I agree. I mean, come on. You should included the AC adpater... what if people have desktops at home and they are on vacation?the_freddinator said:
IMO, you shouldn't have to buy an adapter charge your iPod.
Thank God I have two, lol.
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iPod CONFIRMED: No FireWire Support in 5G iPods
- Thread starter clayj
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IMO, you shouldn't have to buy an adapter charge your iPod.
Thank God I have two, lol.
Wow, no firewire and no adapter? That blows. My TiBook I bought in Feb 2003 (not even three years old) only has USB 1.1, and there's no way I'm going to try to fill up a new iPod with that. And having the adaptor is convenient, my Powerbook goes to many different places in the house, but the adapter is always in the wall in the bedroom. I vote lame as well.
tristan said:
I agree, on my powerbook it took all night to put all of my songs onto my ipod...if it was firewire...it would have been done in like an hour.
iEric said:It's Apple's iNsAnE way of making you listen to the whole song...those bastards!
But the lack of remote compatibility means I can't use my iTrip anymore.
The problem with this whole USB 2 issue on the most part isn't a gripe at Apple for choosing USB 2 over Firewire. Few people are attached enough to Firewire to care about it going from a purely technical point of view. I do find that Firewire is a better port for syncing, but USB 2 works just fine here, and will for everyone who has a USB 2 capable computer.
The problem however does rest with Apple. Why?
Apple didn't introduce USB 2 on its machines until mid 2003.
USB 2 has been around on even the most rubbish PCs almost universally since mid 2002. Apple, so often a leader in terms of introducing new stuff, held off introducing USB 2 on Macs presumably to try and push Firewire as the market's protocol of choice. So otherwise great machines, such as the late G4 Powermacs, the first 12" and 17" Powerbooks, most G4 iMacs, all G3 iBooks, and every single TiBook lacks USB 2. Because Apple didn't add the option until Firewire had basically lost the battle.
I couldn't care less about any so-called 'loyalty' to Firewire, but Apple brought this problem on themselves by not adopting USB 2 earlier. There's nothing either Apple or the USB 1.1 Mac users can do about it now, but it's just a mess of Apple's doing.
The problem however does rest with Apple. Why?
Apple didn't introduce USB 2 on its machines until mid 2003.
USB 2 has been around on even the most rubbish PCs almost universally since mid 2002. Apple, so often a leader in terms of introducing new stuff, held off introducing USB 2 on Macs presumably to try and push Firewire as the market's protocol of choice. So otherwise great machines, such as the late G4 Powermacs, the first 12" and 17" Powerbooks, most G4 iMacs, all G3 iBooks, and every single TiBook lacks USB 2. Because Apple didn't add the option until Firewire had basically lost the battle.
I couldn't care less about any so-called 'loyalty' to Firewire, but Apple brought this problem on themselves by not adopting USB 2 earlier. There's nothing either Apple or the USB 1.1 Mac users can do about it now, but it's just a mess of Apple's doing.
thequicksilver said:
Yeah, I agree with you there for the most part (except that iMacs got USB 2 about half way through and the last PowerMacs also had it). But nobody else has been arguing that point, really. They've all been calling USB "inferior" without knowing anything about it, maybe because they're the ones who don't have it. It's a funny concept, considering the Apple was the first company to drop legacy ports and adopt USB across the line.
I think you're right that they were trying to get Firewire into the market, but Apple has never had enough leverage to do that and they should have known it. They should have adopted USB 2.0 several months earlier with the rest of the industry. But people also should have been informed consumers when they looked around at all the other computers and saw that they all had USB 2.0. They should have looked at the peripheral shelves in stores and seen USB 2.0 everywhere. They should have made sure that they could upgrade to USB 2.0 in the future, rather than happily buying computers that were closed platforms that didn't support the dominant standard. The blame is not Apple's alone.
The fact that they preserved compatibility for two solid years after the introduction of the last USB 2.0 computer is admirable. Any other PC maker would have dropped it a month later and said "to hell with you people." But you knew that as soon as the iPod opened up to Windows in 2003 that Apple was going for the top dog position. It wanted that whole market, and Firewire was not consistent with that vision.
