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iPod No Firewire Support Leaves Many Mac Users Behind

thankfully all my computers have USB 2.

but that is why the iPod is much thinner is because it doesn't have to use the Firewire port in it
 
wPod said:
um, want to give me a hand with buying a new computer? i think a new iMac would look great with a new iPod!!!!

i feel so small and insignificant!
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:( Sorry dude. Now you know what it's like to be a member of the Green party! Sort of unfortunate from your perspective, but no company really cares about maintaining backwards compatibility beyond 2-3 years average.

New video cards are PCI-E and sometimes later AGP as an (expensive) afterthought, but high-end motherboards didn't all go PCI-E until 2005. Even now, there's still a huge number of AGP systems--but look at how popular PCI video cards were in 2000-2001. They're all but gone now. USB 2.0 became standard on PCs in 2001, most Macs in 2002. There were some holdouts, but now they amount to substantially less than 1% of recent computers. Sadly, you're one of them--but a 2004 vintage iPod, or even early 2005, will last you many years from now, with this computer AND the next. Buy clayj's or check out the refurb/clearance stores.
 
matticus008 said:
:( Sorry dude. Now you know what it's like to be a member of the Green party! Sort of unfortunate from your perspective, but no company really cares about maintaining backwards compatibility beyond 2-3 years average.

New video cards are PCI-E and sometimes later AGP as an (expensive) afterthought, but high-end motherboards didn't all go PCI-E until 2005. Even now, there's still a huge number of AGP systems--but look at how popular PCI video cards were in 2000-2001. They're all but gone now. USB 2.0 became standard on PCs in 2001, most Macs in 2002. There were some holdouts, but now they amount to substantially less than 1% of recent computers. Sadly, you're one of them--but a 2004 vintage iPod, or even early 2005, will last you many years from now, with this computer AND the next. Buy clayj's or check out the refurb/clearance stores.
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that is so true it isn't even funny. which is why in about 5 years i will be buying an intel powermac and in 3 years i will be buying an intel poewrbook
 
clayj said:
I've got a FireWire-capable 60 GB iPod Photo (with FireWire cable) for sale over in the Marketplace forum, if you really need a recent FireWire-compatible iPod. :)
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Oh god, please dont let this be another "high second-hand prices of OS9 Bootable PowerMac G4" phenomenon... :(
 
matticus008 said:
The only people in trouble, I think, are early 12" PowerBook/iBook models and 2003 iMacs. The other computers can all be upgraded to USB 2.0 or have had it since 2003. It's marginalizing a small minority of Apple customers, who are in turn a small minority of iPod customers.
.
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Hello. It makes you wonder, however, when they'll screw you instead. If Apple had not held out forever in not adopting USB2, it would be far less annoying. But they did. So it means no new iPod for me for a while.

BTW, does this fortell a day when consumer macs will not even have firewire? Seems sort of sad that Apple would drop their superior technology. Of course, not doing so is what cost them in the 80s . . .
 
Le Big Mac said:
BTW, does this fortell a day when consumer macs will not even have firewire? Seems sort of sad that Apple would drop their superior technology. Of course, not doing so is what cost them in the 80s . . .
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No FW means no connecting digital camcorders. If for nothing else Apple will keep FW on all their machines for that reason.


Lethal
 
eva01 said:
thankfully all my computers have USB 2.

but that is why the iPod is much thinner is because it doesn't have to use the Firewire port in it
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The iPod has not had a Firewire port since 2003. It has used the combination USB 2.0 and Firewire slot since the debut of the third generation iPods. :rolleyes:
 
Superdrive said:
That reads, "Bring back fat iPods" to the rest of us.
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Humm. Do you have a picture of a firewire controller in the third or fourth generation iPods? I doubt Apple discontinued Firewire because of the size of the controller. It was most likely a cost minimizing decision.

I would also think that Apple has to pay licensing fees to Intel to use USB 2.0, whereas they could license Firewire from themselves for free.
 
joshuawaire said:
The iPod has not had a Firewire port since 2003. It has used the combination USB 2.0 and Firewire slot since the debut of the third generation iPods. :rolleyes:
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umm you do know that the 4G iPods did run off of firewire correct?

and the firewire controller is a separate entity in the iPod while the USB comes off of one of the chips, hence making the iPod bigger because it had firewire in it.

that is as of what i know, i know that removing firewire did make it smaller somewhat
 
joshuawaire said:
Humm. Do you have a picture of a firewire controller in the third or fourth generation iPods? I doubt Apple discontinued Firewire because of the size of the controller. It was most likely a cost minimizing decision.

I would also think that Apple has to pay licensing fees to Intel to use USB 2.0, whereas they could license Firewire from themselves for free.
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Firewire controllers are larger and more complex than USB chips. The Firewire protocol has a lot of complexity to it from a signal processing and overall engineering perspective. That said, the reason there is not FW is because the smaller iPod only has space on the small circuit board for one controller (or alternatively only enough money in the the budget for one or the other), and they went with USB because it's more common. USB just has a secondary benefit of being smaller and cheaper.
 
has anybody actually tried loading music onto a nano (say, 2 gig's worth) via usb 1.1 over an ibook/pb (12 Mb/s)? got a time length?

and can the nano charge over usb 1.1? my local apple rep couldn't answer that question...
 
Even though I'm lucky enough to have USB 2.0 on my PM, I'm still annoyed at the omission of Firewire on the iPods.

