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On the lack of Firewire on unibody MacBooks

After some quick research, I’ve concluded that the lack of Firewire on the unibody MacBook is totally inconsistent with other Macs that are available for less.

A potential reason for omitting Firewire is cost. If this is the case, then I have only one question: why is it that Firewire is still a standard feature on the new Mac Minis starting at $599, AND even the updated white MacBook with the 9400M GPU that sells for $999? Ouch.

That and Firewire has nice benefits such as target disk mode for easily mounting the disk for recovery, being able to carry more power for self-powered devices, TCP/IP networking, and smoking USB 2.0 because it’s still CPU dependent, while Firewire is handled by a dedicated controller.

This is not good.

Update – 8 June 2009: Firewire once again STANDARD on all Apple portables except the MacBook Air. YES!

Not sure if Target Disk Mode (TDM) will be offered though. It would be madness not to.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Tech . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “On the lack of Firewire on unibody MacBooks”

  1. Peter Kohut Says:
    April 24, 2009 at 2:58 pm

    I can’t believe it took you this long for a post about this. I was on the boards BLASTING Apple the moment I heard about this last year. I couldn’t agree with you more friend. A Mac without FireWire is like a golf course without holes. It’s like a cigar without a light. It’s like a car with only 3 wheels. You get the idea. Keep up the fight.

    Reply

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