Users Rage Over Missing FireWire On New MacBooks 820
CWmike writes "Apple customers, unhappy that the company dropped FireWire from its new MacBook (not the Pro), are venting their frustrations on the company's support forum in hundreds of messages. Within minutes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapping up a launch event in Cupertino, Calif., users started several threads to vent over the omission. 'Apple really screwed up with no FireWire port,' said Russ Tolman, who inaugurated a thread that by Thursday has collected more than 300 messages and been viewed over 8,000 times. 'No MacBook with [FireWire] — no new MacBook for me,' added Simon Meyer in a message posted yesterday. Several mentioned that FireWire's disappearance means that the new MacBooks could not be connected to other Macs using Target Disk Mode, and one noted that iMovie will have no way to connect to new MacBooks. Others pointed out that the previous-generation MacBook, which Apple is still selling at a reduced price of $999, includes a FireWire port. Apple introduced FireWire into its product lines in 1999 and championed the standard."
Re:is that still around? (Score:5, Informative)
The complaint is because the Macbook makes all their firewire accesories useless. (Duh).
Re:is that still around? (Score:5, Informative)
They both have the same specifications, but the marathoner can keep it up much longer.
USB does it in bursts and firewire is continuous transfer - thats why its better for movies.
(Aren't you glad I didn't use a car analogy? :-))
Steve Jobs' take. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh, I'm probably picking up a MBP, but I know plenty of folks that use firewire for things other than camcorders (particularly good external HDs)
Re:Maybe they were forced to drop it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
An external adapter would still require somewhere to plug into. The MacBook doesn't have an ExpressCard slot like the MBPro does.
The only ports available are 2xUSB2 and Gigabit Ethernet. USB2 can't keep up with FW400 (even though the theoretical max is slightly higher) and doesn't transfer in the realtime mode needed by DV cams. There is talk of Firewire over Ethernet, but there is no known compatible adapter.
If the Ethernet adapter in the MacBook supports this (but possibly not until Snow Leopard is released, then come out and say so now. That would likely shut a number of people up.
I was planning on switching to a MacBook because the video card in the old one wouldn't work properly with Blender (Apple's OpenGL problems, as the same card works with Win/Linux and Blender) ... but the lack of a FW400 port means I can't hook in my DV camera, and using iMovie/iDVD was one of the reasons to want to switch to a Mac to begin with.
Having to capture on another computer and then move the video to the Mac means having to have a system around specifically for when I want to capture. Not very elegant at all. Now, I'm thinking I'll probably get a ThinkPad.
FireWire has DMA, not USB! (Score:5, Informative)
If I remember correctly, USB2 is controllerless and requires CPU overhead and therefore the latency of USB2 sucks badly compared to FireWire (IEEE 1394x) with its controller and DMA (Direct Memory Access) channel.
This just makes sense if you have ever tried it.
FireWire 800 is even better than FireWire 400 for most anything and it is backward compatible. I believe it is much much faster than USB2 could ever hope to be and it is here NOW. (USB3 is still a LONG way off)
This is really about MONEY and Apple's either being greedy or cheap or both. Apparently they did this specifically on purpose as other 'new' models have FireWire... So, Why?
Apple is not wanting to pay the FireWire licensing fees and they are apparently wanting to push their user base into buying an affordable Hackintosh laptop (what many will likely do) or er.., will, uh... I mean Apple intends for their FireWire needing users to just pay many hundreds more for the "Pro" model that has FireWire.
As I understand it, there are also many cool things you can do with hard disk (and DVD and CD) 1-to-1 disk imaging with FireWire on the OSX macs too.. Not anymore. It's a Feature!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus [wikipedia.org]
Seems like it would just be a lot cheaper to just add a FireWire CardBus 54 (PCIe) notebook controller card?
Re:is that still around? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
the original macbook pros lacked a firewire 800 port, which was added to the next refresh on them. I expect to see a fw800 port added to the first refresh on these new macbooks.
