But it definitely became a niche product, with even Apple eventually dropping the port from its MacBooks.Īlso question is, is FireWire still used?įirewire is still used by musicians. It's still in use in many high-end setups, and you can still buy Firewire drives today. Ask your favorite techno-wizard.Firewire didn't die. (Such important little conversion fixtures are commonly called dongles. However, the ports aren’t physically exactly the same, so you’ll need a plastic port converter to connect FireWire 400 devices to a FireWire 800 port. Oh, and as you would expect from Apple, the new ports will be backward-compatible with older FireWire hardware. These ports appear on most of the top-of-the-line Apple desktop and laptop models at the time of this writing. That, dear reader, oughta be fast enough for both you and your loved ones.
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However, FireWire isn’t finished evolving yet - the cleverly named IEEE 1394 B (called FireWire 800 by anyone with any sense, including the folks at Apple) delivers a whopping 800 Mbps.
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(Apologies to owners of DV camcorders, but those things eat power like a pig eats slop.) ♦ Power through the port: FireWire can provide power to a device through the same wire - typically, enough power is available for an external drive or recorder - so you don’t need an external AC power cord for some FireWire devices. Instead, the FireWire peripheral is automatically recognized (as long as the operating system has the correct driver) and ready to transfer.
MACBOOK PRO FIREWIRE 800 EXTERNAL DRIVE MAC OS X
♦ Hot-swapped: You don’t have to reboot your Macbook Pro or restart Mac OS X every time that you plug (or unplug) a FireWire device. This is pretty neat when you think about it for example, you can control your mini-DV camcorder from the comfort of your computer keyboard, just as though you were pressing the buttons on the camcorder. ♦ Control over connection: This is a ten-cent term that engineers use, meaning that you can control whatever gadget you’ve connected using FireWire from your laptop. Here are three other important benefits to FireWire: Ouch! Not too hard to figure that one out. Transfer Speeds for Ports through the Ages
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Check out the relative speeds of the different types of ports in Table 3-1, and you’ll see a big attraction of FireWire and USB 2.0 connections. DV buffs commonly transfer several hundred megabytes of footage to their computers at one time. ♦ External hard drives and CD/DVD recordersįor example, consider the sheer size of a typical digital video clip captured by one of today’s mini-DV camcorders. The following list includes a number of hardware toys that are well known for transferring prodigious file sizes: The original FireWire 400 port delivers 400 Mbps (megabits per second), which is fast enough for all sorts of peripherals to communicate with your Macbook. As countless racing fans will tell you, it’s all about the speed, my friend. (Its official name is IEEE 1394, but even the Cupertino crew doesn’t call it that - at least not very often.)įirst things first. So what’s so special about FireWire, anyway? Why does Apple stuff at least one FireWire port in almost all of its current Macintosh models? (The MacBook Air is an exception.) Heck, even the iPod (Apple’s MP3 player, which you can read more about in Topic III, topic 2) originally used only a FireWire connection.