sliderider wrote:
There are two Firewire specifications. One for 400mbps and a faster one at 800mbps. Some G4 PowerMacs had both but then Apple split them off and made the 800mbps variant available only on professional grade Macs while consumer models had to make do with 400mbps. The white Macbooks still had a 400mbps Firewire port as recently as early 2009 which was long after Firewire was dropped entirely from the Unibody Macbook Pro line.
Technically there exists FireWire 1600 and 3200 as well (there's more than two formally defined IEEE-1394 specs); it's meant to be pin-compatible with the 9-pin FW800 connector. It's relatively rare though, afaik; I think 1600 made it to market in the form of adapter cards, but probably not much else. The only real use I'd see for 1600/3200 these days would be faster-than-GbE networking between two machines, if you have the connectors and aren't using Vista or later (there is a 3rd-party driver to enable IP Support for Vista-8 via FW, but I've read that it isn't the most stable thing known to man).
FW800 isn't entirely tied-up for Macs - add-in boards exists to bring it to PCs. Like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-FireWire-PCIe-Co … /dp/B004QY7M3Y/
TBH I think anything beyond USB2.0/FW400 has limited applications for consumers beyond external hard-drives (that is, I don't think any of those devices are "making do" or "struggling"); really how much bandwidth does your keyboard, printer, or other desk doodad need? 🤣
STX wrote:The USB vs. Firewire battle was won by USB because each Firewire device needs more circuitry and therefore cost more to produce.
This isn't entirely accurate - USB requires a bus master and offloads a lot of the complexity onto that device (and therefore limits the kinds of things you can plug together and what they can do) whereas FW works point-to-point. For example using FW you can plug your cable box into your VCR, or printer into your scanner; USB can't accomplish that unless one of those devices is substantially more complex.
FW can also carry significantly more power than USB, potentially allowing less complexity in the peripheral and reducing the need for wall-warts/cabling for basic external devices. This would reduce costs for the device as it wouldn't need to bring its own power supply and wouldn't need as much internal circuitry. My guess is it's six of one, half a dozen of the other at the end of the day - each has its upsides and downsides.