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How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

arstechnica.com

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Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#91

Post by rangibaby »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #57
rangibaby wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. USB3 killed everything else at the low end; I remember buying an external HDD with FW800 in the olden days of 2011, then getting a USB3 drive in 2013 which is still going strong and fast (enough).

> I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. People that specifically needed their drives to be both fast and external moved to internal drives? I don't understand.

External PCIe (whatever) is kind of the point of Thunderbolt

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#92

Post by baobrain »

Tloewald wrote: post #88
lobster_johnson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets, made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple. Apple can be aggressive about its tech today (such as Lightning and Thunderbolt; anyone know what they charge for those?), but back then they were much more of a niche player.

Thunderbolt is Intel AFAIK. (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.) My guess is Intel probably would have backed USB over Firewire regardless since it had a stake in USB. The irony is, USB would probably have failed without Apple. The fact is that Intel has repeatedly chosen its own technology to promote, and until recently it had the market power to force everyone else to follow suit.

> (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.)

This doesn't seem to be correct. While I can't find anything with a simple search, the thunderbolt technology website is copyrighted by Intel, and Wikipedia directly attributes the development to Intel.

Iirc apple was mostly a first adapter to thunderbolt.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#93

Post by swift »

_e wrote: post #72
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, OP is saying that Apple made the decision to bump the license fee up to a dollar, very quickly saw that it was too high and lowered it to 25 cents, but it didn't matter. That one simple failed decision that Apple quickly reversed still ended up killing FireWire.

If Apple charged 25c in the beginning and increased the price over time until they found the equilibrium then it might have been a different story.

Would that actually have been possible, though? I'd expect that these royalties were defined by massive multi-year contracts. If that's the case, they couldn't realistically do something like gradually increase the price until they found the equilibrium, at least unless "over time" here is on the scale of a decade. I may be off base here, though; I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows more.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#95

Post by nhf »

rconti wrote: post #53

My first exposure to FireWire (like many folks, I assume) was the original 5GB iPod I bought from a friend. I thought it was SO cool that you just used this one cable to connect to your computer (in my case, my first Mac, an iBook 600mhz G3), as well as to the power adapter. The charging brick was just a brick with a firewire port and flip-out prongs that could be removed from the power brick, just like today's Mac l…

Apple's 12 watt USB power adapter* still has the same design. Swappable plugs compatible with all of the laptop power brick international plugs. It comes with the iPad Pro these days (and probably others, too).

* https://qmart.pk/image/cache/Accessories/AppleAccessories%20...

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#96

Post by lukeh »

bsder wrote: post #80
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's being compared to something like 12 Mbps USB 1.1: Firewire is just so much faster that it doesn't matter. I deal with upgrading a lot of industrial electronics, and have to answer this question frequently: people are concerned about replacing Modbus RTU and similar setups with modern protocols: "But it's not real time!", "It's too high-level!" "Consumer or office network gear can't possibly work here!" N…

You might want to look into Time Sensitive Networking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking This is a real-time standard for ethernet that lets you reserve slots for time sensitive information. It's primarily being driven by the automotive guys who want to be able to wire up 4 displays, 12 speakers, and a video player for an in-car entertainment system. Before TSN, it was AVB (audio-video bridging)…

Amusingly enough, the audio data packing in AVB/TSN comes from FireWire via IEC 61883-6. AVB seems to be on its way to irrelevance in the pro audio/video world in favor of AES67/SMPTE 2110, which are Layer 3. Requiring switch support didn't help its adoption as it created the classic chicken/egg vendor adoption problem.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#97

Post by GeekyBear »

baobrain wrote: post #92
Tloewald wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbolt is Intel AFAIK. (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.) My guess is Intel probably would have backed USB over Firewire regardless since it had a stake in USB. The irony is, USB would probably have failed without Apple. The fact is that Intel has repeatedly chosen its own technology to promote, and until recently it had the market power to force everyone else to follow suit.

> (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.) This doesn't seem to be correct. While I can't find anything with a simple search, the thunderbolt technology website is copyrighted by Intel, and Wikipedia directly attributes the development to Intel. Iirc apple was mostly a first adapter to thunderbolt.

At the time of the first technology demos, the story was that Apple and Intel jointly developed it.

https://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated...

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#98

Post by webnrrd2k »

jjguy wrote: post #22

> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWi…

I'm not sure I agree - at least they didn't fight each other for a few years and eventually both get passed up, like the 56k modem chip fiasco. Apple moved forward and still did OK. They might have "lost", but they also avoided a protracted and potentially self-defeating fight.

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#99

Post by Dylan16807 »

rangibaby wrote: post #91
Dylan16807 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people with actual need for eSATA have moved on to PCIe SSDs. People that specifically needed their drives to be both fast and external moved to internal drives? I don't understand.

External PCIe (whatever) is kind of the point of Thunderbolt

People use thunderbolt NVMe drives? I didn't know those even existed. Is that meaningfully better than USB with UAS?

Re: How FireWire came to market and ultimately fell out of favor

#100

Post by jrnichols »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #40

It really is a shame that FireWire didn't work out. Aside from the far better transfer speeds, when used for external storage FireWire has always been more solid. USB storage has a nasty habit of periodically flickering out for a split second and has generally been more flaky, something that's actually gotten worse with USB 3 — if you haven't run into this set of issues yourself, do a quick Google and you'll find mou…

Target Disk Mode + FireWire helped me save many a machine.

Plus, I always thought the logo was cooler. :)

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