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Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly responds to Mac user’s outrage over new MacBook’s missing FireWire

Friday, October 17, 2008 · 12:02 pm · 87 Comments

“In one of his characteristically terse email replies, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has reportedly told one Mac user that changes in video camera technology have reduced the need for FireWire on his company’s 13-inch MacBooks,” Prince McLean reports for AppleInsider.

“The one-line response to a fan complaining over the lack of FireWire on the new entry level aluminum MacBooks is blunt but also points out that technology has changed since the company began including FireWire with Macs in 1999,” McLean reports.

“‘Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2,’ Jobs supposedly wrote in an email, a copy of which was posted to the popular Flickr image sharing website,” McLean reports.

Much more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "pogo" for the heads up.]

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87 Comments

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Steve Jobs and control

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 4:11 pm · Reply

Steve Jobs has never liked users to have any kind of control over Apple products or have any kind of expandability. Read folklore.org about the early days of the Mac. Look at the cases of early Macs.
Jim - TIV

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 4:39 pm · Reply

this whole discussion reminds me of the imovie HD/imovie 08 debate.
fenman

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 4:41 pm · Reply

try running your firewire via ethernet with this adapter or something like it.

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=205852397&SearchEngine=DealTime&SearchTerm=205852397&Type=PE&Category=Comp&Gad=0&dcaid=15891
Gabe

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 5:09 pm · Reply

I’m not as outraged as you all. I don’t see the use of Firewire. Firewire gave us the fastest data transfer it could get and USB improves itself as well. It’s time to move on.
Dialtone

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 5:12 pm · Reply

FW400 is good stuff and FW800 is even better. But here’s how I look at it:

* Pros should invest in pro gear. Moving seriously large image and audio files requires FW800 anyway. The MacBook is intended for highly-mobile people (students, small biz, etc.) on a lean budget. It’s semi-pro. And most semi-pro A/V gear uses USB now.

* There are millions of FW-equipped older machines in circulation, any of which would work fine as a workstation for offloading big audio and video files, backing up FW drives, etc.
tt

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 6:22 pm · Reply

Looks like I’ll be waiting for USB3 till I buy my macbook
bioness

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 7:08 pm · Reply

Had a look at the gmail…

If you’re going to write an email to a CEO, and use another product over apple…. you’re really shooting yourself in the foot in expecting a full explanation.
He’s not really an apple fan… firewire on a dell or sony, doesn’t support Target Disk mode…
TheConfuzed1

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 8:14 pm · Reply

Apple should develop their own USB 2.0 HD video camera, and bundle it free with every Mac.
TTB

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 8:40 pm · Reply

What about the outrage over the loss of the matte screen on the MacBook Pro — following the loss of the matte screen of the iMac about a year earlier.

About 40% of people prefer matte, so technically speaking, Steve Jobs is correct when he says that the majority (60%) prefer glossy, but c’mon, 40% is a lot of the rest of us. And wasn’t the Mac meant to be the computer for the rest of us.

Steve (the money maker) knows that that 40% mostly will keep buying Macs, so he’s not going to lose much money — and in fact make more by streamlining his inventory to make them all gloss. But surely, somewhere in the equation, there should be something called “meeting the needs of his customers” who pay him money.

Please bring back the matte screen on the MBP and iMac.
TTB

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 8:43 pm · Reply

p/s I subscribe to RSS feeds of many Mac websites, and there are several articles about the loss of the FireWire. Please, Mac press, get out some articles on the loss of the matte screen. It matters.

Look at the macpolls.com archive poll. 40% of people prefer matte MBP’s.
mAc-warrior

Friday, October 17, 2008 - 11:33 pm · Reply

All this bitching is starting to get on my nerves.

Three years ago I bought two Firewire-only LaCie external drives. 80GB and 160GB. One for editing the video from my MiniDV Firewire-only camcorder, and one for backing up my iMac G4. You could say that I am fairly heavily invested in Firewire, for an ordinary consumer customer.

I’m also in the market for a new notebook.

Am I complaining that Apple ditched Firewire in this post? NO. Instead, I’m complaining that everyone else in the known world seems to be complaining. News for you guys:

a) Apple knows what people want, before they want it. They always have (under Steve) and hopefully they always will in the future. This is the knack that they have that very, very, very few other companies have. I’m sure they considered every combination of ports on this machine that you can imagine, and I’m sure that they have very good reasons for the ones they chose. The world is not going to end, and contrary to your predictions, Macbook sales will continue to rise. 99% of the people in the world do NOT possess the same view as you.

b) Your Firewire cameras will still work on the machines that you had purchased them originally to work on. Use them on THOSE machines if you don’t want the new Macbook. Hell, use the cameras on those machines even if you do buy the Macbook. Transfer the footage via gig-E if you have to, it’s pretty fast. Whatever. The point is, your tech will not work with everything forever. However, there are numerous options available to you:

1) Buy the Macbook and use your camera with the old machine.
2) Spend a couple hundred bucks extra and buy the Macbook Pro.
3) Buy a new camera.
4) Throw your camera out the window in frustration, then buy a new camera.
5) Buy a Windows laptop.