Yes, no firewire sucks. I do mac repair work, and I use the firewire port a LOT. This is going to make it a lot harder for me to get my job done. I hate working on the slot load imacs that lack the firewire port.
I use to pity the PC service tech as he always had to disassemble machines and pull the HD out to work on certain things.
Re:is that still around? (Score:3, Informative)
but a Mac without Firewire is like a shark without fins - menacing, but no real danger.
you mean, like a shark with no teeth..... right?
(a shark with fins, but no teeth will be menacing, but no real danger)
How about updating USB camcorder support then? (Score:4, Informative)
If they're on the way to eventually eliminating Firewire I sure hope that Apple has plans to update USB support for more camcorders then.
I have a JVC hard drive camcorder that is USB and iMovie has absolutely no idea what to do with it when I plug it into any of my Macs. It seems thatt if I had chosen a camcorder with Firewire instead (which Apple themselves trumpeted as the thing to do) I'd have had no issues.
Nice.
Re:Not quite (Score:3, Informative)
I have a Sony HDV-A1U camera that I used in Africa to videotape stuff and digitize into my MacBook. 1) I'm rarely a loudmouth here. B) I own the camera. III) I preferred to lug a more rugged MacBook to Africa than a much more expensive and delicate Pro model.
Something to think about (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Steve Jobs' take. . . (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of points:
DV cameras (and associated transports such as HDV, DVCPRO, etc.) actually operate at S100 (100mbps). It should be possible to construct an interface that lets these low-speed firewire devices operate over USB2. Plus, the protocols themselves are robust enough to deal with a bus problem. Older ibooks often had trouble keeping up capturing firewire video and they recovered just fine. An occasional hiccup shouldnt be a big deal.
I believe this is what apple or a third party vendor should do. It would be a VERY good product. There are readily available USB2 PCI bridge chipsets and PCI firewire chipsets. Such a product coould probably sell for around $100. While it wouldn't work very well for firewire hard drives, USB2 should be able to keep up with S100 if its the only demanding thing on the bus.
Secondly the IEEE1394c draft specifying an RJ45 connector is *not* Firewire over Ethernet. It's Firewire over UTP/Cat5e with some additional tricks that would allow ports to detect either standard and switch between gigabit ethernet and firewire as needed. I have been hoping for this standard to take off for a long time (It could be really neat in low end storage networks), but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Re:is that still around? (Score:3, Informative)
USB doesn't let you use the Mac in Target mode, turning it into an HD without needing any OS to boot. It's great for system recovery.
On the new MacBooks, you can remove the hard drive very, very easily. So if you are into repairing computers, just get an adapter that lets you plug in a naked hard drive (I found them for around £25). Apart from that, Time Machine is the end user's friend.
Some application-specific FireWire-USB possible (Score:2, Informative)
You know, it's obvious there's no magic converter to go from USB to Firewire in all possible configurations, but it doesn't mean you couldn't make application-specific dongles.
Potential cases:
- you could have a small microcontroller convert SBP-2 (the Firewire disk protocol) to USB Mass Storage class and vice versa
- you could have a small microcontroller read a DV stream and pump out a UVC (USB Video Class) stream
Seems like there's suddenly a market for such things that didn't exist before; and a shitton of potential money to be made...
Sleek design omits legacy IO again news @ 11 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Recording (Score:3, Informative)
Along with the last of the white plastic MacBooks, the Mac mini still has a FireWire port. Both have Intel Vampire Video, but that wouldn't be an issue with audio.
I think this decision was lame, but at least there are options for now.
Re:is that still around? (Score:5, Informative)
Come on. With Target mode you can use you Mac as a HD anywhere, anytime, without opening the case. That's great for a lot of stuff, not just recovery.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:2, Informative)
I was planning on switching to a MacBook because the video card in the old one wouldn't work properly with Blender (Apple's OpenGL problems, as the same card works with Win/Linux and Blender) ... but the lack of a FW400 port means I can't hook in my DV camera, and using iMovie/iDVD was one of the reasons to want to switch to a Mac to begin with.
