Users Rage Over Missing FireWire On New MacBooks

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."

Drat you Steve!

Now I won't have anywhere to hookup my HD-DVD drive!

Re:Drat you Steve!

Of course you do, keep using the mac you have right now.

Re:Drat you Steve!

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.

Re:Drat you Steve!

Apple and "low-cost or free" hardware? What have you been smoking?

Re:Drat you Steve!

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.

Not quite

No one is really "raging". A few loudmouths (and it's always the same ones if you hang around those boards and wait long enough) are whining about not being able to plug cameras (that they don't own) into the new Macbook (which they also mostly don't own). This is bitching for bitching's sake, and I can show you. Look here:

The white macbook is still being sold in the Apple store, and will be for the foreseeable future, having just been made Apple's "cheap" notebook. And white macbooks still have firewire400. Which is exactly what these whiny people are screaming that they want.

It seems to me that a few very loud people quite badly aren't going to shut up until Jobs give each and every single one of them their own free, customized mac.

Steve Jobs' take. . .

A MacRumors article [macrumors.com] has a response from Steve about the lack of Firewire, with his only explanation being that, "All the new HD camcorders have been using USB for the last two years."

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)

FireWire has DMA, not USB!

My Firewire 400 external drives routinely kick the crap out of my USB2 external drivers when archiving large volumes of itty-bitty files.
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?

Firewire Common on PC Notebooks

Firewire is actually fairly common on even budget PC notebooks, including Dells, so this omission by Apple is all the more perplexing. And Apple still doesn't offer Blu-ray drives or 3G wireless at any price on any model. (No 3G wireless option from the iPhone company!) It also amazes me that their latest hardware refresh still caps RAM at 4G maximum. Even Dell has figured out how to go to 8G max on a notebook.

That said, there is some great design in these new MacBooks. But Apple engineers waxing eloquently about "unibody" construction (it isn't, by the way) when they forgot the damn Firewire port is a bit too much to stomach.

No worries

You can just plug a firewire card in to the expresscard sl... oh wait

Firewire is a standard, not a luxury

Quite simply they needed a way to sell more MacBook Pros.
The average audio/video hobbyist/artist is not going to shell out 2 grand for a firewire port so they can record their music and capture their video.

And yet...

And yet Apple will still probably sell a metric assload of new MacBooks.

Saying that hundreds of users are pissed off just means there is a small but vocal minority who are annoyed.

The vast majority of MacBook users and potential buyers couldn't care less what FW is, and probably don't even know what it is.

As a number of commentators have pointed out, the vast majority of consumer grade video cameras now use USB. Seriously, if you don't like the product, don't buy it. Is it really that hard?

Recording

Firewire is absolutely key when recording audio (in my case, guitar, bass, vocals, etc). USB pushes the CPU too hard and doesn't leave it free for realtime sound processing - amp simulation, etc. Currently I'm doing it on a 2 year old MacBook, but at this point my only upgrade option is a MBP. After factoring in the cost of replacing my Firewire hardware, the MBP isn't much more expensive anyway.

Then again, I guess that's what Apple wants.

Something to think about

I work for a major cable manufacturing company, which has made both the standard 6 pin firewire as well as 9 pin. what i do for this company specifically is make their catalog, and i can tell you that in our upcoming 2009 catalog we will not be offering 9 pin firewire at all, and our 6 pin stock selection has been greatly reduced. Obviously (to me) firewire is loosing in popularity (to usb) so get ready to upgrade your soon to be obsolete peripherals.

Re:is that still around?

The complaint is because the Macbook makes all their firewire accesories useless. (Duh).

Re:is that still around?

It's like comparing two runners - one who runs a marathon and goes 7 min/mile and a sprinter who does 7 min/mile.

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? :-))

Re:is that still around?

(Aren't you glad I didn't use a car analogy? :-))

No. You suck. I hate you.

Re:is that still around?

Assuming that you are refering to USB 2.0 and not 3.0, which isn't out yet, there are distinct advantages and disadvantages with Firewire. A standard Firewire bus is rated to 400 Mb/s, while USB 2.0 is rated to 450 Mb/s. However, the USB High Speed protocol with individual devices is limited to 400 Mb/s. In addition, the USB protocol has a lot more overhead when it comes to control of the bus. The entire USB bus is fully controlled by a single host computer, whereas Firewire is an intelligent bus that requires less overhead. What all of this generally amounts to is that when it comes to a single continuous data stream, Firewire still beats USB 2.0 by quite a bit. But when it comes to managing multiple devices, or transfering many small files, the differences are not so great. For external hard drives and digital video cameras, Firewire beats USB 2.0, especially if you run Firewire 800, which is capable of 800 Mb/s.

Re:is that still around?

Speed isn't the issue, at least for me.

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.

Re:Moi aussi

Yeah, I'm fucking bullshit about that. Not going to buy another MacBook until they put it back.

I've got a crapload of external drives, many of which are firewire only. Pisses me off that apple drops their own widely used standard on their own equipment.

Assmonkeys.

Fuck Yeah! Like, do you know how many ISA cards I have sitting in a box at home?

Re:Moi aussi

Is firewire really outdated? ISA surely is, but last I checked, despite being not widely used outside the Macintosh scene, it's still feature-competitive.

Re:Moi aussi

But sadly, there is no BBQ. Apple pushed FW on us as a superior solution and championed it, encouraging us to adopt it. We do. Then they drop it, leaving us with a load of FW enabled devices. Is that not clear enough to you? Hence the outrage. HENCE!

Re:Moi aussi

Yeah but, unlike ISA>PCI, Firewire is actually BETTER than the only connection the new Macbooks offer (USB 2.0). It irks me because Firewire is still my choice for importing and exporting DV video. USB 2.0 just isn't up to snuff (not with the equipment I use, anyway).

Re:Maybe they were forced to drop it?

I think that they wanted $0.25 per end-user. Other than licensing, Firewire is a more expensive technology to implement due the hardware. That's really kept it out of the low-end markets. USB is a decent technology for certain things like peripherals and general data transfers. Firewire supplies more power and is better in time-sensitive transfer applications. Overall, Firewire 400 which came out 1995 has a higher sustained transfer rate than USB 2.0 which came out in 2000.

Re:Mine has two

What does the Robotech Defense Force have to do with this? Are you Rick Hunter in disguise?