It’s so sad to see various technologies going into eternal oblivion before making any impact on the industry, but that’s life. For example, who is still wondering what is AMR? Just for the record, also known as “audio/modem riser,” this was an expansion slot found on Pentium III, Pentium 4 and Athlon motherboards, probably only used by 0.01 percent of those having such motherboards. Even I still have such a mainboard, in a computer that I keep for emergency situations, and I never used that slot. Now, what about FireWire?
No, I won’t get into the details regarding what is FireWire, because there’s something even more interesting to say – what’s going to happen with it. Before moving on to tackle today’s subject seriously, I have to make another confession – I have no idea if my AM2 mainboard has FireWire, and I couldn’t care less about that. Of course, I could check the manufacturer’s website and see if I have such a thing available, but… what for?
I guess Apple ended up facing the same question, when they decided what to remove from the new MacBook Pro and MacBook computers. Guess what? No more FireWire for Mac, of course! Don’t ask yourselves why, after all Apple took away the optical drive from the MacBook Air and nobody died. I am sure this move could help some accessories manufacturers to come up with “USB to FireWire” adapters or something similar… or not, I am not working in the field, so I can’t tell that for sure.
Since I mentioned the MacBook Air above, I should also add that the lack of FireWire is widely considered to be one of the biggest downsides Apple’s thinnest notebook has, so the big question remains – if Apple decided to drop FireWire for Mac notebooks, why did they do it?
I can’t really answer the question above, so maybe you can help me. First, they dropped iPod’s FireWire support, in 2004, and now they are leaving no more FireWire for Mac notebooks. I only hope they won’t do the same to the USB ports, because that would really be a tragedy!