On FireWire
The future of the IEEE 1394 (FireWire 400) link is apparently coming under a lot of speculation, as this article at MacMod alludes. Certainly, the rapid expansion of the USB 2.0 empire has been seriously cutting into FireWire's cake, and for consumer peripherals like portable music players, digital camera card readers and the like, FireWire no longer has any visible presence. The current line of iPods no longer support FireWire, even.
USB 2.0 is ubiquitous - being an Intel thing - especially on PCs, so the lack of FireWire devices would hardly matter to many. For those of us with older Apple computers (which seem to stay capable for longer than equivalent specced PCs), it's either FireWire or USB 1, which is painfully slow for anything except perhaps a printer and user input devices. For digital photography work I use a Lexar FireWire CF card reader, which was hard to track down and quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent USB 2.0 device, and my iPod is early generation and uses a direct FireWire connection.
It seems that a safe haunt for FireWire for some time will be the audio-visual production scene. DV cameras use it under some guise for data transfer, and for mobile recording with a laptop it's the only way to go if you want to record more than two channels at a time.
FireWire was developed largely by Apple, and USB 1/USB 2 by Intel. With Apple's move to Intel chips, it will interesting to see how the future of FireWire 400 fares. It seems that in practice FireWire 400 and the much quicker FireWire 800 offer superior performance and versatility compared with the current offerings from the USB camp.
USB 2.0 is ubiquitous - being an Intel thing - especially on PCs, so the lack of FireWire devices would hardly matter to many. For those of us with older Apple computers (which seem to stay capable for longer than equivalent specced PCs), it's either FireWire or USB 1, which is painfully slow for anything except perhaps a printer and user input devices. For digital photography work I use a Lexar FireWire CF card reader, which was hard to track down and quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent USB 2.0 device, and my iPod is early generation and uses a direct FireWire connection.
It seems that a safe haunt for FireWire for some time will be the audio-visual production scene. DV cameras use it under some guise for data transfer, and for mobile recording with a laptop it's the only way to go if you want to record more than two channels at a time.
FireWire was developed largely by Apple, and USB 1/USB 2 by Intel. With Apple's move to Intel chips, it will interesting to see how the future of FireWire 400 fares. It seems that in practice FireWire 400 and the much quicker FireWire 800 offer superior performance and versatility compared with the current offerings from the USB camp.
posted by Alex Wegman at 03:12
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