Now With Firewireless Networking
Apple updated their laptop product line this week, giving the Macbooks a shiny new aluminium enclosure as well as a hardware upgrade for all existing Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air models. Although, somewhere in the middle of the switch to those new aluminium cases, Apple apparently forgot to cut the opening for Firewire (IEEE 1394) port.
Previously Firewire – a standard Apple itself has helped to build, promote and support – has been present on all Macs, desktop and laptop. Most Macs came with a single Firewire 400 port while the recent high-end models (Mac Pros, MacBook Pros) also featured the high-speed Firewire 800 port.
The new Macbook Pro-model still includes the Firewire 800 port, but the Firewire 400 port as seen on the previous MacBook models vanished somewhere. Lost to the sea of half-assed excuses like “nobody used it anyway”, “all cameras use USB 2.0” and “just buy the Pro model” probably.
I own, let’s see, a one camera and three hard drives that use Firewire. I intentionally chose drives with both USB and Firewire, so I’ll be able to still use them if I upgraded, but the camera would be a no go. If I upgraded to MacBook, that is. No matter how nice the design, I have to say that this has me eyeing for good deals on previous generation models…
This is not a good sign, probably they’ll axe the connection from Mini and iMac next. I’d understand if they’d just upgraded the port to newer FW800, as it’s faster and still backwards compatible when used with an adapter, but this makes no sense.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog asked their readers for feedback on this issue and apparently this is a big deal for many. It should be, as many consumer-level PC laptops carry Firewire and it’s rather hard for a firewire device owner to replace perfectly good devices and switch to an inferior connection type. For example, USB is much more processor intensive than Firewire. And yes, USB 2.0’s theoretical speed indeed is better, but the real world-performance is far from that of FW400, let alone FW800.
Bye, Firewire. For now. I hope Apple someday again affords the $2 it costs to implement you on low-end models as well…