I pit Apple Computer......

The BBQ Pit
1

Yes, you read that right, a Doper named MacTech is actually pitting Apple…

see, we’re not all mindless drones following the Word Of Steve™…

what specifically am i pitting? well, i call it the “Dumbing-Down of the iPod”

first up, a little history, when it was first introduced, the iPod (5 Gig first-gen model with a mechanical trackwheel) used FireWire to interface with the host Mac, and since it was also a FireWire hard drive, you could store files on it, as well as having a bootable system (9.2.x, but it would work) on it

second to fourth gen models all shared the FireWire connectivity/bootability, as did the first and second gen Minis , the Dock connector (Firewire and USB in a “universal” connector) was added on the third-gen and Mini

all iPods up to this point shipped with both a FireWire cable and USB cable

the third-gen iPod Minis, however, did not ship with a FW cable, but could still use one, and it was available as an accesory, fifth gen iPods (iPod Photo and 30 GB iPod) no longer shipped with FW cable

the iPod Nano introduced an unwelcome change, it was the first iPod that would not sync with FW, it was USB (USB 2.0 reccomended) only, it would charge off a FW cable, but not sync, but since it was A; a flash drive and not capable of storing a bootable system folder, and B; too small to hold one anyway, it wasn’t a big deal, just an annoyance

now Apple releases the sixth-gen iPod, color screen, even thinner, plays video as well as music, can store files as a mass-storage device, all good so far, EXCEPT…

it, like it’s more diminutive sibling, the Nano, can ONLY sync with frelling USB 2.0, which removes a rather major feature i used rather heavilly…the ability to BOOT OFF THE iPod (note, officially Apple discourages this use, but it can be done, and i’ve used that feature to save many a customer’s machine…), much like the Nano, the new vidPods can charge via FireWire, but gone are the days of fast, reliable syncing over FireWire, hello long, boring waits over USB 2.0

i really don’t know what Jobs was smoking when he decided “Hey, here’s a great idea, lets make our new iPods, which now support higher bandwidth video files, use a slower, less reliable interface to do it, maybe if we release the new vidPods in black as well as white, it’ll throw them off long enough to sneak the dumbing-down past them”

now i have even less reason to replace my “old” 40 GB 4G “Clickwheel” iPod, yes it would be nice to get a new color screened iPod, but i already have a Nano that’s quite nice thank you, and i’m not willing to give up FireWire connectivity to get a color screen, after all, i’d be losing a functional feature to gain a cosmetic one, rather stupid idea, that

c’mon Apple, get with the program, keep the FW functionality, sell the FW dock cable as an accesory if you must (i have 2 FW Dock cables so i’m all set for now), but DON’T remove a feature that’s been on the iPod since it’s creation, when you compare FW to USB 2.0 side-by-side, USB 2.0 has NO advantages over FireWire, the theoretical “higher speed” transfers of USB 2.0 are PEAK transfer rates, assuming there are no other devices connected, wheras FW’s bandwidth rates are guaranteed no matter how many devices are connected

FW advantages (FW 400)
40 MB/sec data transfer rate
Bootable
Guaranteed bandwidth no matter how many devices are connected
BOOTABLE
delivers up to 15 watts of power to external devices, pocket-drives only need a single FW cable to supply both power and data to the pocketdrive
can daisy chain up to 63 devices (okay, okay, USB 2.0 wins here, i’ll give it that)
oh, and did i mention, FireWire is BOOTABLE, don’t think i did…

USB 2.0 advantages
hmm…let me think…hmmm…
48 MB/sec (if it’s the ONLY device connected, any additional USB devices drop the speed dramatically)
supports up to 127 devices (and the speed drops with each device connected…)

2.0 Drawbacks…
NOT BOOTABLE!
supplies only 5.0 volts to external devices, not enough power to power an external “pocketdrive”
NOT BOOTABLE!

basically, i hate USB 2.0, they try to tout it as better than FireWire, which it isn’t, it only slightly exceeds the transfer rate of FW, and that’s only for burst/peak data transmissions

put FireWire compatibility BACK in the iPod, Apple!

2

Amen.

3

That’s putting me off the new ones too, plus the lack of a wired remote in-line with the headphone cord.

