g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est




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Friday, December 9, 2005
11:03 - The approaching bootfalls of DOOOOOM

(top) link
Aziz Poonawalla and Steven Den Beste both asked me to weigh in on this rumor that the Intel-based iBooks will come without FireWire ports and the PowerBooks will eventually dispense with FireWire 400, which in concert with the new USB-only iPods signals an unmistakable effort on Apple's part to de-emphasize and even (perhaps) abandon FireWire.

Some will be tempted to claim this as a victory over Apple and its funky semi-proprietary standards, whereas a lot of Apple fans are (rightly) miffed at the death of a technically more elegant and flexible connectivity standard than USB. But that's only if FireWire is really being "abandoned". Me, I'm not sure what to think just yet.

Maybe Apple's just decided that it's pointless to make users have to juggle two competing serial standards. When we gave away our old iMac G4 to a non-computer-literate acquaintance a few days ago, she was bewildered at our attempt to explain the difference between the myriad USB and FireWire ports, and when she asked about getting an external hard drive for it, her eyes glazed over within seconds at our response. Ever try to explain to someone how to buy an external hard drive in today's market for a non-expandable computer with only FireWire and USB 1.1 ports?

So maybe Apple's just decided on a strategy that differentiates USB and FireWire as much as possible, positioning them for different markets and applications. FireWire for general peripherals never took off—and rightly so, probably. It was overkill for stuff like mice and keyboards. So without the flexibility of supporting everything from speakers on up to external hard drives and webcams, FireWire never was destined to take over in the low-end roles where USB has become commonplace; and hampered by a non-backward-compatible plug design in the 800-Mbps variety, its claim on the high end has become muddier and a much tougher sell. Now, the professional video editing market won't be giving up FireWire 800 anytime soon (it is twice as fast as USB2, after all, and the ability to daisy-chain peer-level video devices is crucial to pros), and neither will Apple as long as it's got its stake in the Final Cut Pro/Motion/Shake/Apple-logo-in-the-credits-of-blockbuster-movies segment. But that just means they can phase out FireWire 400 on all their machines, and put FireWire 800 on the pro machines (Power Macs and PowerBooks) only. USB will thus be the standard going forward for regular peripherals, including iPods. (If we see the iSight go USB soon, we'll know this is the case.)

This sucks for people buying new USB-only iPods to use with old FireWire-oriented Macs; but hey, we made PC people buy $20 FireWire cards for the early iPods—I guess turnabout is fair play. Meanwhile it means one fewer chip on the iPod boards, making them thinner and a tad cheaper. Same goes for iBooks, iMacs, and Mac minis—one fewer port, one fewer chip on the board, smaller packages.

Aziz also wanted to know what I thought of this Aperture review, also on Ars Technica. Well, it seems pretty straightforward—it sounds like Aperture's got a bunch of pretty serious shortcomings that need to be addressed before it gains widespread acceptance. However, I did notice that the review completely ignored all the cool and unique features of the program, like the "light table" interface, the cool loupe viewer, all the publishing mechanisms, and so on (it explicitly said it wouldn't bother with them because the problems obscuring them were so glaring). As John Gruber notes, the reviewer speaks with the voice of a Photoshop veteran whose expectations of a photo-manipulation program are refracted through a Photoshop-colored prism; somehow I think Apple's going at the market from a different angle entirely, one that tries to capture traditional (non-digital) photographers from a workflow standpoint, rather than seasoned digital experts from a hard-core image-processing standpoint. If you're just interested in organizing a billion photos and working up a presentation or a book, which is what Aperture's selling points are made out to be, it'll probably do the job just fine—it just needs a better RAW converter. The market isn't the people who already use Photoshop for intensive editing. Those aren't the "photographers" Apple's profiling, anyway. Still, it can't be denied that they've got to fix the histogram behavior (it helps nobody to make the histogram curve pretty by smoothing out its peaks and troughs—this is a power tool, not a piece of demoware) and add some basics like color-value sampling and proper EXIF export. C'mon, guys.

Taken as a trend, these observations on Apple by the Ars Technica guys might seem ominous for Apple's fortunes—abandonment of its pet connectivity standard, and a big airball for the first time in its generally well-thought-of Pro software lineup. Is Apple losing its vision? Is it getting cocky? I don't know—it's too soon to tell. Certainly it seems they're focusing most of their efforts on iPods right now, and considering the wall-to-wall throngs in the Oakridge Apple Store grabbing up iPods like chips at a party, that's what they ought to be doing while the market's hot. But they're also dealing with a huge transition internally, not just technically but philosophically, just in handling the infrastructure and vocabulary surrounding the Intel hardware they'll be using from now on. I doubt the move to USB has anything to do with any friendly knife-twisting on the part of Intel. I think maybe it's more that Apple sees this as an opportunity to phase out a lot of cruft, streamline its offerings, and firm up its message to customers. They're already kicking internal modems to the rear of the class. Next on the block, it seems, is FireWire 400. But the top end of the market will continue to have its FireWire 800, and the overconfidence and hubris of which the Aperture reviewer accuses Apple is probably indicative more of the glee the company feels about its iPod success than any sense of entitlement to the competitive professional market.

Once the iPod shopping season is over, and once we start seeing the Intel machines coming out (particularly the pro ones), we'll be in a better position to see how seriously Apple takes its fresh outlook on the computing market. If they rush out an Aperture 1.5, we'll know they haven't forgotten their roots. It's just hard to see them when you have to keep pushing iPod bucks out of the way.

UPDATE: Mike Silverman points out that it's going to suck if we can no longer boot our Macs from FireWire drives—as of yet Mac OS X won't boot from a USB 2.0 devics. One would hope this is on the prerequisite docket for the switch...


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© Brian Tiemann