Posted 02/23/2009 at 06:02:30pm

Inx,

You are obviously not a musician or videographer.  However, the sad truth is, as much as you're right about Apple messing some things up, upwards of 95% of any and every piece of audio and video equipment worth anything relies either mostly or solely on firewire.  Yeah, you can get a crappy low-end USB audio device to record a couple of tracks, but you can bet anything that it's going to choke up after about 8-10 tracks and a couple of effects on most computers, even recent ones with pretty good specs.  As much as I love ProTools, I would never buy a USB Digidesign Mbox because most computers I've dealt with can't seem to handle any real amount of A/D conversion, processing, and D/A conversion via USB simultaneously.  The standard USB Mbox costs about $450 new, and a comparable firewire interface is in the same price range or a little less.

In terms of your distaste of firewire, you might get your wish - Apple appears to be in the process of phasing out firewire, as they removed it from their lower end laptops.  The funny thing is, Apple has really marketed its optimization of Apogee interfaces and Logic Pro to musicians.  In the music world, Apogee (next to Digidesign) is probably the most popular manufacturer of more ultra high-end quality audio interfaces, and every one of their current models are firewire or PCIe-based - the two interfaces that Apple pushes are firewire only.  I am a long time Mac user, but this kind of stupidity and gross negligence on Apple's part is a huge kick in the face of all a/v professionals that have supported them during the period when Apple was really stuggling.  At one time, Apple had only about 10% of the total market, but Macs were still far superior to Windows machines for music and graphics, and it was people like myself that kept their heads afloat.  Trust me, I'm not scolding you for having a problem with Apple, but you definitely shouldn't have any love for Microsoft and their nickel and dime to death licensing policies either - what you don't pay for the machine, you very quickly make up for in Microsoft's much more expensive operating system and can't do without basic functional software (which Apple either includes free or makes available at a fraction of the cost, by the way).  However, if Apple keeps pissing people off, they're going to become exclusively a manufacturer of iPods and iPhones, which wouldn't surprise me because that appears to be all they care about these days anyway.

All corporate bashing aside, my real point is that just that you have to try and see things from the point of view of all the people out there that have invested so much money into quality, useful a/v equipment that relies on this wonderfully-designed, poorly-marketed thing called firewire.  You've really pointed out how useless it is to your needs, and your utter rejection of it seems to stem from your inherent dislike toward Apple.  I think it sucks that they own it, because too many people in both the Mac and PC world rely on it.  I am all for USB 3.0 and/or standardization if it proves to be capable of being an actual replacement for firewire.  I don't see that happening though, even with all the advances.  The really sad thing is, there will be people out there with, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars worth of unusable equipment if firewire disappears completely.  And unlike computers, which are basically worthless as soon as you buy them, this equipment does not really get obsoleted at nearly the dizzying rate that computers do.  Pretty much all semi-professional and higher 3CCD camcorders that someone would actually use to do something novel like make a living rely completely on firewire to transfer info to your computer - either that or spend many thousands of dollars on proprietary video editing equipment.  A Sony VX2100 was the standard professional wedding videographer camcorder 5 years ago, and it still is today - it cost about $2700 then, and it still costs about $2200 or more.  Apple says get a new camera, but that's making an awful assumption that everybody has a typical camcorder that is full of cool acronyms and inflated numerical specs, but lacking in true professional quality.  SSD video is nice and neat and convenient, but tapes really do rule in terms of quality, even in HD, and firewire is the only good way to extract that amount of info into a computer in real time at this point.

Think of what a horrible waste it would be for all the musicians and videographers out there that have such a large investment in good, still useful equipment if firewire goes away altogether.  Progress is great, but there can't be a lapse in functionality and availability of things that meet people's basic needs for true progress to take place.  USB is great for mice, keyboards, printers, and other things that standard computer users facilitate on a regular basis, but for all the bigger throughput-heavy stuff, USB really just doesn't cut it, and I have serious doubts that it ever will.  I love all the things that USB is great at and the fact that it is a convenient standard connection, but I dread the day that I get stuck with USB and nothing better.