4

They have. It’s the “Make an assload of money with as little expense as possible” program. It seems to be working quite well for them.

5

My understanding is that ditching the Firewire unit is a big contribution to getting the smaller size. I guess the number of people with USB 2 access dwarfs the number of people with Firewire so dropping it saves them money and makes for a smaller, cuter, package.

It a shame about the loss of bootability but I would guess the number of people who used that feature was even smaller than the comparatively small number of firewire users. I can see what Apple’s thinking, anyway, although I might not like it.

And honestly, USB 2.0 does handle the file transfer and the charging things just fine. Most people use nothing but USB 2 with no problems, after all.

6

I believe the new iPods will still work with Firewire; Apple simply doesn’t include an iPod-dock-connector-to-Firewire cable in the box.

Ah, here we are: Apple iPod Dock Connector to FireWire Cable

7

Enlighten me on something:

Does the iPod Photo 20GB that I bought 4 days before the video iPod was released have Firewire?

8

Um, you can make a bootable optical disk with a shitload of files on it for, like, a buck. I’ve got a 250 gig firewire backup drive plugged permanently into my dual G5, and it back up everything periodically. I can easily boot off of it, and it’s cheaper than the Nano. Why is this such an important feature to have in a frigging iPod? Who really uses it for that except the odd geek here and there? Yeah, it’s a spiffy little hackerish idea, but 99% of the iPod users out there could give a fuck about such capabilites, especially since there are so many better alternatives out there.

9

Oh this is fucking bullshit. The only time you will notice the difference between USB and Firewire if you are transferring Gigs and Gigs of data. Even when you are transferring that much you are talking about around 10 seconds longer for a 2-3 minute transfer for USB 2.0. If you consider 10 more seconds a long boring waits I would hate to see what you are like at the DMV. When you consider that USB is not only backwards compatible but comes standard with every damn device its pretty obvious why Apple when to the USB. I sure as shit know I would rather Apple keep the price down and reduce the size than add Firewire capability for some little pissant that can’t wait 10 seconds.

10

I’ll be taking the video iPod plunge as soon as they are out this week, and it pains me to have to say that all my research, and word at the Apple store, is that the new iPod will not be able to use FireWire even with a dock.

11

No, it isn’t. USB 2.0 is a kludge designed by Intel to sell Intel CPUs, and to avoid licensing the technology for Firewire, an IEEE standard. By design, it places a heavy load on the host CPU, preventing it from doing anything else that requires a substantial number of CPU cycles. Firewire is much more versatile and efficient. The reason that it isn’t available on most PCs is Intel’s refusal to support it in their chipsets. It is available on many PCs that use non-Intel chipsets.

12

This is totally in sync with the move from Power PC to Pentium for the mac. Its not about what is inside the box, but how it looks as a fashion accessory that sells. USB? FireWire? Huh? your average consumer can’t spell USB.

Good, makes them more dependant on us Geeks.

13

I’m fairly certain that’s not entirely correct. For example, here’s a recent article from Mac World/Mac Central’s Playlist feature: (you have to scroll down a little to spot this quote)

14

The idea that Firewire is fast and speedy but USB 2.0 is akin to transfering data on pack mules is bullshit. No one is saying USB 2.0 is better for external drives than Firewire but its not that much worse. But when you are transferring small files (less than 5 GB) you simply aren’t going to notice a difference unless you are sitting there timing it with a stopwatch.

As to Firewire being much more versatile I don’t think I can plug my mouse, keyboard , joystick, game controller, finger print scanner and many other periphials into a firewire port.

15

actually, the bigger problem than “waiting a few seconds” is that USB, since it depends more on the processor than FireWire, slows down as you add more devices (kinda’ like the old “SCSI Drag”, where SCSI would throttle itself back to the speed of the slowest device), wheras FireWire guarantees bandwidth to each device on the FW bus, i can have my iPod connected as the first device on the chain, connected directly to the host computer, or it can be daisy-chained off a series of external FW housings with no loss in speed

amd the biggest problem is that USB is not bootable, FireWire IS, and when i have multiple machines on the bench, each one using one of my external FW drives to boot off while i test them, it’s nice to have the ability to squeeze in one more machine booted off my iPod, or if a customer comes in for emergency service (or i have to go onsite, GRRRR…HATE onsite calls!), and i have all my drives in use on other repairs, it’s nice to be able to boot the customer machine off my iPod with all my diagnostic software on it

can’t do that on the new iPods now, can i?

