“After running in the middle of the pack with several other transmission schemes for a decade, 1394 is poised to break out this year. The high-speed technology is about to take its place tying together the pieces in the home theater’s move from analog to digital TV. In addition, the technology–also called FireWire and i-Link–is beginning to show up in surprising ways in enterprise applications,” W. David Gardner reports for TechWeb News.
“‘The really interesting stuff-wireless–is coming later this year,’ said 1394 Trade Association (TA) executive director James Snider in an interview. ‘We’ve already showed that 1394 wireless can go through walls with no degradation of the signal.’ Snider said more than 1300 separate products now include 1394, ranging from HDD drives and set-top boxes to televisions and DVDs,” Gardner reports.
“The technology has had to hurdle several obstacles along the way. It has beat off competitive threats from DVI, Ethernet, and USB. Hollywood interests, too, tied up the technology for years, as the film industry worried 1394’s capability of producing perfect copies of films would cut into profits. The result is a regulation that permits users of devices with 1394 technology to copy material for personal use,” Gardner reports.
“‘FireWire will be in virtually every high-end computer–in workstations and, particularly, in Apple machines,’ Snider said… He noted that Apple is putting the technology in its computers to beef-up its traditional emphasis on graphics and video. In fact, Apple pioneered the 1394 technology, which it called FireWire. Snider said the FireWire moniker might, in fact, replace the 1394 title as the technology becomes more widespread,” Gardner reports.
Full article here.
Cool! I don’t know why Mac did the interim USB technology anyway.
Well it’s got to be better than those 5hitty SCART connectors, but I’d like the designed with a catch, so that they stay in place better. (So you have to squeeze it to pull the cable out. Maybe not like ethernet, but like ADC, which seem less obtrisuve.
Having said that, I’ve never had a firewire cable fall out, so maybe I’m trying to solve a problem that I only think exists.
Apple will drag them kicking and screaming to the future in spite of themselves.
USB has its place, Jack A. USB 1.1 is fine for mice and keyboards, for example. Even printers and scanners can use USB 1.1, although they are relatively slow. Besides, Apple had to support USB in order to give its users access to low-cost peripherals and devices such as digital still cameras (video cameras sport FireWire, but not still cameras).
You might have a better case against USB 2.0. However, I would still argue the Apple is better off supporting USB 2.0 than not. For instance, my USB 2.0 memory stick was flaky on older USB 1.1 ports (PC or Mac), but works fine on a G5 PowerMac. Eventually USB may disappear, but don’t hold your breath. It took a long time for Mac ADB or PC parallel/serial ports to fade away.
You know, it’s fine that one says ‘firewire is the future,’ and I’m all for it, but I want to buy devices that take adavantage of it. My scanner (and most)is USB 2.0, so is my digital camera. I have no need of portable storage, either. I’d love to ‘adopt this technology’ but there are no devices for me to adopt with.
Yep there’s place for USB1.1. It’s a perfectly good technololgy for low speed/low bandwidth devices.
That USB2.0 is failing to displace Firewire is encouraging. It’s the use in DV cameras that has propelled it as an accepted standard. Fortunately Apple got there first and the camcorder manufacturers picked it up as the best technology available at the time.
I do wonder if there’s a possibility of Apple licensing the iPod interface/OS to third parties. This is what Microsoft are looking to do with their rucksack sized ‘ipod killer’. If Apple could do that, mainly a music player, but get quicktime in there too, they might be able to beat M$ at their own game.
Not saying that’s what they SHOULD do, it’s just an idea.
“It’s the use in DV cameras that has propelled it as an accepted standard. Fortunately Apple got there first and the camcorder manufacturers picked it up as the best technology available at the time.”
It is my understanding that DV cameras use firewire because it is superior to USB 2.0 in sustained download times as required by DV, not because they picked it up first. While USB 2.0 is rated faster on paper, it is a “bursty” technology and over long downloads it can’t come near sustaining its stated transfer speed. Benchmakrs would confirm this.