See this page for details on how to solve the Blender/MacBook problem (the solution is to disable double buffering or to download a build of blender which is configured to work properly)
http://www.blendernation.com/2008/02/22/blender-problems-on-leopard-solved/ [blendernation.com]
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, Commodore/Amiga and Atari were companies not formats.
They produced closed-source operating systems and non-IBM-PC motherboards, but their machines actually used standard connectors and protocols for the most part. Commodore failed due to gross mismanagement (there's a hilarious/tragic book about it), not because they were particularly proprietary, and Amiga didn't really escape, becoming a suehappy I"P" holding company rather than producing real stuff.
I _agree_ that USB will/has basically killed firewire (that and the stupid firewire per-board licensing fee that OEMs had to pay that slowed takeup), but it is not directly comparable to the horrible zombification of the "official" amiga (unofficial amiga-like stuff is going strong - AROS is an AmigaOS-3-source-compatible open source operating system that runs on IBM-PCs, for instance).
Re:I have to say, this seems a bit overblown ..... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to seem like an ass, but the fact that you are using M-Audio gear indicates to me that you're really not working "pro" audio interfaces (particularly on Mac, since the OS X support for M-Audio is awful).
While you are probably correct that Apple is further straying down the road of "consumer appliance" for their sub-2000$ computing devices and they can be served by USB2 ports, what it says to me even more is that Apple is happy abandoning some of the creative folks who are frequently the traditional standard bearers for OS X (video and audio creative folks). There's a lot of audio editing and composing, for example, that doesn't need a $2000 MBP.
But, as I said on Ars, that's fine. The audio folks will eventually just move to an alternate OS platform.
Re:Moi aussi (Score:2, Informative)
Then get the referb prior gen Macbook Pro for about $1350 from the referb store. Still better than the new Macbook.
So Don't buy Mac (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Moi aussi (Score:3, Informative)
Hey, I have hardware MIDI synthesizer cards at home that are ISA and I certainly wouldn't mind using. My old ISA modems that had a real UART chip also always worked far better than the software modems being sold now (even though I very rarely use a modem - still, it has happened within the last year that my power went out, including that to my router/DSL modem, but I was still able to connect using a regular modem to send out a few emails before the UPS gave out).
Still, though I would LIKE to have those things working again, I'm perfectly capable of accepting that the time has past and that the market for a new motherboard with an ISA slot included simply isn't big enough for the market to support.
Re:I have to say, this seems a bit overblown ..... (Score:5, Informative)
The vast majority of portable audio interfaces are firewire... because at this point there is no alternative. USB2 for audio pretty much sucks. All of the portable plugin hosts are firewire. It has nothing to do w/ "audio is slow to adopt to standards". Firewire is the proven low latency interface for audio.
Apple is being Apple... they try to force their users - being the fanboys they are - to shell out more money for the "Pro" series. So much for their 'warning' to the market about slimmer margins. I don't know where that was coming from or referring to.
If I didn't already have a huge amount of money invested in Mac audio software, I'd flee.
Re:FireWire has DMA, not USB! (Score:1, Informative)
What FireWire licensing fees? Apple invented FireWire. Other companies pay fees to Apple!
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
not in the audio world it isn't... try finding a multichannel professional usb sound card...
there are many differences between firewire and usb that make firewire far better for audio work (and video too, but that isn't my area) and it isn't just better speed (although that helps).
porl
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:4, Informative)
Macs can also be hooked to eachother (as can PCs and Linux boxes) via crossover ethernet
Actually, Macs have NICs that can automatically detect crossed pairs in ethernet cables, so you don't even need a special crossover cable to connect two computers directly, as long as one of them is a Mac. Just a regular ethernet cable will do.
