I’m not the only one shocked and surprised with Apple’s move to dump FireWire (IEEE 1394) from the video iPod. Many in the industry are agreeing with me that this just shouldn’t have happened, including ZD Net’s Jason O’Grady. He subscribes with me that it makes no sense for a standard that was envisioned and created for the moving of video quickly would be dumped from an iPod whose claim to fame is video.

We all understand that USB 2.0 is installed on a larger hardware base, but that doesn’t make it better for the job. USB requires the host to do all the work and thus creates overhead. FireWire, on the other hand, requires the device to do all the dirty work and thus spits all the data right to the host. The host just gladly accepts what it’s given. And since FireWire takes care of its duties via hardware on the device, throughput is thus at wire speed. USB 2.0 can’t say that and many tests have even shown FireWire to be faster than USB 2.0 even though the latter is - on paper - faster than the former.

Okay, cost may be another reason, but I doubt it at this point. Apple, the co-inventor of FireWire, has brought cost down enough to not make this a major issue. The LCD and hard drive are still the costliest items on the unit - not the transport mechanism.

So what does this all mean for our beloved FireWire? Since Apple has pretty much buried any mention of it (now dig deep into its site on the developers section), it sounds like Apple has embraced Intel in more than one way. Who knows, maybe their CPU deal required it to promote Intel’s little pet serial bus, too. I’m sure we’ll end up seeing wireless USB iPods in the next year and thus solidify why FireWire had to die. But I won’t go easily; I’ll gladly keep my 2G, 4G, and mini syncing via FireWire and continue to let my external hard drives run off my IEEE 1394 ports. My USB ports are just fine with the mouse plugged into them. :)

[tags]ipod video,firewire,video ipod,ieee 1394,exclusion[/tags]