Maybe I misunderstood your meaning.
King Mel:
While I applaud your optimism, I have to ask “Can you say ‘Intel’?” USB=Intel, and they are not going to roll over and die.
You can see the evidence of this in USB peripherals coming out, even thought it is a clearly inferior technology to FireWire. For example, Edirol has just released an audio interface to allow recording to a computer hard drive. USB 2. There are lots of external hard drives that are USB 2 only. These exist, even though for sustained throughput, plain ol’ FireWire 400 easily beats USB 2.
I am not saying that FireWire will “lose”. But USB 2 will be around for a long time.
As for serial/parallel ports fading away, I have noticed no such trend. Every non-Mac that I see has ’em, or, on small laptops, adds them with the port replicator gizmo. We sure would hate to obsolete anything, after all.
Mike
PS Standard Apology: Please forgive spelling errors. No system wide spelling checker on this Dell POS at work.
Wireless FireWire?
Tell me more!
Does anyone know of a link that discusses this in terms a dummy such as I can understand?
What then of WiFi and Bluetooth?
Mike
Speaking of faster technology, some smart guys at NC University came up with a faster TCP/IP, a whopping 6,000 times faster than broadband.
It’s expected to be implemented within a year!
This is no BS either.
Read it here
w00t, hang on to those 56k modems folks!
Cure disease small application from Stanford University. 100% secure. Very easy.
Actually FW 400 is supposedly faster than USB 2.0. I have nothing to back that up, but I remember hearing that quite a few times when USB 2.0 tests first came out.
FW800 blows everything out of the water!
USB will go away as soon as Apple stops using it their computers. Anybody still remember floppy discs?
Wireless FireWire, huh? Does that mean we just call it Fire?
“Wireless FireWire? […] What then of WiFi and Bluetooth?”
There’s some overlap, sure.
Wireless FireWire, I’d imagine, would be used in environments where you have devices which are physically seperated.
Fun personal example: I have a DVR with Firewire ports. It sits on one end of
my living room. I have a computer with Firewire. It sits on the other end of my living room. I’d love to hook one up to the other, but (a) I don’t want to run a wire the length of my living room and (b) I think it’s too long for Firewire anyway (though maybe not). I’d love Wireless Firewire for something like that.
I don’t need the whole “Internet Setup” hassle of WiFi. BlueTooth would be good, but there is an issue of range and speed–namely, that BlueTooth is too slow and I’m not sure it has the range to get clear across the room.
Both of these could be updated, sure. But it’s one of those “why bother” cases. For example, Apple could have developed ADB 2 to compete with USB, but why bother.
Jump – No. USB2.0 isn’t used because it wasn’t around at the time these interfaces were around. USB1.1 wasn’t used because it’s not fast enough. But even if it had been, it’s unlikely to have been picked becuase it’s not standalone in the same way that firewire is. Two cameras with firewire can speak to each other without an intermediary computer. With USB, that’s more difficult because it’s not what it was designed to do.
Had USB2.0 been around first, despite it being less appropriate, it may well have become the standard anyway.
That’s not to say it was entirely lucky on Apple’s part, because they made a superior protocol happen despite there not being any real competition at the time.
Despite Intel backing USB, facts are facts. Firewire is faster over the long run.
USB2 is a burst technology, it RARELY gets to 480MBPS, it’s kind of a misnomer, personally, false advertising, but hey, the general public doesn’t know better.
Firewire is an amazing peripheral for scanners, dv cameras and etc, it’s just more efficient.
USB was a decent technology…for mice and stuff like that. It still is a good technology. USB 2.0(worst name ever) is a poor excuse for a protocol, and is made for all the cheap PC bastards out their who can’t part with an extra $20 for a better product. USB 2.0 tried to kill firewire in a price war, but consumers have changed. They want quality and the want the best product available, and that’s firewire.