This is also the reason that a Mac will sometimes work when plugged into a wrongly-wired wall jack when all other computers fail.
Re:is that still around? (Score:2, Informative)
As for the "There's only *one* FW 800 port on the MBP!" complaints: you can daisy-chain; and you can also connect FW400 devices to a FW800 port with the appropriate cable - so I don't think it's an issue.
I really hope that the next iteration of the Mac Mini still has FW.
Re:HD Cameras tend to use firewire (Score:3, Informative)
Those are quite expensive cameras; people who have those also have MBPs. Cameras under $2000 (AVCHD) all use USB.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Macs have NICs that can automatically detect crossed pairs in ethernet cables, so you don't even need a special crossover cable to connect two computers directly, as long as one of them is a Mac.
Every Gigibit Ethernet NIC needs to be able to do that, it's not Mac-specific. It's required by the Gigabit Ethernet standard.
Loss of Target Disk Mode is a big deal (Score:3, Informative)
The loss of Target Disk Mode is a big deal. I've used it to retrieve data from laptops with a bad display or bad logic board and wipe the disk of those laptops before taking them in to be repaired. I've also used it to install Tiger (OSX 10.4) on G3 iMacs which didn't have a DVD drive.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. FireWire is great for pumping high-bandwidth data like multiple audio streams (think mixing board) into the computer for processing. Firewire's biggest advantage is that it's designed to do all of this while bypassing the CPU as much as possible, freeing the CPU's cycles for audio effects processing. USB's theoretical speed is higher, but the architecture relies on the CPU to a much greater extent than FireWire.
Maybe we will get to the point soon where USB's CPU-intensive nature won't matter, but as someone who still occasionally overloads the USB input using only a MIDI controller, I can authoritatively say that we're not there yet.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:3, Informative)
There are very few devices that actually use firewire, due to the massive success of USB.
That is not true. Case in Point: video cameras. And huge percentage of other devices that do use firewire were designed specifically for Macs. Apple had a very long history of advocating for Firewire.
Macs can also be hooked to eachother (as can PCs and Linux boxes) via crossover ethernet.
Target disk mode doesn't work over crossover ethernet. Target disk mode is a very cool, very useful feature.
Also, Apple's own support documentation from the Macbook and Macbook Pro update this spring [apple.com]: "FireWire connections are still the fastest way to migrate applications and data from an older computer to your new computer, however, these new models now offer the ability to perform a system migration over network connections." And network migration requires installing extra software whereas firewire migration has always been baked into the OS.
rare circumstances that ought to belong to the MNP market anyway
I assume you meant "MBP" instead of "MNP". But you are wrong. The most common use of firewire are removable hard drives and home video import from Mini-DV cams. There is nothing "pro" about either of those uses.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:4, Informative)
Seems simple (Score:4, Informative)
Re:is that still around? (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, many people don't know that Target Disk mode *also* gives the host Mac access to whatever is in the target Mac's optical drive. Very handy for certain tasks.
http://macworld.com/article/57005/2007/03/tdmoptical.html [macworld.com]
Re:FireWire has DMA, not USB! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
IEEE Std 802.3-2005 clause 40.4.4 Automatic MDI/MDI-X Configuration
Automatic MDI/MDI-X Configuration is intended to eliminate the need for crossover cables between similar devices. Implementation of an automatic MDI/MDI-X configuration is optional for 1000BASE-T devices. If an automatic configuration method is used, it shall comply with the following specifications...
I'm not an IEEE expert but the above appears fairly unambiguous. What I do know is that if it isn't required then you can be certain someone, somewhere omitted it. Heck, it would be found missing even if it were required. Crappy hardware abounds.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:3, Informative)
Your point also works in the other direction (so to speak). With a firewire-equipped laptop one can boot up a firewire-equipped desktop in target disk mode and perform maintenance on the desktop with the laptop, everything from reformatting and restoring the drive to cloning it.
