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A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed
Technologizer writes "Some folks are outraged over the lack of FireWire in the new MacBook released this week. But Apple wouldn't be Apple if it didn't move faster than any other computer company to kill technologies that may be past their prime. And history usually validates its decisions. We've posted a decade's worth of examples that prove the point."
The new Macbook doesn't have an 8" floppy?!?!
I won't buy one then, wah, wah, waaaaaaahhhh!
I would love to know what Apple expects basement musicians to use to record multitrack audio. Firewire is way better suited to that and frankly after buying mics, instruments, amps, and mic preamps that group tends not to have an extra $1000 for a computer.
If Apple hadn't invested in so many non-mainstream technologies to start with then they wouldn't have had to kill so many - leaving those machines poor orphans in the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There is always an alternative. This time, Apple is just asking you to give them 700$ more and buy MBP.
Something missing here. The article claims to be "A Brief History of Features Apple Has Killed" Yet, the article has nothing of the sort, and the linked page is a just an opinion piece on the lack of Firewire in the new MacBooks.
I'm guessing this is the link that was intended.
It's not incomprehensible, it's good business sense. The Apple model is make average hardware and very shiny software, then bundle them together with technological safeguards and profit off selling the hardware at 2-3x what other manufacturers charge (for upgardes, initial computers are far more reasonable but there's still the "apple tax")
Apple and MS are about as evil, if anything Apple is worse per unit user. The difference is Apple can make software that doesn't suck in the OS division AND elsewhere.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Why not link directly to the list instead of the pointless poll?
says the article. That's right: 'Hundreds,' not 'tens of thousands.' Get it? The average consumer doesn't give a rip.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Firewire isn't past its prime. Apple wanted to further differentiate the consumer and pro versions of their laptops, and Steve Jobs' comment about recent consumer camcorders using USB is a reflection f that. Firewire is still used in the professional space for audio and other high-bandwidth data transfer situations where you don't want the CPU bogged down.
Exactly right. It's called technology lock-in, and it often (at least to me) seems pretty arbitrary (the classic examples being modern clocks going clockwise rather than counter-clockwise, and the QWERTY keyboard). "History validating Apple's decisions" of killing technology is rather a weak anthropic principle, rather than any explanatory answer.
There is also a matter of not putting gratuitous features on the machine just to meet the buzz word compliance features. For example, many people complain that the Airport has no firewire port, and I am one of those because some of my kit is firewire only. But given the wireless transfer speeds, 54 Mbits/second, why put a 400 Mbit/sec on it. Sure, if one is using GHz ethernet, it would be nice a FW800 interface, but how many of us do this. And this is the case, perhaps an network aware hard drive is a better solution, which I see are not very expensive.
What is true is that Apple does not waste resources support tech that no longer serves a broad purpose. This means that many of us have closets full of old tech. What this also means is that we don't have to worry about installing drivers every time we put in a USB drive, most cameras work with the standard picture protocol, and if we are willing to pay for the machine, we have external hardware that communicates at fast speeds, built in.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If it is so dead, why do most if not all servers come with it? :-p
I've never noticed! My wife and I are going out to eat tonight. I'll check my server and see if there's a RS232 port on him.
Seriously ... it's time for it go!
Even USB was faster than parallel ports, and RS232, and DVI was better than RGB.
But FireWire was better than SCSI, and nothing touches it yet. The reason that it is a problem that it was gone, is that there is a significant portion of the MacBook population that used FireWire. It will still be used by the higher end macs, but paying 800-1000 for a port is insane. So the choice is to keep using outdated macs, pay TOO much for a port, or go windows.
This is not just an outdated, or soon to be outdated port. This is used, and it is replaced by nothing, and what remains is worse.
This is just a bad idea.
Sorry guys, I know FireWire is faster and cooler than USB 2 (no sarcasm there) and has neat features like the easy peer to peer connection, but USB won the market. Cheap and 'pretty good enough' beats out better and more expensive almost every time. Given that Apple has to put USB on any laptop (leaving that off would really be a disaster), adding FireWire as well just adds to their expense and complexity.
We had this discussion, what, 5 years ago about SCSI? Yeah, IDE/SATA won that one too.
You could argue that the Mac's growing market share itself argues against this, but to me that's just due to sufficient numbers of people thinking Vista isn't 'pretty good enough'. I know some of you love it dearly, but to most people FireWire just doesn't matter. Apple's eventually gonna ditch it, so they've started weaning you off it now.