I was ok with it on my Nano, I figured it was to save space. But I'm replacing my Nano with a new iPod. Having USB only seems.......very PC, and very un-Apple.

Maybe it's to cut costs to keep margins higher. But Apple doesn't have to pay licensing for Firewire.

I don't know, I'm out of ideas. I know it sucks though.
 
sadness,

I was thinking about getting an ipod for my sister-inlaw, but seeing that she has my old ibook g3(900mhz) , I don't think i will. It kinda sucks. That machine is barely two years old, and still run everything she needs great(expect for logic board issues :( )...

o well, maybe i can find her a used mini.
 
I found out about this the other day... I bought a nano for a friend, and when we connected it to my iPod's FW cable on my computer a message appeared on the Nano's screen saying that it would only for if used over USB2, NOT FW ... :eek:

It is really sad that Apple is not supporting FW in the new iPods. I now have a newer PBook, but my old TiBook I had until very recently only had FW and USB1. Hopefully the new iPod Video supports FW, even if it only comes with the USB cables.
 
matticus008 said:
Firewire controllers are larger and more complex than USB chips. The Firewire protocol has a lot of complexity to it from a signal processing and overall engineering perspective. That said, the reason there is not FW is because the smaller iPod only has space on the small circuit board for one controller (or alternatively only enough money in the the budget for one or the other), and they went with USB because it's more common. USB just has a secondary benefit of being smaller and cheaper.
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Once again "superior" loses to "good enough."


Lethal
 
i would prefer firewire to a thin ipod.
for one because my ipod is the only thing that i own that uses firewire and i have a bunch of things that use usb. with only two usb ports and one firewire port it makes everything easier to manage.
+ being able to boot from it

do these things really need to get thinner? and if so how about taking out the useless features like colour screens, video and photo. its an mp3 player for christ's sake, i thought apple was about removing the clutter.
 
asherman13 said:
has anybody actually tried loading music onto a nano (say, 2 gig's worth) via usb 1.1 over an ibook/pb (12 Mb/s)? got a time length?

and can the nano charge over usb 1.1? my local apple rep couldn't answer that question...
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For charging, you need to use a powered USB port (some computers and many monitors offer only unpowered ports). As long as it's a powered port, which might be really hard to determine, it should charge. I could be mistaken, though, so someone else will have to answer that question definitively. As for the transfer time, I tried using a Cruzer mini USB drive on a 1.1 system (an older notebook) and rarely broke 1MB/sec. It took some 40 minutes to transfer a 530MB file over. Assuming that the nano is the same (it may be faster, but I don't have access to 1.1 to test it), you're looking at 20*40 or about 1.3 hours to put 2 gigs of data on a nano. I think USB 2.0 does it in somewhere around 12 minutes.

jalagl said:
Hopefully the new iPod Video supports FW, even if it only comes with the USB cables.
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It does not, hence this thread's existence.
 
csubear said:
Can mac boot from USB devices? Does anyone know?
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Nope. It's technically possible, but Apple firmware doesn't support it at this time. You can bet that the Intel Macs will definitely support USB booting, and I'd like to think that Apple will release updated firmware for the current (and future) Macs so we can boot to USB flash/hard drives and the like.
 
eva01 said:
umm you do know that the 4G iPods did run off of firewire correct?

and the firewire controller is a separate entity in the iPod while the USB comes off of one of the chips, hence making the iPod bigger because it had firewire in it.

that is as of what i know, i know that removing firewire did make it smaller somewhat
Click to expand...

Your post said "firewire port." I was assuming you were talking about the rather large full-size 6-pin firewire port that was included on the 1G and 2G iPods. The port itself affected the size of the iPod.
 
I agree with other posters that it's lame on Apple's part to not even provide some sort of support for Firewire (the port they so highly touted just a few years ago.) USB 2.0 seems far slower than Firewire for transfers to an iPod in my opinion. I have a 2G iPod (Firewire) and a USB 2.0 iPod Shuffle and it takes at least 2x as long to transfer a song to the Shuffle than the regular iPod connected via a FireWire cable. :(
 
Billicus said:
I agree with other posters that it's lame on Apple's part to not even provide some sort of support for Firewire (the port they so highly touted just a few years ago.) USB 2.0 seems far slower than Firewire for transfers to an iPod in my opinion. I have a 2G iPod (Firewire) and a USB 2.0 iPod Shuffle and it takes at least 2x as long to transfer a song to the Shuffle than the regular iPod connected via a FireWire cable. :(
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The shuffle isn't really indicative of iPod write speeds. Flash memory vs. hard drives creates a totally new dimension in transfers. Apple still supports Firewire for mass storage and audio equipment and the like, but USB makes more sense from a market perspective and also if you consider that the iPod is more of a peripheral than a mass storage device. With its high capacity, iPod crosses into Firewire's boat (because when it was designed, USB 2.0 hadn't caught on and no Macs supported it) because of its clear superiority over USB 1.1. Its capacity also makes it a very good mass storage device for many users, but that's not the primary function.

Had the iPod been delayed just one year and released as Mac + Windows, it probably would have been USB 2.0 the entire time.
 
I love FireWire and I hate to see Apple drop support for it. Synching thousands of songs onto the new iPod would not be fun with USB 2.0. But hey, look at this way: you're only going to transfer thousands of songs one time... maybe two if you format it and start over. So after that it's not a big deal, as you'll be adding a couple CDs max at a time.
 
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