The loss of firewire in the MacBooks severely limits their usefulness in situations which happen with some regularity, almost as frequently as every 10.x.x update of Mac OS.
Without providing an alternative interface by which to invoke target disk mode, Apple is forcing users to use desktops or the pro line of laptops to get this incredibly useful functionality.
Without question, Apple made a big mistake.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:1, Informative)
Yes. Only a very small number of DV camcorders (and DV is by far the most popular home video camera out there) support USB for video. Further, when sending images via USB, the few DV camcorders I've seen that support USB all downconvert the DV stream into a lower quality MPEG stream intended for use as a webcam. So even if your camcorder does use USB, you are getting significantly degraded quality from A. the quality of the downconversion (scaling artifacts), B. the fact that you are decompressing and recompressing the video data, and C. the reduced quality of the resulting video format itself. It's a triple whammy.
Most DV camcorders do provide USB, but for the vast majority of those, the USB connection can only be used for accessing the internal flash card, which usually can't store video (and if it does store video, does so in, again, at significantly lower quality). Most cannot capture from recorded tapes in this fashion at all.
Add to this all the amateur musicians who use MacBook machines for their audio recording. USB audio interfaces are pretty universally crap compared with their FireWire equivalents, and are limited in the number of inputs they can support reliably. Buying a MacBook therefore is locking you into inferior capabilities in this space, but unfortunately many musicians won't realize the problem until it is too late to do anything about it (except sell their Mac). That's why we're seeing articles with headlines like " Why musicians shouldn't buy Apple's new MacBook [musicradar.com]".
While the mainstream consumer may not care, the starving musicians of the world---Apple's most loyal fan base---are pissed. Worse, those folks are the segment of the audience least likely to move up to a pro laptop because they simply can't afford it. Apple may well lose a large chunk of its pro audio market sales in the long run because of this decision---not because this really affects people who can afford a Pro Tools rig, but because today's starving musicians tend to become tomorrow's pro engineers....
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:1, Informative)
USB doesn't work above about 4 channels reliably, though, as compared with FireWire that easily handles 24, 32 channels.... It's not a bandwidth problem. It's a CPU overhead problem. USB CPU utilization goes through the roof when the bus is running hot, and if you get a bit more interrupt latency than usual, you glitch. (This is compounded by the tendency of laptops to slow down their CPUs when they get too hot; minimizing CPU utilization is crucial in laptops for audio purposes.) With FireWire, the isochronous bus transactions are handled by a separate microcontroller that is part of the FireWire cell. That means that you can have a much higher average interrupt latency without getting glitches because the data is already stored in a sufficiently large RAM buffer in your machine.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:An Email From Steve. (Score:2, Informative)
LiveCDs should work fine... if you can make one. (Score:3, Informative)
LiveCDs in concept should work fine; Apple certainly hasn't disabled them to my knowledge - you can definitely boot from arbitrary media. The OS X install DVD is bootable and has disk tools, also.
However, there just aren't a plethora of available CDs for your average user to download and run. According to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LiveDistros#Mac_OS-based [wikipedia.org]
There's BootCD which doesn't support anything about 10.3
OSx86 (for Hackintosh's) supposedly has some LiveCDs, which I would presume also work on a real mac.
It's not exactly legal for someone to mangle OS X onto a liveDVD, so there's not the zillion options Linux users have.
I'm pretty sure if you had a Linux/BSD LiveCD that supported the hardware and supported the filesystem, it'd work fine.
But 'fine' still wouldn't include, for instance, being able to run OS X executables. All of that is still a ton of work.
***
And while it has its own advantages (not needing another machine) even a totally working liveCD is in some ways NOT as cool as Target Disk. In Target Disk you can run arbitrary applications etc from EITHER disk in most cases, and those applications can have access to writable space on the host machine. You can ALSO do things like install from DVD media to a machine that only has a CD - put the DVD in your newer machine, hook the older one up as a target disk, and install like any other external media.
