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I think really the goal here is for Apple to make laptops cheaper, smaller and cut costs across the board by moving to a single type of port that can handle all connections. With all the complaints about the MacBook Air only having one USB port, Light Peak could solve the connectivity problem in these ultralights by providing screen, USB, networking and more through just one socket. I certainly like the idea!

My FireWire disks are daisy-chained, and people I know that try to stay with Firewire HDDs do so to.

Rather than the feature not being successful (it works just fine), it is the connector that features it which has not gained traction. Pretty much every FireWire disk has 2 FW sockets just for that. Pretty much no USB disk does. That is probably why you have not seen it.

The reason why you don't see USB HDs daisy chained is because while the B in USB stands for "bus", it is of course not a bus technologically. That's why.

Also, when you read transfer/access speed comparisions from ye olden days, FW always lagged substantially behind plain IDE setups, so there was really no point in having HDs with FW interface.

Actually daisy chaining has been the preferred connection method in firewire, firewire can work hostless, but without intel on board it had always sort of a nieche market, big nieche, but it never really has been as popular as the inferior usb.
Apple seems to search for a universal firewire replacement, and this time they have Intel on board.

Unless the OEM's (Dell, Acer, HP) get on board with this though it will just be another niche market that will fizzle out. Sony and Apple were the only 2 OEM's I remember really pushing firewire which is one reason why I think it never caught on to the mainstream.

OEM's got on board with USB when x86 chipset manufacturers started putting support for USB into their chipsets. The most important chipset manufacturer that did that, and drove adoption for the PC masses, was Intel.

As Apple wasn't a consumer of x86 chipsets when they came up with and later introduced Firewire the only option for OEMs was a separate chip to support Firewire for quite some time. That made it expensive for them to add at a time when prices were being driven rapidly downwards. There was also the mistaken idea that USB is "good enough"... Anyone that's used to Firewire that has ever had to copy multiple gigabytes off a USB drive knows that's a bunch of crap, but marketing droids and folks that are extremely budget sensitive just don't get that.

Who was/is Sony using to make motherboards that have their i.Link on them?

firewire was invented in teh 80's and was a standard before USB.

It also had a downside. The power button on the display would shut down the computer.

This is an issue if you want to leave your computer running and only turn off the displays.

It also had a downside. The power button on the display would shut down the computer.

This is an issue if you want to leave your computer running and only turn off the displays. "

This depens on whether the power button also switches off the bus, if it does not then this is a non issue.
In firewire devices you often have a mixed environment, some devices do some do not.
But it is not that bad because usually you only daisy chain 2-4 devices together, on the other hand all this saves you to have a hub up and running with a handful of cables going into it, and you dont need a central computer for device2device data transfer!

While those Apple Cinema Display-s are great, the connector technology is quite poor IMHO. I have several computers at home, like PC-s with windows and linux and also a Mac Mini. It is really painful to switch the cable from one computer to the next, as that multiheaded cable is not too comfortable to work with. And think what? They also put power adapter to one branch, so every time I want to move the display cable, I also have to move a power adapter and also need to find a place for it. Damn I hate this. And all because of the idea for having single cable coming from display.

I know that there are KVM switches for things like this, but I do not switch the computers that often and therefore have not invested yet. But the cabling solution is a pain to use with Apple displays. Who had a wonderful idea of having quite heavy power adapter connected to display cable?

I never had to move my ACD between different PCs so I hadn't thought of that. I am sure it is a pain to move it even if the PCs are a few meters apart.

If you don't want to buy a KVM switch, you may want to have a look at synergy ( http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ ). It's basically KVM over the network.

Spot on trolling.

Even with a workforce of a billion of engineers if your company doesn't have a true visionary then nothing exciting is going to happen. Intel would probably be happy with USB 3.0 and won't put resources into any technology with an uncertain future, they've been bitten by Rambus and Itanium.

As of today, AAPL's market cap is $163B while INTC's is $108B. They both have similar revenue. AAPL also does custom chip design, media, retail, software and hardware design and cell phones. Which of the preceding factors disqualifies Apple as one of the "Big Boys" as you so intelligently put it? Does the company in China that makes $0.02 capacitors count as a "Big Boy" since they make a critical component that goes into every electronic device?

Agreed. While Apple's marketshare may not coincide with that fact, they are one of the leaders in the industry when it comes to pushing technology and have been so since their inception. They seem to take pride in being their first whenever possible. They are definitely one of the "Big Boys". Consider the fact that regrdless of how low their marketshare is, they are still profitable, at times more so than other companies who actually have far more marketshare. Apple is not want for resources, They have plenty of resources at their disposal and can rally behind a technology and get it accepted in the larger technological community pretty much on their own (though history has shown that things don't always work out that way).

Just this year alone, you have opencl which all major gpu makers have rallied around even forgoing plans for their own implementation of the concept. Who here can't name something that Apple has introduced to the masses and is now ubiquitous. They may not always invent everything they introduce, but dammit if they didn't make them popular.

Bull - at MOST Apple is an early adopter of technology they didn't invent & which would have become just as popular if Apple weren't around to "introduce" it. And if they deserve credit for that, it's more than outweighed by the numerous examples where Apple was WAAAY behind everyone else (PCI, AGP, IDE, USB2, etc).

And when they actually HAVE introduced technology (rather than just jumping on someone else's bandwagon), that technology has ALWAYS failed in the long run (NuBus, ADB, ADC, Firewire, etc).

Not true. Even for tech they didn't introduce, they've had a lot if influence on use.

USB is actually a very good example. Neither Intel or MS could get it working properly, nor could they get manufacturers to produce much product for it.

It was dying.

When Apple introduced the first iMacs, and had USB instead of their own technologies, they got it working well for the first time. Manufacturers began to produce many USB products, many in new iMac colors.

This inspired MS to finally get USB working in 98 SP2.

They had promised it would work with 3.1.

Even with Firewire, despite what is said in the article, Apple was one of the developers of the the standard.

I love the way you make it sound like the iMac magically revived USB, an otherwise "dying" technology. Despite the fact that the USB specification was first released in 1996 and the iMac only came out in 1997, and despite the fact that USB was included in many PCs (particularly laptops) released at the same time as (and even earlier than) the iMac.



At best, the iMac caused a minor spike in the sales of USB devices - mainly because it was crippled (even by Apple standards of the time) by a lack of any other connectivity options.



Uh, no - try Win95 OSR2.



Are you high? When did they ever promise USB support in Win 3.1? They had been selling Windows 95 for almost two years by the time the USB standard was even finalized.

My Firewire Audio Interface says different. I can also name many attempts where Apple has succeeded. What's your point? They are still usually ahead of the curve while other manufacturers are still deciding if they should remove the ps/2 port on their PCs. At least Apple tries something different, they may not always succeed but they put their best foot forward. When was the last time Dell did anything innovative or even different than any other OEM on the market? We can all name the most influential tech companies on one hand, Apple is part of that group, along with IBM, Intel and even MS.

Firewire failed? really? You might want to let all the pro audio and video guys know. They need to stop using it I guess.

Considering that Apple was pushing it as an alternative to USB2, yeah, it failed. Even Apple admits it, how long has it been since you could buy an iPod with a firewire connection? And it's only a matter of time before Apple drops firewire support entirely, as they inevitably do with their failed technology (effectively giving the shaft to everyone foolish to adopt said tech).

Try reading the article next time. No one is saying Apple is the driving force behind Intel. That would be foolish.

However in this particular case with Light Peak, they are the driving force. Big. Difference.

There's such a thing as "multimode" optical. You can run thousands of channels of anything over one wire.

It's much more complex than using different colors of light. It's also common.