4 ms·

Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire

16 points by echair 18y ago

ajross 18y ago
This is just a small-scale repetition of the utter freakout that happened when they went with Intel CPUs. It's the flipside of the religious mania that Apple produces in its customers. A distinguishing technical feature (PowerPC, FireWire) is taken in by the acolyte and interpreted not simply as a difference, but as a fundamental difference between the wonderful Apple stuff and the junk in the rest of the world. The fact that CPUs and high speed peripheral interconnect standards are more or less interchangeable in the modern world gets lost in the mix.
- unalone 18y ago
  Yeah. I'd say it's one of the downsides to the hardcore relation Apple has with its users.
- mdasen 18y ago
  I don't use FireWire for anything, but it is a superior technology to USB. While USB 2.0 is rated for theoretical speeds higher than FireWire, in reality FireWire performs much better. It's like ATA vs. SCSI. With USB, the CPU of the host machine must manage the connection while FireWire has dedicated hardware for that. FireWire also allows for memory mapped devices which means that the CPU doesn't need to be bothered for copies. I don't care that FireWire isn't in the new MacBooks, but it is a much better interface than USB. I don't have FireWire devices and don't do anything that would benefit that greatly from FireWire (like video devices or external hard drives). However, I can understand why people who had invested in FireWire devices or people who would benefit from the better interface would be annoyed. The problem for those people is that, just like SCSI, very few people need the advantages of FireWire.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    Well the good news is owners of new Macbooks are no longer vulnerable to Firewire attacks.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I'm not sure I'd characterize the switch to Intel as an "utter freakout" -- my impression is that the doubters quieted down fairly fast once they got a look at the demos of the compatibility layer and the relative ease of cross-compiling. And while the switch to Intel now looks like a no-brainer, hindsight is always 20-20. That said, I'll agree -- to the extent that people freaked out about the Intel transition, it might be fair to call it an example of "religious mania". But complaints about Firewire aren't about religion. Firewire and USB 2.0 are only "interchangeable" if you don't already own thousands of dollars' worth of Firewire-only peripherals. Which quite a few people do. Yes, there are probably converters out there somewhere, or there will be. But will they affect latency? Will they affect driver stability? The owners of $1200 audio interfaces worry about such things. A lot. Of course, this is not yet the end of the world. As the article points out, Apple still offers Firewire on the MacBook Pro. Moreover, they are still selling machines like my white Macbook, with Firewire, for less money than the new Macbooks. So it's not as if Firewire is being phased out tomorrow. But I don't blame customers for pushing back. If people can convince Apple to keep Firewire around for an additional year, that's one more year that I don't have to spend several hundred bucks to replace my Firewire-based audio interface and hard drive enclosures.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    The owners of $1200 audio interfaces should probably consider getting a Macbook Pro. The Macbook line is apparently not targeted at people that need professional audio equipment. Some people didn't seem to understand that and it looks like Apple wanted to make it more clear.
ashishk 18y ago
It's hard to get everything right. Apple has messed up a few times (firewire and the mini slot on the macbook pros that were never used). But overall, they make great machines.
- lyime 18y ago
  I don't think taking out firewire would be a mess up. I am pretty sure quite a bit of thought went into this decision. Apple brings changes into its products quite slowly. I am not surprised at all that Apple is letting firewire go.
  - ashishk 18y ago
    Totally agree. I meant putting it in might have been a mess up. Apple was really pushing firewire hard with the early generation iPods. If I recall correctly, they only accepted firewire. I don't think that worked out too well, because they eventually accepted USB as well.
charlesju 18y ago
I think this was a necessary transition for Macs to take. There is no reason to have so many different ports serving the same purpose. You can do everything with USB 2.0 that you can do with Firewire. USB has essentially won the war, supporting Firewire would just perpetuate this unnecessary battle even longer. In the long run, this is better for the consumer.
- kylec 18y ago
  The only thing I use FireWire for, Target Disk Mode, cannot be done with USB. This omission has made the new MacBooks a lot less appealing.
  - kqr2 18y ago
    An alternative is to use an ethernet cross-over cable and just use standard file transfer methods. Or perhaps someone will write an os x driver to take advantage of usb-usb (aka usb bridge / networking) cables that work for PCs. http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-computers-with-a-usb-cable http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-compu... The advantage of these solutions is that you can work with other non mac os x computers.
    - Angostura 18y ago
      Sorry - how exactly do you mount the disk of an unbootable Mac on another machine, via an Ethernet cable?
      - iigs 18y ago
        The protocol you'd use is iSCSI. You could hack this together with commercial iSCSI initiators on the working machine, and some kind of LiveCD target, but Apple would need to release an initiator in OSX to make it slick and easy. There is one for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, and Solaris, so asking for this feature in OSX doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
        18y ago
gstar 18y ago
Target disk mode saved my ass just last night. But I'm all for progress. Also, if you consider the waste that went into fitting almost every single mac since 1999 with unused firewire ports, it makes you cringe. If you have a pro audio interface or pro camcorder, you probably want a macbook pro anyway (just a shame they don't do one in 13")
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  Target Disk Mode is indeed an awesome feature of every Mac with Firewire since ~2000. Someone should hack together a "USB Target Disk Mode" live-CD based on Linux or something. Surely it's possible. Or not? I'm not to familiar with the USB protocol, but isn't there a distinction between hosts and devices, hence the asymmetry of USB cables? (unlike Firewire)
  - iigs 18y ago
    It would be trivial to beat the 400/480/800mbit of FW/USB/FW800 with a LiveCD, and all of the pieces are more or less already there. Use the Gig-E wired ethernet connection.
weegee 18y ago
if Apple had added an additional USB 2.0 port, that would have been better, than just removing the Firewire port altogether and leaving just two USB 2.0 ports. I would need a hub if I were to upgrade to this MacBook, which now I don't plan to do. I'll just be using my Dec '06 MacBook for a few more years I guess, which isn't really a bad thing either as it is a very nice Mac indeed.
- axod 18y ago
  The less ports the better. Ports look ugly. If you have that many peripherals that need to be attached at the same time, a hub is probably best.