It's not so much a case of Apple abandoning its customers. It's Apple targeting a different group of customers entirely. People who are offended by Apple's actions should realize that it's not Mac users that made the iPod successful, and iPod is, for all practical purposes, a different brand with a different mission. Apple hopes that people who like iPods will also get Macs, but they didn't make that part essential to their iPod business model. With the iPod, Apple can't afford not to play the game PC-style. That's what's totally different between the two lines. The Macintosh is an effort to develop a powerful, beautiful, sophisticated computer that people love--knowing that they are a small, niche player and not aiming to take over Windows. The iPod is an effort to make Apple a household name in digital media--and IS designed to streamroll the competition.
Yeah the fact that Apple didn't put USB 2.0 on the laptops until very late in the game has basically created a situation where the company's best customers (the one's who spent $2500 on their Powerbook) can't use any new iPod.
1) USB-PS2 adapters for mice are readily available and super cheap, even included with many USB mice. Why doesn't Apple let me buy a USB2-Firewire converter to use these new iPods with my "old" Mac? Of course they're two totally different protocols - so what.matticus008 said:
2) USB2 is hands-down technologically inferior. Its real-world max transfer speed is slower, CPU utilization is higher, and it supplies less bus power making charging much slower.
USB 2.0 is a hack on top of USB 1.1 which is older technology. It is inferior in most respects to Firewire. USB 2.0 is to Firewire, for the iPod's purposes, is what IDE was to SCSI in about 1995.
There are 2 big differences between Firewire and USB2 for my purposes:
1) Firewire is significantly more technologically advanced; and more importantly,
2) My Mac (and a lot of others' Macs) don't have USB2
The additional space necessary for a Firewire controller chip is quite small. Firewire chips are not exactly concrete slabs, you know. If it expands the length/depth of the thing by 1 or 2 mm, it would be more than worth it for me and for anyone who wants faster transfers and shorter charge times. Of course, if THAT EXACT level of thinness is absolutely necessary, then feel free to offer a reasonably-priced USB2-FW converter instead of putting FW inside the iPod.
So I ask again, why not either include both interfaces like previous iPods did, or offer for separate purchase a USB2-Firewire converter for the people who can't use USB2? That way, all 330m people are covered.
Case in point.
It's difficult to plug a cable into a jack? FW is no more difficult to deal with than USB.
Apple has also gone against the grain and been unsuccessful. The puck mouse... the G4 cube... the Flower Power iMac (wtf?). Apple is not successful because it goes against the grain, it's successful because it makes good products that its customers love. The new iPod is not a good product to me because a feature from it that is vital to me has been stripped out.
It is inferior, it is a poorly designed interface, and I wouldn't know if it's handicapped for use with peripherals because my Mac doesn't have it and therefore can't use them!
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html
But my point is not that FW is superior to USB, which it is. My point is that lots of Mac owners don't have USB2 and thus basically can't use the new iPods.
That's great, except it's not more accessible to ME. I think it's great that the iPod has USB2 support and that definitely should not go away. I just wish that it also had FW support, like all previous iPods, even the commodity consumer-level Mini.
Not worthless to me or to anyone who owns a pre-USB2 Mac (they're really not that old) and is in the market for a new iPod. We would consider buying a reasonably priced adapter.
Oops - looks like Apple forgot that step. (They forgot to buy the FW interface)
Not to the average upper-middle-class Mac Rumors member, but to quite a few people, tens of millions in fact in the US alone, $300, $400 for an MP3 player damn well is a luxury item. I don't mean to say that all of these people are in the market for an iPod, just that what is considered luxury is relative.
Fair enough, it's a commodity item. I'm curious as to your opinions of previous iPods, the ones that included Firewire support. Were those not commodity items then?
Millions of other people would buy them if they had Firewire+USB2 too... like they did during the previous generation.
1) I never said they should have gone with FW INSTEAD of USB, I said they should have STAYED with FW AND USB like all previous iPods were. That would make EVERYBODY happy (except people like you who like slower transfers and longer charge times and would rather screw thousands of potential customers than have to deal with a 0.8mm-deeper bulge in your belt clip-mounted iPod case).
