I always liked Firewire as a technology, compared to its 12Mbps contemporary USB. Firewire had a simple hardware-like control/status register interface, USB was more like a software state machine.
Allegedly, Apple doomed it by starting with a poor prototype and then charged too much for each port, while a USB control microprocessor was dirt cheap.
For media, Firewire offered bandwidth/latency guarantees. I don't think USB did.
stringsandchars · 9h ago
I'm genuinely hoping that this is just an early beta omission because, contrary to the very limited use-case presented in the article (iPods) Firewire is still an essential part of many professional workflows: an enormous amount of very expensive high-end music-studio equipment uses Firewire, as well as film scanners such as the CoolScan range from Nikon, that still outperform camera scanning - even using modern 'medium format' cameras like the Fuji GFX100.
Replacing that equipment would be extremely expensive - disincentivizing buying new Mac equipment.
Allegedly, Apple doomed it by starting with a poor prototype and then charged too much for each port, while a USB control microprocessor was dirt cheap.
For media, Firewire offered bandwidth/latency guarantees. I don't think USB did.
Replacing that equipment would be extremely expensive - disincentivizing buying new Mac equipment.