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Steve Jobs on Lack of Firewire in MacBooks

Belly-laughs said:
You were talking about DV models, though ;)

You are right, the FireWire ports were introduced on the DV/SE models in 1999 and are present till this day. But I hear they are being downgraded in December.
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Oh. I guess I need to read my own posts better. Well, I'm a jackass. :)


Yeah, I'll be really pissed if Apple removes FireWire from their desktop machines. :mad:
 
Just bought a daughter a MacBook today to replace her crashed Compaq. We wanted the new aluminum model and we would have gotten one of them if they had a firewire port or at least the ability to boot from a clone of the internal hard disk on an external USB drive. Since the new models lacked *both*, we when with the white MacBook.
 
cdp3 said:
Just bought a daughter a MacBook today to replace her crashed Compaq. We wanted the new aluminum model and we would have gotten one of them if they had a firewire port or at least the ability to boot from a clone of the internal hard disk on an external USB drive. Since the new models lacked *both*, we when with the white MacBook.
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Who told you the aluminum Macbooks can't boot from USB? It doesn't sound right.
 
Evangelion said:
Where would Apple add it [FW400]? Next to the other ports? That woule mean making the battery smaller. Would you accept less battery-life in exchange of FW?
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lol, hell yes. Even if this were true and there wasn't room for FireWire (which there is), you can BUY a second battery and throw it in your lappy bag to double the capacity. You cannot in any way, shape or form buy anything to make up for no FireWire on the MacBook.

A more relevant discussion. If Apple have gimped FireWire by installing a substandard chip in the MBP, would a belkin 2xFW400 + 1xUSB 2.0 ExpressCard have better reliability?
 
iEdd said:
lol, hell yes. Even if this were true and there wasn't room for FireWire (which there is), you can BUY a second battery and throw it in your lappy bag to double the capacity. You cannot in any way, shape or form buy anything to make up for no FireWire on the MacBook.

A more relevant discussion. If Apple have gimped FireWire by installing a substandard chip in the MBP, would a belkin 2xFW400 + 1xUSB 2.0 ExpressCard have better reliability?
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Yes. Make sure the firewire chip is Texas Instruments (TI) though.

My 2006 Macbook has an Agere (Lucent) chip. It kinda worked with a MOTU Ultralite but there were many audio glitches at 96 kHz and it would go off after a minute when both phantom powers were on.
 
There's room enough on the Macbook for a Firewire 400 Port.


Why the hell did Apple think it was a great idea to put the battery indicator lights (BIL) on the side? - A BIL SHOULD be on the battery, not the side.
 
clockworkorange said:
Why the hell did Apple think it was a great idea to put the battery indicator lights (BIL) on the side? - A BIL SHOULD be on the battery, not the side.
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Yeah, that didn't make much sense to me either. :confused:

Edit: Actually, isn't the battery itself enclosed in the machine now?
 
clockworkorange said:
There's room enough on the Macbook for a Firewire 400 Port.
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From the disassembly pics not so much. To get a FW port, it would need another redesign.

Why the hell did Apple think it was a great idea to put the battery indicator lights (BIL) on the side? - A BIL SHOULD be on the battery, not the side.
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That is actually a pretty good idea. You can see how much battery you have left without having to pickup the laptop.
 
Who knows? I'm still confused about this whole thing, it's the most negative response to anything Apple of recent years.
 
Adamo said:
Who knows? I'm still confused about this whole thing, it's the most negative response to anything Apple of recent years.
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Most negative, every single Apple keynote has reactions like this, where you here after they introduced the Macbook Air and people said Apple was arrogant and would go down because of that, it was even worse than this, just shows how some people deal with change.
 
Adjei said:
Most negative, every single Apple keynote has reactions like this, where you here after they introduced the Macbook Air and people said Apple was arrogant and would go down because of that, it was even worse than this, just shows how some people deal with change.
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I thought about that several times this last week, that maybe it seemed as if this was the worst blunder in the past few years. But, I generally don't follow negative reactions unless Apple does something that affects me. I don't follow any iPhone reactions because I'm sick to damn death of hearing about the iPhone. I hear some of the complaints, but not all of them.

This boneheaded move from Apple seems different somehow. It could very well be because I am affected, but it feels as if Apple is slapping many Mac users upside the face with a dead trout.
 
Adamo said:
Who knows? I'm still confused about this whole thing, it's the most negative response to anything Apple of recent years.
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Has there ever been a petition with several thousand names and threads with 1000+ replies in response before? This seems like a bigger deal, not the usual blowback from design changes.
 
synth3tik said:
Steve is CEO, not VP of product development. He may protest an idea, but he is not the designer or engineer. He never was.

If we had Woz, he would have left FW400 on the MB.
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Ok perhaps, but I guarantee you Steve makes his neurotic call on a lot of those issues be they design/engineering & product related or not. And I would venture to say that he made the call on FireWire.
 
