[FirmwareBurner]

Sure but it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on with mainstream conumers other than some niche cases like camcorders.

Thunderbolt was also expensive, which is why adoption was limited, but it's becoming more maisntream since Intel and Apple have been pushing it in the last years, adn piggibacking over USB-C makes it an easy sell comapred to requireing a separate connector like firewire.

Still, thunderbolt peripherals are way more expensive than USB ones, so like Firewire before, use is still more in the enthusianst/professional space.

[GeekyBear]

> it was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet so Firewire never caught on

Compared to Gigabit Ethernet back in that time period? Firewire was a huge bargain.

[FirmwareBurner]

No, not gabit, but 100 Ethernet was more than enough for what average consumers had to transfer back then, and it was significantly cheaper and more available than firewire. It was more likely your HDD to be a bottleneck for faster network transfers.

[GeekyBear]

Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that.

Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Even the first version of Firewire was four times as fast as that.

Yes and? At what price points? What was the adoption rate? How many mainstream PCs and peripherals worldwide had it?

Wherever you went, whoever you met, you were way more likely to find a USB or ethernet port to hook up for a fast transfer rather than Firewire.

At least in my country at the time, maybe you lived in Cupertino/Palo Alto where evryone had iMacs and firewire.

Just like VHS over Betamax, USB won because it was cheaper and more convenient despite technically inferior to firewire and consumer tewch at the time was a race to the bottom in terms of price.

>Completely loading a 5 Gig iPod with music over that first version of Firewire still took a few minutes.

Only the first gen iPod had firewire before switching to USB, and even then, what was the point of Firewire 400 on it when the tiny and slow mechanical HDD on it was the real bottleneck.

There was no way the iPod would have been remotely as successful had it stayed on firewire. Apple didn't have the market sahre back then to enforce their own less popular standard. Only when it switched to USB and supporting PCs did the iPod really take off.

[GeekyBear]

> Yes and?

At the time, USB was still limited to 12 megabits per second and transferring that same 5 Gigs of MP3 files would have taken over an hour. The firewire iPod did it in a couple of minutes.

USB was cheaper, but dog slow.

Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.

[FirmwareBurner]

I see you keep ignoring my arguments so this is the last time I say it.

Again, only the first gen iPod was firewire exclusive and it was not yet a maisntream product since it was still Mac only, so avergae consumer demand at home computers for Firewire was lackluster and the iPod didn't change that.

Firewire was niche or non existent in the home PC space and it died completley with the launch of USB 2.0 remaining alive only in the pro-sumer space.

>Gigabit Ethernet was faster but WAY more expensive.

Please show me where I mentioned Gigabit ethernet as an argument. I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap and almost every PC and Mac had it, as opposed to Firewire, so if you needed a fast cross platform transfer it was your best bet at the time in terms of cost and mass availability over firewire before USB 2.0 and gigabit hit the market.

[jwells89]

Later gens of iPod gained the ability to connect to USB but still supported FireWire. The majority of my usage of my 20GB 4th gen iPod was with the FireWire cable it shipped with.

[xattt]

It’s forgotten to history that Apple supported FW on the 30-pin connector.