is booting off an iPod common practice, no, am i the exception to the average Apple customer, yes, but as i tell my customers, it’s nice to have the ability to boot off the iPod in an emergency, isn’t it?, i see no reason for removing FW functionality from the iPod, the only reason Apple’s doing it is to cut corners and make the device cheaper, but by removing functionality, bad move, Apple

16

How many devices do you think a typical user has attached to their computer at any point in time? Perhaps a keyboard, mouse, printer, one HD and sometimes a Digital Camera or iPod type device. More likely the keyboard and mouse are in their specific ports leaving them with 2-3 devices to plug in. All CPUs come with two USB ports and a lot of times 4. Considering your mouse, keyboard and printer transfer almost no Data they can be easily be put on one hub. That means your typical user will only need 2 USB ports. The USB drag as you put it is simply a non-issue to 99% of computer users. In essence this is why your complaint is stupid. You are pissed at Apple for not cramming Firewire onto a device the size of a credit card to please perhaps .1% of owners that are using the iPod for a completely different function than what it was designed for.

In fact as far as I can tell and correct me if I am wrong here but I don’t believe Firewire supports a mouse or a keyboard. Considering that, at least for a laptop, those are the two devices you are most likely going to see connected Firewire has a bit to go before its a pratical replacement for USB. If Firewire could support that I would gladly choose it over USB but until then I can’t. I might be in a unique situation with the Tablet I have but there simply is no room for more ports. I get two USB ports and thats it. No mouse port, no keyboard port and no printer port. To me, and I suspect most users, the better features of Firewire would not be enough to swap out one of my USB ports for it.

The biggest problem for you. 99.9% of iPod owners could give two shits that they can’t boot from their iPod. You are talking about a device where size is at the utmost premium. The idea that Apple will continue putting firewire on it so some tech who won’t go and spend 30 bucks on a Firewire CD-Rom is laughable. As is the idea that Apple will continue supporting a feature that 95% of their customers can’t use and of the other 5% 99% of them have something that will do just as good of a job.

For all of the complaining about USB you do I can transfer a 1.3 GB file, with Word, Excel, Firefox, Thunderbird, iTunes and GoBinder running on my 1.2 GHZ Pentium M machine in 2 minutes 30 seconds to my iPod on a USB Hub with a printer, CD drive and mouse also attached. I noticed no appreciable change in computer performance while doing this.

No, Apple is doing it becuase they had to make sacrifices to cram a 4gb mp3 player into a credit card in addition to saving money. You tell your customers that its nice to have an OS on their iPod in the case of emergencies but how many of them actually do it? I would guess 0 beucase if they can rub two brain cells together they will realize that booting off a CD is a much better solution.

Let me ask you, are there any Macs sold today that don’t include an internal CD-Rom drive?

17

I can’t speak to whether or not it’s a kludge, but I just did a little experiment and found that my CPU load increased about 5% while copying a 3GB file to my USB2.0 hard drive. Is that the “heavy load” you’re talking about? “Preventing it from doing anything else that requires a substantial number of CPU cycles” is a gross exaggeration.

18

It seems like the complaint here should be “Apple sucks for not allowing you to boot from USB.” It’s not that “USB is not bootable” – it’s that “Macs can’t boot from USB” (apparently; I have no actual knowledge of this an am just going on what you say). There are plenty of PC’s that can.

19

I am pretty sure you are mistaken about this. USB devices are far as I am aware are not capable of being boot disks.

20

You are quite mistaken. Look at any modern PC’s BIOS settings. USB is almost always a boot option nowadays. Checking my extra desktop machine here, I see that the default boot order is 1) IDE CD-ROM Drive, 2) USB device, 3) Hard drive, 4) Ethernet. This is a Compaq, in case it matters. Further, my Gateway TabletPC is one of those ultra-compact things that doesn’t even have a CDROM drive built in, and the only way to boot it from anything other than the HD is to boot from USB.