Don’t forget that USB2.0 is a standard that isn’t just backwards compatible with USB1.1, but INCLUDES USB1.1.
Cleverly from a marketing standpoint, this means that as a USB1.1 device also complies with USB2.0, it can be labelled as USB2.0.
I’d call it FireWireless.
FireWire 400 is indeed faster than USB 2–even those USB 2 devices that aren’t just USB 1.1 with the name “2.”
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,848858,00.asp
And FireWire 800 I understand can be at least 4x as fast as FW400–with a fiber-optic adapter stuck on the port. So I’m told.
Not bad for a technology I first read about in MacWeek way back in 1989. (Apple’s other announcement at that time was a bus replacement for MIT/TI’s NuBus, called QuickRing.) Back then the initial speed of FireWire was only 50 Mbps. With standards now ranging up through 3.2 Gbps it sure has come a long way.
The biggest difference between FireWire and the rest of the croud is the lack of a requirement for a centralized controller. In theory you can hook two FireWire enabled camcorders together and play a tape in one and record it onto the other. (I say “in theory” because I don’t personally know anyone who has done it.) The other competing standards (especially USB) require a central controlling device (such as a computer) to direct traffic.
Apple either had a stroke of genius (or a lapse of business sense) when it specified that FireWire would not require a central computer (even a Mac) to run the show. While at the time of its introduction people wondered about that (and wondered about it again when the USB spec came out and Intel set it up so a computer [preferably an Intel based computer] would have to control the system) it seems as though not requiring a computer to control everything has worked out well for FireWire even if it is approaching 15 years old this summer!
To Jay:
Sorry to be an old fuddy duddy again, but I just went and looked at the brand new Dell we just got at the office, and what do you think is on the front? Yup. A floppy drive mouth.
This computer is even one of those smaller mini-tower designs that is as close as Dell can come to making an attractive computer like an iMac.
Apple seems to have some control over the colours used for computers (and many other things), but not the feature set. One example – Apple chose SCSI as an open standard faster, scaleable hard drive system. Although a few high performance PC’s used it (and still use it despite the existance of FireWire [see above]), most used EIDE. SCSI was better is a hundred ways, but the (cheap) EIDE won. In fact, my Mac uses EIDE.
As one very clever gentleman said earlier: “We sure would hate to obsolete anything, after all.”
Mike
http://www.arstechnica.com recently did a showdown between Firewire 400 and USB 2.0. On both PCs and Macs, Firewire was faster. More so on Macs, but they speculate that’s becuase Mac USB 2.0 drivers are relatively immature. But even on PCs Firewire is much faster.
I thought that was interesting, but not surprising. Firewire being a streaming protocol, and USB 2.0 being a packet protocol, it only makes sense that in the long run, Firewire would be faster.
Shadowself:
I have indeed hooked up two DV cameras with a FireWire and transferred from DVCAM format directly to my Canon MiniDV. Worked like a charm.
Bill
Firewire is better suited for video because of the sustained throughput, USB 2.0, as has been stated, works in bursts, but cannot sustain the same throughput. Also note that the power on the firewire bus is much higher. Thus you can charge your ipod from the computer with a FW connection, but a PC with a USB 2.0 connection has to have a connection to either a FW port or the adaptor to charge it.
USB 1.1 was perfect for peripherals like a computer mouse, keyboard and game controllers. Unfortunately it was also used for things like scanners and audio interfaces which would have benefited from the faster speeds of FireWire 400. If Intel licenced FW400 from Apple the same way that Apple licenced USB from them in the first place (and made the technology popular) today we would have a better selection of peripherals for our computers on both platforms.
Now what is all this talk about wireless FireWire? If this technology is as good as it sounds on paper then we can expect computer and audio-visual equipment to advance to the next level of performance. For example, cameramen could be out and about shooting footage in a riot and have the data streamed wirelessly to a recording device inside their car parked hundreds of meters away. If the camera is damaged the footage would be safely away from it.