[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.

[GeekyBear]

Your claim was that Firewire "was very expensive compared to USB and Ethernet".

Which completely ignores the speed and the costs of the various data transfer standards as they existed at the time.

The cheap 1.2 megabit USB standard that existed at the time couldn't transfer 5 Gigs of MP3 files in less than an hour.

The cheaper 10 megabit version of Ethernet they sold at the time also would need more than a hour to transfer enough MP3 files to fill an iPod and wouldn't have been cheaper than a Firewire port.

Ethernet with faster speeds than 400 megabit Firewire existed, but was MUCH more expensive.

Speed AND cost both matter.

> I said 100 Ethernet which was dirt cheap

Back then? It wasn't.

[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.