I heard Mac is gonna drop firewire?!?!?

[chucks]

Don‘t forget the new card slot on the Mac Book Pro! It seems to be PCI Express and there is already a FW card from LaCie.
I love FireWire

Where did you see this? I haven't been able to find any ExpressCard/34 products yet.

[Rock]

About a week or two ago I saw a FW800 interface announced on the Motu site. Was I just seeing things?
Perhaps the right hand did not know what the left was doing here when Apple came out with the MacBook Pro w/o FW800.
I hope that the PCI Express interface will support a variety of port configurations down the road.
Anybody know anything about this FW800 Motu deal?
Thanks~

[bobf]

In my little Panasonic P2 video camera broadcast world, USB 2.0 (rated at 480) is for hard drives (4 times real time MXF video data transfer) and FW 400 is for bringing in video in real time from non-P2 sorces (like a DV camera playing back tape). In my little DP Mac world, USB 2.0 is for my iPod shuffle and FW 400 is for all of my external drives. I hope USB 2.0 and FW 400 will be around for awhile, 'cause the PC's and Macs I use need them both! I've been told (yes, it's hearsay) that a FW drive will make a PC choke up, so that's why a USB 2.0 drive (or is some cases simply a USB 2.0 instead of a FW cable) is the current storage solution for the PC world.

[Frodo]

Since the brand new MacBook Pro has a firewire port, and since the new Intel iMac maintained its two firewire ports, I don't see any reason to believe that Apple is on the verge of phasing it out. 2 years down the road....maybe who knows, but I doubt you'll see it happen in 2006.

I doubt it will happen this year, either. But early 2007 could clearly usher in a major change in technological climate. (We have yet to hear about the early summer announcements in any case...)

The current models had to include some FW support, otherwise users who need Macs now wouldn't buy them as eagerly if it meant not being able to use their current FW peripherals. It seems to fall into Apple's "transitional" pattern of gradual phasing out one thing and phasing in something new.

Then again, Apple has made some not-so-sudden switches, such as exclusive monitor and peripheral connectivity in favor of USB, which sent most of us kicking and screaming to buy adapters that didn't work and eventually to replace printers, scanners, etc., when drivers for these peripherals were not being supported in OSX. It was a wise move overall, but the short term fiinancial outlay of getting into a new Mac a few years ago was painful.

There are no definitive answers yet how gradual this transition will be. That FW hub cards are still being made only shows that there is continued *compatibility*, but not that Apple will continue including these up-to-so-recently-new ports, except through third-party manufacturers. It could be a temporary issue with the early Intels and latter-day PPCs, or it could be a major sign that at least one of the FW formats is slowly becoming a legacy product.

At one time, there was the argument justifying Macs being more expensive than PC's because of what Apple delivered with its systems as standard. Now, the climate has changed somewhat in that current Mac users will have much to consider when purchasing their next computers: there will be lots of essential external hardware upgrades and replacements such as PCI cards, external hard drives, etc. We've already seen a small bump with G5 slots changing voltage from G4's, which forced users to upgrade their card$. AGP 8X Graphics technology is already being called "long-in-the-tooth", and PCI Express 16x graphic cards are getting a lot of attention right now in PC world.

It's hard to say, but that Apple is playing roulette at all with any of this makes for quite a cliffhanger.

[quincyg]

i think it's the other way around. they will most likely drop fw800. there have been major problems with fw800 always. fw400 is the stable one for them. usb 2.0 does not really handle sustained data as well as fw400.
my imac g5 is usb 2.0 and fw400 only.