I could care less what you do. Go back to Windows if you want. God only knows nobody here would miss you because you probably came from there in the first place, a few years ago. Like somebody else said somewhere, any lifelong Mac user would appreciate that sometimes Apple has to make compromises to push technology forward. See: Abandonment of Serial ports, abandonment of floppy drives (twice), USB 1.0, Firewire, WiFi, DVD, Intel, PowerPC (from 680×0) OS X, etc., etc., etc. Just stop bitching in threads that have no relevance to your obsession with Firewire. Notice I’ve posted this in a relevant thread. I don’t need to read your garbage in a thread about DisplayPort.

Myself? I am buying a Macbook Pro. I was going to buy a Macbook Pro before the update, and I’m still going to buy one now. But I’m not buying it for the Firewire, I’m buying it for the graphics.

/rant.

–mAc
since1985

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 12:32 am · Reply

@MPC Guy

in response to me writing:
> Besides, as a pro, I would never run Final Cut on a MacBook anyway.

MPC Guy wrote:
> Oh get over yourself! Many pros use whatever gear they have available.

MPC Guy, the MacBook has never met the minimum requirements for Final Cut Pro/Studio and therefore NOT SUPPORTED BY APPLE, as described in Final Cut Studio’s MINIMUM HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

“An AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card (Final Cut Studio is not compatible with integrated Intel graphics processors).”

MPC Guy, the MacBook is a CONSUMER LAPTOP. So, get over it!
MPC Guy

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 3:34 am · Reply

>since 1985 wrote: MPC Guy, the MacBook is a CONSUMER LAPTOP. So, get over it!

Tell that to all the pros who use it dumbass.

You’re obviously very full of yourself and bend-overy. It works for you, fine. Not everyone is quite so willing to smile, take it, and ask for more.
qwerty

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 11:57 am · Reply

@MacBill:

S.Jobs does not read all his email from his public address. He has a staff that sifts through it and occasionally forwards based on circumstances.
since1985

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:23 pm · Reply

MPC Guy, you still don’t get the point.

The MacBook does not meet the hardware requirements for Final Cut Studio. APPLE DOES NOT SUPPORT IT. It was never intended to run Final Cut, the MacBook Pro was. You may be able to do light editing on a MacBook, but Motion and Color will run horribly.

The MacBook sports an integrated video processor which doesn’t support floating point processing, so performance is ‘degraded’ on a MacBook.

So what sense does it make to spend $1299 for Final Cut Studio and not be able to run half the software because you’re running it on unsupported hardware?

Of course, it’s your choice to run Final Cut Studio on any unsupported Mac you can get it to run on, but then it’s like buying a Psystar computer so you can get it for cheap and then complaining when the next OS X update bricks it.

You’re faulting Apple for removing FireWire from a consumer laptop because now you can’t run Final Cut on the new MacBooks, when the MacBook was never designed nor supported to run Final Cut Studio anyway.

Unfortunately, your only argument is name-calling and personal attacks. Now that’s professional.
uncle mac

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:29 pm · Reply

I’m not a pro and at best I’m a prosumer and I choose FireWire devices & accessories for my Macs when possible. To satisfy most people Apple should consider a MacBook Pro 13.3″ or there about form factor & include FW800. I’m sure there’s lots of Pros that need that smaller form factor & from what little I know musicians & video editors love the old 12″ Powerbooks. Maybe in January we’ll see the new 17″ MBP & a 11-14″ MBP w/FW800.
OMG

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:30 pm · Reply

“He has a staff that sifts through it”

OMG Steve has Aides. No wonder he’s getting so skinny.
Lossy Transfer

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:47 pm · Reply

What people don’t get here:

Streaming video over FireWire to your Computer and capturing it is much slower and more likely to result in dropped frames.

Recording it digitally within the camera and uploading the resultant digital file via USB or FireWire at many times real time will always result in a precise copy of what the camera has. There is NO NEED for isochronous data transfer to get a perfect copy.

As I just noted. that is NOT true with FireWire capture. Firewire through poor partitioning of where the real response is required places very strict timing constraints on both the PC and the camera rather than containing those requirements within the camera.

The only problem then occurs if your camera drops frames as it’s recording them to the media. And that would happen even if you used Fw400 USB or Fw3200 to upload the file. The answer for that is not to bring back FireWire but to buy a better camera.
MacRaven

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 3:06 pm · Reply

If you are that much of a “pro” or heavy duty user, you would be using a MacBook Pro anyway, which still has the Firewire port, wouldn’t you?
doc

Sunday, October 19, 2008 - 12:31 am · Reply

First !!! POST!!!