Re: The sad Truth about iMac:

[CUTjefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On Mon, 08 Mar 1999 05:54:53 GMT, coaxial@escape.ca (coaxial) wrote:

>But I know for a fact that there are already FireWire digital cameras and
>hard disk drives available for the blue & white PowerMac G3 systems.
>Hooking up a digital video camcorder or a hard disk drive and bringing in
>data at 400 Mbps sure sounds good to me. What other type of port can
>currently handle this type of speed or even come close to that kind of
>speed?

I'm not exactly sure.  I haven't looked at specs like that in a long
time because they don't make a whole lot of real world difference
anymore.  When the difference in transfer speeds translates into a
time savings of a fraction of a second, it really doesn't matter much
to me.

However, keep in mind that FireWire is serial and that you are talking
about transferring at 400 Mbps (bits).  I'm not sure how FireWire
actually sends data but that speed translates into 40 - 50 MBps
(bytes).  And as far as I know, SCSI 3 is capable of this or at least
getting close to it.  Heck, IDE may be capable of this now as far as I
know.  And if they aren't, I'm sure they can be improved to get to
this speed or faster.

>> Why don't PC's come with built in FireWire?  There is nothing that
>> needs it.
>
>That's one of the differences between PC's and current Mac's then I guess.

You already said that there are only a few devices available for
FireWire and you've also said that the Macs that have FireWire also
have other interfaces.  Please note that I said "needs".  The devices
you mentioned are available for other interfaces and don't "need" or
greatly benefit from using FireWire instead.

>Well....since the introduction of the first iMac and it's built in USB
>ports last August, USB certainly has swept over the Mac platform. Seems
>like everything is USB nowadays when I look through my MacWarehouse
>catalog. I have a strong feeling that the same will be true with the
>FireWire thing. It might take a few months, but once people see what it
>can do and what new devices can take advantage of such an incredibly fast
>peripheral standard, it would be hard to go back to a paltry SCSI port.

I thought the same thing about Beta, magneto-optical drives and my
Apple II.  Technical merits of a device do not make it popular,
unfortunately.  If it isn't marketed well, you might as well forget
that it even existed.

By the way, you mentioned in another post that Apple created the
FireWire standard.  I'm not sure if this is true or not.  I remember
reading about FireWire years ago and I never heard Apple's name
mentioned in association with it.  As I've been using Apple computers
for 16 years, I think I would have remembered Apple's name if they had
been mentioned with FireWire.

>It's called technological evolution. One only has to look back over the
>past 20 years in the microcomputer industry to see that it happens whether
>ya like it or not. At Apple Computer, Inc. tries to stay on the cutting
>edge of hardware development.

At some point, the technological advancements that take place will
actually be making a significant difference and that is when it will
be worthwhile to change.  Besides, what is the problem with improving
an existing system rather than just throwing it out and starting with
a new one?  Look at CD-ROM drives.  Instead of throwing out the
technology and starting from scratch with something else, they simply
improved the technology and today we are using CD-ROM drives that are
at least 32x faster than the original and we are migrating into DVDs
which can work faster than the original CD-ROM drives and hold much
more data but can still read old CD-ROM disks as well.  No need to
throw out everything you already have and start from scratch.

I think Apple is making a big mistake with the stuff they are doing
now.  The PC has been running into this problem for years.  There are
too many options which now means that there is no base standard PC
system which is why we have all the hoops and hurdles to deal with
when adding new hardware to a PC system.  I think you will soon see
this with the Mac as well because you will now have the ability to use
so many different interfaces for the same types of devices.

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