'Home on iPod' Patent Surfaces

[k8to]

Hooray for trivial patents.

 

[redAPPLE]

so will apple support firewire-powered iPods again!? 😕

hope so. down with usb!

 

[SeaFox]

so will apple support firewire-powered iPods again!?

No, because they would have to add the Firewire controller back to the PCB, and it was removed because it didn't fit in the current case thickness. So they would have to redesign the iPod.

 

[sunfast]

This is a FANTASTIC idea! I didn't have a Mac in the Panther days so never heard about that slip-up. But what a great idea.

I really wish I had a bigger capacity iPod now though

 

[Dunepilot]

iPod has moved in a direction toward greater external HD use, if anything. Intel Macs, most PowerPC Macs (with the exception of boot capability), and PCs all work with current iPods. Like it or not, Firewire is being repositioned in the computer market as a whole. This technology is one developed for OS X and of course would not work with any other OS. Whether or not it will require an iPod is unknown (but doubtful)--it just happens that lots of people have iPods, which make for convenient "satellites" for this system.

I beg to differ. I have a 5th Gen iPod which transfers much more slowly by USB2 than my 3rd Gen did by FW400. A quick look at barefeats would show you the real-world speed advantages of Firewire over USB2.

Also, are you saying that Firewire won't work with any other OS, or by 'this technology' were you referring to 'home on iPod'?

 

[Macnoviz]

No, because they would have to add the Firewire controller back to the PCB, and it was removed because it didn't fit in the current case thickness. So they would have to redesign the iPod.

Couldn't they offer 30 pin to Firewire cables?

 

[Henriok]

MenuExtra

There's a Menu Extra (/S/L/CoreServices/Menu Extras/) in Leopard that is called "Home on iPod". It was there in Tiger and Panther too during the development but was taken away later on.

 

[matticus008]

I beg to differ. I have a 5th Gen iPod which transfers much more slowly by USB2 than my 3rd Gen did by FW400. A quick look at barefeats would show you the real-world speed advantages of Firewire over USB2.

Also, are you saying that Firewire won't work with any other OS, or by 'this technology' were you referring to 'home on iPod'?

"This technology" refers to the "portable accounts" development, not Firewire. Sorry for the confusion.

As for your USB transfers, it's well known that Apple's USB drivers basically suck. The Barefeats website also has a number of flaws in the way they collect and present data (though it's historically been one of the only resources available for Mac benchmarks), and that data refers to a comparison of high-speed desktop drives, not the 1.8" micro drives in an iPod. The biggest flaw with Barefeats is that the data composition is not disclosed--is it large files, small files, a mix? Firewire's speed benefit is only realized by a large margin when transfering at a sustained rate, which requires relatively large files. In other words, there's a clear advantage for video work, but little to no "real world" advantage to moving thousands of Word documents, for example.

An iPod hard drive is slower than USB 2.0's peak "real world" speeds--transfers to and from my 4G iPod (30+ GB, mostly 3MB-10MB files) on my PC are within a few seconds of the time required by my PowerBook (FW). When using USB on the PowerBook, the speed difference is more substantial (15-30 seconds).

Couldn't they offer 30 pin to Firewire cables?

No, because there's no Firewire logic in the iPod. The pins in the dock connector would still have to connect to something inside the iPod, and there's nothing but USB present.

 

[GregA]

This feature would be MUCH more useful if there were more "panther-equipped" (leopard, now, if anything) Macs lying around.

It would seem to make it much easier to implement if you had identical operating systems.

However, if your application supports 10.3/10.4/10.5, then it'd really become a question of whether 10.3 supports iHome.

I know an upgraded iPhoto library doesn't load on an older version - could Apple upgrade the older iPhoto to handle the new files only (but no other newer features). I'd like to see a free 10.5-lite - without all the goodies - just to get people on a common platform.

So anyway, if Apple let us backup (time machine) to an online server, do we need an iPod to log on to any Mac and see our desktop? Or could we do it from the online copy?

 

[Jimmieboy]

Don't know why they decided to drop it. I'd love it if that featyre was avaible!