With a liveDVD you didn't personally make, you ALSO have the problem that whatever other info you're trying to deal with isn't there. (Like the tool you just downloaded to fix today's problem.) So you have to deal with that stuff over the network, I suppose...
Of course Target Disk Mode is ALSO a solution to having a permanently broken ethernet adapter and backing up your info before you replace the MB - you can transfer all the files via TD. TD is just extremely convenient.
*****
With all that said, though... I can get behind their decision to remove the hardware to trim costs. I think the MB SHOULD try to trim costs. I think the lack of TD sucks right now... and I hope they make up for it in software.
Specifically, I hope that they will make it so at the very least you can - with Mac like ease and using Apple-provided media that you are allowed to add tools to, boot without the disk, make a proper network connection, and have AFP sharing in any direction you want with complete access to the disk.
Re:Drat you Steve! (Score:5, Informative)
While new devices that use firewire might be rare, I have no intention of replacing my camcorder just because Apple says I should.
Apple is saying no such thing. It's so silly that people get worked up about a product that doesn't support their particular need, especially when there's an alternative product that does.
FireWire is only required for older DV cameras, some high-end video production equipment, certain musical equipment, target disk mode, and certain aerospace applications which really have nothing to do with personal computers.
1. Older DV cameras (dwindling market) - Get a new one, or don't get a new MacBook. If you still want a Mac, there are both cheaper and more expensive Macs that will do what you need. However, if you are thinking of buying a MacBook Pro just for FireWire, and would actually prefer a smaller screen, you can buy a MacBook and a new video camera for the same or less than a MacBook Pro.
2. High-end video equipment (niche market) - tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in video equipment, with the level of income that goes with it, and you can't afford a MacBook Pro?
3. Musical equipment (niche, but potentially low-end market) - This is really the best case for FireWire on the non-high end MacBooks, and it's still pretty lame. It's an extremely niche market, and it's silly to cater to them at the expense of the average person on the specific model targeted directly at mass consumer.
4. TDM (not niche, but relatively geeky) - The hard drives are insanely easy to get to. A $20 enclosure and an extra 10 minutes tops.
5. Aerospace - Added for completeness.
The mass market has moved to USB. The MacBook is the mass market Mac notebook. You can still buy a higher end, and even a lower end Mac notebook with FireWire.
This does not signal the end of FireWire on Macs. It just signals the end of FireWire as standard on all Macs. If you want both a Mac and FireWire, there are still, and will be for some time to come, plenty of options.
Re: no alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
Getting music equipment manufacturers to adopt standards has always been an exercise in cat-herding. My studio is quite modest, and almost every piece of gear has some interface unique to itself. The sampler has SCSI, the controller keyboard has USB, the audio interface has FireWire, the Roland module has the R-Bus connection that not even Roland uses anymore, there's a synth with a "to-host" serial port.
About the only standard that everyone can agree upon is MIDI (which was adopted jointly by the two heavy-hitter manufacturers back in the day) which is why everything still has a MIDI in and out 25 years later. There are some products that use Ethernet, for example the Muse Receptor, but I think the problem is that nobody wants to adopt a new standard until they're sure everyone else has adopted it, or else it's a wasted investment. I've believed for quite some time now that the major hardware manufacturers need to settle on some kind of MIDI-for-the-21st century specification, but perhaps it's a moot point now as people turn more towards software tools for audio synthesis and production.
Re:is that still around? (Score:3, Informative)
USB doesn't allow for devices to communicate peer-to-peer. There is always a HOST and devices. Most USB devices can't switch from being a USB host to a USB device and vice-versa.
USB OTG(on-the-go) can allow devices to act as hosts, but this requires a USB controller that supports it.
IEEE 1394 is peer-to-peer. It requires nothing additional to use "target disk mode".