iPassion

The lack of firewire support on new MacBooks and on the new iPod Nano said it all already. But Steve Jobs himself confirmed that the reliable, amazingly fast FireWire standard has an uncertain future — as reported by this article on AppleInsider.

What strikes me more is the fact that FireWire is perceived mostly as a mean to transfer video from digital camcorders rather than a fully bloated SCSI replacement. FireWire is not just about video… Hard Disks and Audio peripheral truly benefit from this standard that is far superior to USB 2.0. Unfortunately, money drives the market and USB 2.0 is a cheaper standard to implement both technically and on the licensing side of things.

Apple invented the standard in the late 80s as a hot pluggable replacement for SCSI, with a special emphasis on supporting media streaming with isochronous, real-time data transfers. Upon returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs hoped to earn some licensing royalties from the technology, which was quickly becoming an emerging standard not just to replace SCSI but also in video and music applications. Jobs’ plan resulted in Intel offering to upgrade its USB standard to speeds approaching FireWire at a lower cost.

Somewhat ironically, Apple’s 1998 iMac originated the push behind USB (due to the lack of any FireWire support in both the first generation iMac and iBook!) that allowed it to gain rapid adoption among consumers. USB 2.0 built upon that ubiquity to push into the peripheral territory that had been wholly owned by FireWire.

While USB 2.0 ate into the casual peripheral market for consumer hard drives and web cams, FireWire retracted to support applications where USB 2.0 wasn’t suitable. The future of FireWire is still not written. 

However — a little sadly particularly because I just bought a FireWire Audio Interface from Behringer – I think that FireWire is not going to last long on MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, or iMac, either.