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* Photo: Jeff Mermelstein * At one point during last October's introduction of the latest MacBook laptop, Steve Jobs made a telling remark: "We are just as proud of things we leave out." He was talking about toxic chemicals. But when the MacBook's specs were detailed later that day, it became clear that Apple had left something else out that customers would be less happy to lose: the FireWire port.
Can I shed some eye water here over the demise of FireWire—aka the IEEE 1394 interface? Introduced in 1995, it was touted as a panacea, speedily transferring information to and from gear like disc drives, other computers, and especially video cameras. Coming after the madness of the SCSI ("scuzzy") system, with bulky sockets called terminators and cables so thick they could hold up bridges, FireWire was a godsend. It even won an Emmy.
Losing FireWire got me thinking about all the ports and standards that have vanished over the years, leaving behind a trail of memories and a dumpster's worth of orphaned peripherals. Our pop-in wires now transmit megabytes in seconds, but there's a buggy-whip-style frisson in recalling the feel of ridged plastic on your fingertips as you screwed in the socket of an RS-232
Connector. Where are all those old RS-232s today? In my basement, probably.
It's often Jobs who pulls the plug on a fading port or standard—FireWire is just his latest victim. "We're often the first company to adopt innovative technologies and also often the first to discard them," Apple spokesperson Steve Dowling says. That's the only official comment the company would make on the issue. Sometimes Jobs is overeager to snuff a standard and winds up engaging in premature evacuation. In 1984, he was so smitten with the mouse that he felt it obviated the need for cursor keys on the original Macintosh. Even early Mac adopters disagreed, and he quickly restored the arrows in the keyboard's next rev. There they remain.
But more often than not, the Apple boss is prescient. There was outrage, scorn, and disbelief when he launched the iMac in 1998 without a floppy disk drive. Now floppies are quainter than spats. More recently, Jobs caused a stir when he did away with built-in phone-line modems. Guess what? Most of us were already living without dialup.
In retrospect, FireWire was doomed when Apple dropped the technology from its video iPods several years ago, embracing the high-speed version of USB. Nonetheless, the MacBook loss has wigged out some of the Apple faithful. The subject quickly generated more than 1,500 messages on one Mac discussion forum, most by people who protested as if Jobs were disconnecting their windpipes, not their cameras. One agitated fan emailed him directly, complaining that the MacBook would no longer work copacetically with camcorders. Jobs allegedly fired off a reply: "Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2."
What about all those FireWire camcorders that people still use? Collateral damage of progress. Still, when I got my own MacBook, I missed IEEE 1394 immediately. It's long been the best way to move the contents of one Mac to another. When loading a new MacBook, Apple's Migration Assistant requires Ethernet or a wireless network. (I had to change my networking settings to get it to work.) But I made the switch. And now my two-year-old Handycam will inhabit the closet, along with SCSI hard drives, boxes of floppy disks, and tangled wires ending in sockets once recognizable as serial or parallel but now just ephemeral. All wrapped up in a ribbon of AppleTalk connector cables. One day, USB paraphernalia will join them. It'll probably be Apple that pulls that plug, too.
Email steven_levy@wired.com.
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