2) What do you mean it was no longer possible? The previous generation already had FW and it was pretty darn successful I would say. Maybe it would have no longer been possible to include FW with the new form factor, but why did the form factor HAVE to become THIS form factor?
"Sorry everybody, in order to shrink our new iBooks down to a half inch thick, we had to get rid of the upgradeable RAM. Those slots only add to the iBook's price. Also, they just took up too much space on the board. Our market research indicated that most people don't upgrade their RAM anyway, so we're including 512MB with every Mac - that's more than enough for 95% of the market. We're sure you'll be amazed by the new innovative size!"
in a USB2+FW iPod, there is no need for ANY PC user to buy a FW card.
Firewire is not some last vestige of a formerly important piece of technology either. Like PCI Express, it is higher-performance, more expensive, and technologically superior in every way. It is in much the same predicament as the Mac - superior hardware, more expensive, hard to compete against commodity hardware that, while crappier, is also cheaper.
Easiest and most logical place? No, I'll tell you where the easiest and most logical place for it is - it's plugged into my Firewire port, 'cause I don't have USB2 ports.
(And for iPod-as-hard-drive use, there's another thing about the supposedly just-fine-and-dandy USB2: You can't boot off it.)
I don't like that attitude and Apple shouldn't either.
None of this had to come at the expense of FW, except perhaps the size, but even then we're talking about millimeters or fractions of a millimeter. Apple would have sold just as many iPods and even more if they had retained FW (or offered an adapter separately), pleased more of its customer base, and made the same or even greater profits (factoring in profits off the USB2-FW adapter).
wtf?matticus008 said:
If you wish iPods supported Firewire then why don't you just come out and say so? YOU ARE the market. Apple's market research is not infallible. Steve Jobs is not the messiah. He screws up sometimes too. Quite frequently, in fact.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
alex_ant said:
Because Steve Jobs doesn't like video, either. I doubt he was too thrilled about this product. Steve Jobs has very little to do with this. I know that I don't want video in my iPods, but I also know that hundreds of millions of other people want video and would rather have that than Firewire. I've accepted that my preferences are not the same as 99% of the rest of the world, something the Firewire camp here can't seem to recognize.
No one's market research is infallible, but in this case the research is absolutely right. iPods are selling faster than ever.
And yes, as weird as it sounds, 4 million is a very small number compared to the 790+ million total computer sales in that same four year period. Even if every one of those 4 million people were going to buy an iPod, they only comprise 0.5% of Apple's potential market. And based on iPod sales, only about 1-2% of computer owners buy an iPod every year (though that number is increasing rapidly), meaning that it's more likely that only 40-80 thousand of those people would buy an iPod. That's a very small number.
They're not the same at all. That mouse physically has hardware onboard that can do both PS/2 and USB. The adapter is just a pin reconfiguration. No such thing exists for USB and Firewire, because they have nothing in common from a communications standpoint. One is peer to peer and the other is host/client. You cannot adapt that.alex_ant said:
USB and Firewire are the same age, actually. Its CPU utilization is generally lower than Firewire, actually. From a technical perspective, USB is much more versatile and much more dependable in scarce resource situations. USB is capable of isochronous transfer (at a lower speed than Firewire, yes), as well as burst transfer, and variants of the two. Firewire just does one of those. Firewire also panics and shuts down when it fills up, while USB can handle failure better. USB is also a much simpler protocol to implement in hardware, making the chips smaller by about a factor of 5.
Firewire is not more advanced. It's just more specialized. Sorry about your luck not having USB 2.0, but you bought that computer knowing that it had that limitation. You gambled on that limitation not mattering, but you lost that crapshoot.
Wrong again. A Firewire controller is about five to six times the size of a USB chip. USB-Firewire conversion is not simple, cheap, or practical. The end. The fantasy notion of a converter must end right there. It doesn't exist, and Apple can't magically make it exist economically.
Well, that's fine. But your loss was worth it to Apple, because it picked up plenty of other people to replace you.
