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What will I miss with out a fireiwre?

MacBH928

MacBH928

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 17, 2008
9,167
4,193
I am like many , confused by apple's decision
and started to think about getting the white book, but then I stopped when I heard that display is inferior.
Then I thought what am I missing with out a firewire?

I have firewire on a lamp imac, I love it for its speed and great use. I thought firewire was the future. Now apple is abandoning it, I do not know why it seemed so good. I thought USB 2.0 is better and faster than firewire, but I hear people complain its slower.

What am I exactly missing if I chose the laptop with no firewire. I am looking forward to do some video editing, watching media from an external hard drive, backups, and more...

So is this firewire really important in the first place?
 
I use firewire for my external hard drive. I would live without it though if I had to.
 
kingmohd84 said:
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I thought USB 2.0 is better and faster than firewire, but I hear people complain its slower.

What am I exactly missing if I chose the laptop with no firewire. I am looking forward to do some video editing, watching media from an external hard drive, backups, and more...

So is this firewire really important in the first place?
Click to expand...

First off as NewMacbookPlz noted above while USB's specified transfer rates are a little higher than FW 400 in real world terms USB never comes close to its ideal rating. Neither does FW 400 for that matter, but it comes far closer to its rated transfer rate than USB due to the methods used and in the end can transfer data far more quickly than USB 2.0.

Your comment about video editing is the thing you should be most concerned about with no FW port. While there are some camcorders out there that can transfer footage over USB, the majority do not so you need to be extra careful if you are dealing with a Mac with no FireWire. Don't be confused by the fact that many camcorders come with both FW and USB ports on them-- the inclusion of both types is very misleading as most of them can only transfer video footage via FW and the USB connection is reserved for transferring still shots stored on the camcorder only.
 
i barely see firewire devices around. i have a unibody macbook (in my signature) and have not wanted to use the firewire once. even for things like firewire target disk mode... say hello to a thing called an ethernet cable :) ha

anyways.. you will still see some things with firewire. especially with some older camcorders and such.

USB 2.0 is fine... sometimes it is Sub Par... but IMHO i think you will be ok
 
USB also has the drawback that it sucks some CPU power, whereas FireWire doesn't. Not a big deal with todays hardware I'm sure.

FireWire is very common in audio recording gear. All the better audio interfaces are either PCI, PCI-E or FireWire. This will probably change as USB3 comes out but there'll still be tons of FW400 and FW800 devices in use. One of the reasons why I don't have a Macbook yet is because of the lack of FW and also the display's poor quality. The MBP on the other hand is too expensive and above all too big for my needs.

The display on the whitebook vs unibody is mainly just a lot dimmer so it won't be very visible in bright light. The unibody panel has the same ****** viewing angles and obviously the 6-bit colors plagueing nearly all laptops at the moment. Hopefully when the next Macbook iteration is released LG or Samsung is making either S-PVA or H-IPS laptop screens. E-IPS (upcoming cheaper version of H-IPS) would be a good candidate as well.
 
Should I worry about using external hard drives and watching videos off them using USB?
 
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