16 points by echair 18y ago

This is just a small-scale repetition of the utter freakout that happened when they went with Intel CPUs. It's the flipside of the religious mania that Apple produces in its customers. A distinguishing technical feature (PowerPC, FireWire) is taken in by the acolyte and interpreted not simply as a difference, but as a fundamental difference between the wonderful Apple stuff and the junk in the rest of the world. The fact that CPUs and high speed peripheral interconnect standards are more or less interchangeable in the modern world gets lost in the mix.

unalone 18y ago
Yeah. I'd say it's one of the downsides to the hardcore relation Apple has with its users.
mdasen 18y ago
I don't use FireWire for anything, but it is a superior technology to USB. While USB 2.0 is rated for theoretical speeds higher than FireWire, in reality FireWire performs much better. It's like ATA vs. SCSI. With USB, the CPU of the host machine must manage the connection while FireWire has dedicated hardware for that. FireWire also allows for memory mapped devices which means that the CPU doesn't need to be bothered for copies. I don't care that FireWire isn't in the new MacBooks, but it is a much better interface than USB. I don't have FireWire devices and don't do anything that would benefit that greatly from FireWire (like video devices or external hard drives). However, I can understand why people who had invested in FireWire devices or people who would benefit from the better interface would be annoyed. The problem for those people is that, just like SCSI, very few people need the advantages of FireWire.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  Well the good news is owners of new Macbooks are no longer vulnerable to Firewire attacks.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
I'm not sure I'd characterize the switch to Intel as an "utter freakout" -- my impression is that the doubters quieted down fairly fast once they got a look at the demos of the compatibility layer and the relative ease of cross-compiling. And while the switch to Intel now looks like a no-brainer, hindsight is always 20-20. That said, I'll agree -- to the extent that people freaked out about the Intel transition, it might be fair to call it an example of "religious mania". But complaints about Firewire aren't about religion. Firewire and USB 2.0 are only "interchangeable" if you don't already own thousands of dollars' worth of Firewire-only peripherals. Which quite a few people do. Yes, there are probably converters out there somewhere, or there will be. But will they affect latency? Will they affect driver stability? The owners of $1200 audio interfaces worry about such things. A lot. Of course, this is not yet the end of the world. As the article points out, Apple still offers Firewire on the MacBook Pro. Moreover, they are still selling machines like my white Macbook, with Firewire, for less money than the new Macbooks. So it's not as if Firewire is being phased out tomorrow. But I don't blame customers for pushing back. If people can convince Apple to keep Firewire around for an additional year, that's one more year that I don't have to spend several hundred bucks to replace my Firewire-based audio interface and hard drive enclosures.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  The owners of $1200 audio interfaces should probably consider getting a Macbook Pro. The Macbook line is apparently not targeted at people that need professional audio equipment. Some people didn't seem to understand that and it looks like Apple wanted to make it more clear.