It's not poorly designed at all. It's a really flexible, admirably designed protocol. Apple was the first company to adopt USB and drop legacy ports because it liked what it saw in USB. And it's not just an Intel thing, because Intel helped develop Firewire, too.
It's not superior, except in a very narrow range of applications. Yeah, lots of people don't have it, but so what? 98%+ of people do, and iPods are selling faster than ever. This decision has allowed them to expand the market and increase the rate of sales. It hasn't hurt them in any way.
They didn't forget. They left it out on purpose, because USB does everything they want the iPod to do.
An iPod is a commodity item, because the definition of being such is that it can be purchased on the average family's weekly disposable income (about $350). The personal computer hitting $299 was a major event because it signaled the first step of PCs entering commodity status. That's what it means to be a commodity product.
Once the price for the iPod dropped to $300 or below, yeah, they were commodity items too. I'm not seeing where you're going with that, though.
Not really. Apple can't gain that many sales to Firewire-only computers. By next year, every late-model computer in their target range will have USB 2.0. Firewire will still only be around 10%.
There isn't room for video and Firewire. The market wanted video, so goodbye Firewire. Simple as that. Nobody is going to notice that it took 23.5 minutes instead of 22 minutes to sync their iPod. Even within a given interface, sync times vary a little each time.
Because people expect the iPod to become better. That means thinner, smaller, bigger hard drives, more features or improvements to existing features. People wanted video. They got it. The dead weight of Firewire went away, and nobody really cared (with some minor exceptions).
Lots of people would buy that slimmer iBook, I'd wager. The iMac said "we're going to do away with internal expansion bays to make the computer smaller." Look how successful that's been.
Apple never marketed that as a feature. It was a pleasant bonus...but guess what, PCs can boot to USB 2.0. They're enjoying that feature now.
Why not? Apple supports your choice to buy something else, and so does your wallet and your local electronics store. If it doesn't work for you, don't get one. Apple doesn't mind, because they're selling iPods almost faster than they can make them.
No we're not. We're talking about appreciable differences of more than half a square inch--a tremendous amount of space on a circuit board less than 5 square inches.
No they wouldn't. The new iPod wouldn't have video in it, and then people would be complaining about the "lame" iPod updates. They'd still sell a lot, but probably not as many. There's no way they could recoup the R&D costs of an adapter because nobody would want to pay an extra $100 for it, given that only 1% of the market would even need to use it. It's a stupid thing to waste money on.
I'd like to toss another vote in for "sh**, no video pod for me".
I'm sure if you had both an old ipod and a video ipod and enough know-how, you could make a fraken-pod that would play movies after quickly downloading them off of my G3 imac.
I'm sure if you had both an old ipod and a video ipod and enough know-how, you could make a fraken-pod that would play movies after quickly downloading them off of my G3 imac.
I completely agree with alex. FW+USB2 would have been the way to go. It's just one more little chip on the board and a dollar or two, that's a small price to pay for not upsetting your most loyal customers. And they don't have to leave FW on there forever, but a couple more years would be a nice bone to throw to the Mac buyers who supported the company during its less successful days.
View attachment 33177
Note the size of the Firewire controller.
View attachment 33178
Note the size of the USB controller. The Broadcom video chip is the same size as the Firewire controller. Where do you want Firewire to go?
Firewire isn't one more little chip. It's the biggest chip on the board.
Note the size of the Firewire controller.
View attachment 33178
Note the size of the USB controller. The Broadcom video chip is the same size as the Firewire controller. Where do you want Firewire to go?
Firewire isn't one more little chip. It's the biggest chip on the board.
matticus008 said:Powerbooks can be upgraded to USB 2.0 via the PC card slot
So Apple's worst customers using the older iBook are out of luck.
Unfortunately so. But the fact that the iBook isn't upgradeable or that USB 2.0 was an important omission was no secret, even back then...and somewhat more than two years later, here we are. That limitation has started to be significant for iPods.BornAgainMac said:So Apple's worst customers using the older iBook are out of luck.
It had to happen sooner or later.