Is there no USB 2.0, which is nearly equal and has the huge advantage of being more mainstream?
The whole article is a troll. I mean "they killed the floppy" that was in the original Mac? Hell they *invented* the scheme that let them store twice as much as PC's did on the same size floppy media. That was great, but now we're all thankful that the floppy is obsolete.
They "killed" nuBus once PCI finally came along and was mainstream. Before that, nuBus, which they invented, kicked @ss over the PC's crappy bus, which was slower and didn't allow for plug-and-play -- you had to move address jumpers on the cards before you installed them.
Back in the day it *was* a pain that Apple hardware was special and more expensive than PC hardware. People complained about lock-in and expense, but it was also often better than the PC hardware of its day. Now it's almost a little sad that Apple isn't the one leading the way on those architectural components, though they still lead on design. (Remember when the G4 came out and it was small and *quiet*? Now you can get a cheap Dell that is small and quiet.)
I have never owned an Apple, but I *am* a fan of their past hardware innovations. Oh, and: Get off my lawn!
Sssshhh.
It's written by an Apple fan.
If you make them think, their heads might explode from cognitive dissonance.
One button mice are fine! It's simpler, and you still have all the functionality if you just hold down the option key!
The next day...
OMG! Did you hear? TWO-BUTTON MICE!
Just to pick a nit (I agree with everything else) but Apple didn't invent NuBus, though they were the only ones to actually use it. IIRC, it was invented by TI.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
Yeah, except if you read the other thread you would know the MacBook will have neither CardBus nor ExpressCard slots, so you can't really add FireWire even if you wanted to. Apple isn't simply not including it, they are making it impossible to use on their new macbooks, which I believe is what's causing all the complaints.
Not only that, but Apple created FireWire and tried to shove it down everyone's throats. Now they say you don't need it, that's just bullshit. Apple does what they want with hardware, and all the Mac fanbois just bend over and take it. If you don't need it, then no problem. If you do need it, you're S.O.L. unless you want the more expensive MacBook Pro.
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Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
I had to check what a Firewire cable and port look like. Why? Because it's rare. Sure, there are a lot of cameras with a firewire port but USB is just that more prevalent. There isn't a modern computer in the world without a USB port. Seriously, I took this from wikipedia:
"Full support for IEEE 1394a and 1394b is available for Microsoft Windows XP, FreeBSD, Linux[6], Apple Mac OS 8.6 through to Mac OS 9[7], and Mac OS X as well as NetBSD and Haiku. Historically, performance of 1394 devices may have decreased after installing Windows XP Service Pack 2, but were resolved in Hotfix 885222[8] and in SP3. Some FireWire hardware manufacturers also provide custom device drivers which replace the Microsoft OHCI host adapter driver stack, enabling S800-capable devices to run at full 800 Mbit/s transfer rates on older versions of Windows (XP SP2 w/o Hotfix 885222) and Windows Vista. At the time of its release, Microsoft Windows Vista supported only 1394a, with assurances that 1394b support would come in the next service pack.[9] Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Windows Vista has since been released, however the addition of 1394b support is not mentioned anywhere in the release documentation.[10][11][12]"
See? They don't care. Nobody cares. Try that with a USB protocol. There would be total outrage at the fact that there would be no proper USB protocol support.
Now let's look at the back of my computers. Count the number of Firewire ports you see and compare them to USB ports. My computers have 0 or 1 fw ports but they all have 3-5 usb ports on the back alone(not including my usb hub for my golden oldie). Then add some usb in front and you know that it is a widespread standard. And you also must not forget usb sticks and usb external hard drives. The whole world runs on usb(including a usb vacuum cleaner ;) ).
Sure, firewire might be better but it does not matter. Cut the cord and let it die. This year will not be the year of firewire in the desktop.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
If you're doing beefy AV processing yes, you're going to have a MacBook Pro, or a suitable desktop (PC alternatives are available, but this is an Apple thread so I'll stick to Mac).
However, Apple touts iLife as one of the big selling points of Macs, and iMovie 08 is a part of that. MacBooks are more than powerful enough to rip your home movie and chop it about in iMovie to share with family, but without a FireWire port you're going to have an awful time importing video, often having to use an external adapter or some proprietary USB method. FireWire provided a DV standard for getting video off a camcorder, and was part of the 'plug in your camcorder and make a movie' thing which Apple markets to pretty much everybody who buys a Mac.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
An Apple fan who is obviously not an Apple fan - the Xserve has an RS-232 port on it.
this is my sig
I don't think you understand.
