I m struggling with Apple’s decision to begin walking away from the technology that helped put them back on the store shelves. Yes, I am talking about Firewire. When Apple introduced the new Al Macbook it looked really good until the connections were revealed.Not only did it not have eSata (not a surprise) but, it also lacked the universal, swiss army knife of connectivity - Firewire.

Why is this such a problem you may say. There are those very handy USB ports sitting there. Let me briefly describe why USB 1.0-2.x is not an equal to Firewire:

Hardware acceleration:
USB is CPU dependent for it’s transfers. It will utilize CPU cycles to help especially when the connection is not direct from host to peripheral. You can daisy-chain FW all day and no performance is lost.

Better physical connections:
The USB connection design is generally pretty poor. However, the real devil here is the “mini-usb” connection. It easily detaches from it’s host with even the slightest movement. As a mobile user, this is very vexing to me and has caused me data loss. The Firewire connection is solid. I would have to pull rather deliberately to disconnect it to the point that I lose connection with my notebook.

Power:
Firewire can direct power and data from the same connection much more reliably than USB. There have been times when I have managed to get a USB 2.5″ drive to power up from a single connection but, I had to align elements just right and not try to do anything very difficult on the computer or it would lose it’s connectivity. Firewire is a dream to use in terms of portability. I can connect a 2.5″ drive with no issue or performance hit. You can even connect multiple drives as there are FW enclosures that have two raided 2.5″ drives that power up from the single connection.

My petition to Apple is to stop and desist this pattern and move forward with Firewire that has been your steady companion through the good and bad. There are so many reason to continue with it despite the plaguing adoption of USB. The advancments in FW development have a great potential - can you say firewire via rj45? How about the slick new SMDI connection?. Legacy support is also an issue but, that is not the real loss when all is weighed. The great emptyness will be in what we are left with - a terrible excuse for real connectivity.