ashishk 18y ago

It's hard to get everything right. Apple has messed up a few times (firewire and the mini slot on the macbook pros that were never used). But overall, they make great machines.

lyime 18y ago
I don't think taking out firewire would be a mess up. I am pretty sure quite a bit of thought went into this decision. Apple brings changes into its products quite slowly. I am not surprised at all that Apple is letting firewire go.
- ashishk 18y ago
  Totally agree. I meant putting it in might have been a mess up. Apple was really pushing firewire hard with the early generation iPods. If I recall correctly, they only accepted firewire. I don't think that worked out too well, because they eventually accepted USB as well.

charlesju 18y ago

I think this was a necessary transition for Macs to take. There is no reason to have so many different ports serving the same purpose. You can do everything with USB 2.0 that you can do with Firewire. USB has essentially won the war, supporting Firewire would just perpetuate this unnecessary battle even longer. In the long run, this is better for the consumer.

kylec 18y ago
The only thing I use FireWire for, Target Disk Mode, cannot be done with USB. This omission has made the new MacBooks a lot less appealing.
- kqr2 18y ago
  An alternative is to use an ethernet cross-over cable and just use standard file transfer methods. Or perhaps someone will write an os x driver to take advantage of usb-usb (aka usb bridge / networking) cables that work for PCs. http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-computers-with-a-usb-cable http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-compu... The advantage of these solutions is that you can work with other non mac os x computers.
  - Angostura 18y ago
    Sorry - how exactly do you mount the disk of an unbootable Mac on another machine, via an Ethernet cable?
    - iigs 18y ago
      The protocol you'd use is iSCSI. You could hack this together with commercial iSCSI initiators on the working machine, and some kind of LiveCD target, but Apple would need to release an initiator in OSX to make it slick and easy. There is one for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, and Solaris, so asking for this feature in OSX doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
      - 18y ago

gstar 18y ago

Target disk mode saved my ass just last night. But I'm all for progress. Also, if you consider the waste that went into fitting almost every single mac since 1999 with unused firewire ports, it makes you cringe. If you have a pro audio interface or pro camcorder, you probably want a macbook pro anyway (just a shame they don't do one in 13")

tlrobinson 18y ago
Target Disk Mode is indeed an awesome feature of every Mac with Firewire since ~2000. Someone should hack together a "USB Target Disk Mode" live-CD based on Linux or something. Surely it's possible. Or not? I'm not to familiar with the USB protocol, but isn't there a distinction between hosts and devices, hence the asymmetry of USB cables? (unlike Firewire)
- iigs 18y ago
  It would be trivial to beat the 400/480/800mbit of FW/USB/FW800 with a LiveCD, and all of the pieces are more or less already there. Use the Gig-E wired ethernet connection.

weegee 18y ago

if Apple had added an additional USB 2.0 port, that would have been better, than just removing the Firewire port altogether and leaving just two USB 2.0 ports. I would need a hub if I were to upgrade to this MacBook, which now I don't plan to do. I'll just be using my Dec '06 MacBook for a few more years I guess, which isn't really a bad thing either as it is a very nice Mac indeed.

axod 18y ago
The less ports the better. Ports look ugly. If you have that many peripherals that need to be attached at the same time, a hub is probably best.