A lot of us "outraged" at the omission of FW are mad because of the following reasons:
-digital video (My sister was sold on the capability to import movies of her son and make DVDs and send them to our parents overseas. Big deal for home users interested in this.)
-digital audio (I don't know anything about that, so I can't comment, it seems like a big deal.)
-firewire target disk mode (huge deal for those of us supporting friends and family, even bigger for those of us who have to deploy tens of laptops at the same time. We use firewire drives to slap images on them. If you've never done this you probably don't understand the huge time saving.)
-firewire devices (I've invested in a few FW hard drives because of their power through bus capability, portability and speed, now they're all useless for data storage, time machine, etc.)
There are counter arguments too... .. use time machine, or netrestore, or go se a genius instead of friend-tech support
- digital video, all the HD camcorders supposedly come with USB
- digital audio.. whatever, I don't know
-FW TDM
-firewire devices... SOL
I've successfully "switched" over a dozen friends and family to macs, knowing that in a pinch I could boot into FW TDM and recover their data, or that simply buying an inexpensive external FW disk they could have TimeMachine.
But now, I will not suggest a MacBook for anyone that I may need to support. Especially not for work, where we have over 50 MacBooks deployed. Which is unfortunate, because it really is an excellent machine.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Ahh, to be young...
We old farts never forget the first time seeing a hardcore high-end card reader suck up a four-foot hopper full of cards in less than five seconds, with a noise like ten Shop-Vacs and one Cessna.
This is what I keep pointing out to people when we get into the Apple cart. Everyone that loves their Mac is desperately pleading to the world to get on board with them and buy one too. They want that horrible, monopolistic company called Microsoft to go away. Oh, wait a minute. Apple is even more of a monopoly. You must buy their hardware and software. If you don't like their changes, tough luck! This would be the future with Apple. They will make choices and you have none...other than what color of white or silver you want.
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I'm happy to give up Firewire, but why not throw on an eSATA port? This seems like the way to go for external hard drives.
All your stuff no longer works.
Really?
(plugs in Firewire drive, watches it mount)
Phew! It still works!
By the way, while Apple dropped Firewire from the main consumer-level laptop, they kept it on every other machine (the 13" MacBook, all MacBook Pros, the Mac Mini, the iMacs and the tower). It doesn't look like they're dumping Firewire to me.
There's no winning or losing in this standards 'war' - Firewire and USB aren't competing for the same market. There's a fair amount of market overlap, but Firewire is targeted at more professional use and USB is targeted at more ubiquitous, consumer use.
There's room enough for both standards here. I can't see why one standard has to 'win' if sometimes the best tool for the job is the other one.
Macs never had RS-232. They had RS-422.
It is a matter or an expensive technology being removed because most people do not wish to pay for it.
That may be true but it was nVidia who made the call, not Apple. The 9400M southbridge in the Macbook simply doesn't support firewire.
I suspect Apple simply looked at all its CUDA cores and decided that realtime h.264 for the YouTube set was simply more important than firewire. Yeah, they could have done a discrete firewire implementation but then they're adding cost back in, and Apple isn't going to do discrete anything on the MacBook. Had nVidia supported 1394b, the MacBook would have kept it, but that wasn't a make-or-break feature.
We've heard the story Jobs tells himself to rationalize it, but it simply doesn't hold water in the real world (none of my friends have HD camcorders, though I don't live in Silicon Valley). I suspect Jobs knows the real deal, but they had to make trade-offs, and this was one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If Apple are willing to upset their customers for intel's sake, why are all their new laptops shipping with Nvidia chipsets?
A Mac Mini used as a router, ethernet to the telco's dongle, Firewire to the local network.
It's true that you may be able (with considerable effort and a few choice Japanese and Korean words of incantation) to do that with a USB port, but you can't do it with standard USB.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Firewire allows DMA access to all of memory, it was joked that since Apple's come with firewire they're more insecure than PCs. Nobody would seriously recommend removing Firewire for this reason... and yet these laptops have better physical security than the ones before them. Imagine an encrypted HD with a password request on resume... it gets stolen at the coffee shop, the bad guy takes it home being careful to not allow the battery to die. They open the lid, plug into it's firewire and snag the HD keys.
A laptop with sensitive information on it shouldn't have Firewire.
It's just one of the positives of this announcement.
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