Bubba Scruggs said:
Has there ever been a petition with several thousand names and threads with 1000+ replies in response before? This seems like a bigger deal, not the usual blowback from design changes.
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Yes, adjei is being his usual apologetic self on behalf of Apple – the Corporation that can do no evil and is destined to become the saviour of us all.
 
To the audio folks who have been contributing to the discussion:

Do we have a list of which Macs have the TI Firewire and which have the Agere chips? I was looking into getting a small audio controller but I want to make sure I get a Mac that won't have any problems with it.

(To think that we have to ask such questions now! I want the 'it just works' Apple back!):p
 
corinhorn said:
... This boneheaded move from Apple seems different somehow. It could very well be because I am affected, but it feels as if Apple is slapping many Mac users upside the face with a dead trout.
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When a company does something the affects people who rely on their Macs to make a living (in whole or part) and they affect hobbyists who have invested heavy in equipment then that company should expect a reaction. It's not something akin to a $15 floppy drive being dropped.

Apple had previously created problems in the audio world when they started using (cheap) Firewire chipset instead of the (proven) TI chipset. This effected the MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and the iMacs. Apple never addressed that issue publicly that I remember, which left potential buyers with a very bad taste in their mouth.

Apparently, few journalist or bloggers in the Mac world ever understood the Lucent Firewire chipset blunder and unless you were seriously into digital audio you never heard about it. I don't remember seeing a thread at MacRumors for example, but you found them at nearly every music or audio forum.

Apple just seems out of touch on the whole subject...
 
dolphin842 said:
To the audio folks who have been contributing to the discussion:

Do we have a list of which Macs have the TI Firewire and which have the Agere chips? I was looking into getting a small audio controller but I want to make sure I get a Mac that won't have any problems with it.

(To think that we have to ask such questions now! I want the 'it just works' Apple back!):p
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Well, if you have an Apple store nearby, you can follow the (user supplied) advice from the Apple forums about this problem:

go to the apple store, restart one of the computers holding down command s
half way down the page it will say firewire
if it is followed by TI - it is texas instruments.

type exit, than restart

Otherwise, there is apparently no way to know for sure. Reports by users at various forums seem to indicate that some Macs had the TI chip, while other didn't, both the haves and the have-nots were from a common time frame of manufacture. Apple never publicly provided any info on exactly what production runs or what manufacturing dates had the Lucent chips. So no one could say for certain what Macs to avoid and what Macs worked. It affected MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and iMacs.

The nearest Apple store is about 4 hours away from me; the closest reseller about 2 hours. And I'm not willing to play Apple's "lottery" by buying online, etc.
 
Thanks for the how-to... sadly there's only a mini-store in a Best Buy where I live... I don't know if I'd be able to reboot it. I will take a look at my system though just to see what's inside.

If as you say there wasn't any consistency with which chip was put in, even with the same production timeframe, then it's kind of fruitless to check out demo machines when what I'd get could be different... ah well.
 
corinhorn said:
I know, some people seem to think that FireWire and USB are the same thing only with a different connector. They don't seem to understand that they are completely different protocols. :) Oh well.

That is compressed content, not DV.



No, DV cameras are uncompressed and are tapes. Hard drive based cameras compress their content.

Edit: I realize that HD based cameras are fine, but I have a FireWire DV camcorder. I'm simply torked that the new MB is not compatible with my camera.
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Again, who said anything about compression. I am asking why there isn't a camera out there which has a hard disk and stores the video in an uncompressed format. Why the hell you went off on and talked about compress, I don't know. I was asking a question why something hadn't been made yet.
 
kaiwai said:
Again, who said anything about compression. I am asking why there isn't a camera out there which has a hard disk and stores the video in an uncompressed format. Why the hell you went off on and talked about compress, I don't know. I was asking a question why something hadn't been made yet.
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To do that they would have to digitize the video in different codecs and for both Windows (avi) and Mac (Quicktime). Plus, I'm not sure that it could keep up. And, it would take the price of the camera out of the consumer price range and put it into the prosumer price range. And prosumers wouldn't be interested in that type of camera because it would still have cheap optics and cheap ccd or cmos chips.
 
kaiwai said:
Again, who said anything about compression. I am asking why there isn't a camera out there which has a hard disk and stores the video in an uncompressed format. Why the hell you went off on and talked about compress, I don't know. I was asking a question why something hadn't been made yet.
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Sorry if I misunderstood you. You told me to get with the program and stop using tape based cameras. I poorly attempted to explain that hard drive cameras compress their data while tape based cameras do not, which is why I prefer tape based cameras and why they are preferred by others. I didn't understand that you were asking me why there were not any hard drive based cameras that do not compress. Sorry again.

Anyway, editguy explained it pretty well.
 
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