Firewire and Apple

Prior to January’s MacWorld convention, Apple released several news bulletins.  One of which is that Steve Jobs will not be attending as the keynote speaker.  The other one is that the succeeding releases of Apple MacBooks and iBooks will no longer support Firewire connectors.

Both news are significant, but for ordinary users, the latter one has more weight.  Apple along with Sony co-invented the Firewire.  This was a high speed serial connection which pre-dated the USB, and was meant to address the limitations of SCSI.

The impact on users is significant because for a long time now, the firewire connector has been the de facto standard for transferring data from the mini-DV camcorder to the PC.  And because of its data throughput speeds, early iPods also had firewire ports built-in.  Additionally, home brewers who want to cluster their Linux computers on the cheap used firewire connections to enable file- and hardware-clustering at home.

The promise of firewire hard drives also fizzled out with the introduction of SATA.  Although firewire is still the connection of choice for external hard drives.

For server use, firewire has largely replaced high-speed SCSI variants in clustered servers and server farms. But the use of SATA is slowly gaining ground for NAS/SAN use.  With not much difference in performance, it all boils down to the hard disk price/performance ratio and the cost of the other equipment.  SATA comes out cheaper in that comparison.

For camcorder users, the firewire port enables full-frame transfer of videos from DV tapes to the computer without any lags or dropped frames.  On the other hand, transfer via the USB 2.0 for DV tapes still has a lot of dropped frames.  This issue is no longer a problem, however, with DVD and HDD camcorders.  DVD and HDD camcorders transfer video as data files, and even if the connection was slow, there won’t be any dropped frames because of the built-in error checking of the hardware.

The Firewire development roadmap has the Firewire 1600 as the next step.  But that might not come anytime soon, if at all. On the other hand the next generation of USB ports is slated to come out in 2009.  And with double the throughput and a higher power output, this will enable more devices to be connected on a single USB port.  One limitation of the USB is that it is a shared port.  But with PCs having more USB “hubs” there is no need for bandwidth sharing.

For a long while the RS232 was considered as the “universal” port, as it is used by most computer equipment, including hubs, switches and routers.  The firewire was aimed at becoming more ubiquitous, targeted to be found in digital appliances allowing file transfer and communication between various devices.  This did not happen.  Instead we have DVD players with USB ports to read from USB thumb drives. And MP3 players and car stereos, sporting USB ports for uploading and downloading video and audio files to and from computers.  We also have handy USB storage devices for cameras to download pictures to.

This does look like the end of the firewire.  But with Apple, not everything is as it seems.  Firewire 1600 might still appear sometime.  Or maybe not.