[celebi23]

I started a petition for Apple to restore full Firewire support in the next iPod video revision. People may think that this won't work BUT, there was a petition for Digital Booklets in iTunes and now almost every album has one. I'm somewhat lucky as my iBook G4 was the first one to have USB 2.0 yet, many of my friends who have macs have the model before mine and only have USB 1.1

http://www.petitiononline.com/ab1987/

Some stats about Firewire being faster and more reliable than USB 2.0:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/usb20vsfirewire/

http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm

Some other sites I posted this at:

[url]http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=198167[/
url]

http://forums.ilounge.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=123014&perpage=15&pagen umber=1

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=155411

385 Total Signatures so far

[Randman]

I wish there was Firewire but Apple ain't going to offer Firewire on iPods anymore. The masses have spoken and most of them are PC-using weenies.

[ort888]

Good luck with that.

[ghporter]

I don't think that it's "PC-using weenies" that are the problem. (And I don't admit not having firewire is a problem, either.) I think this design decision came from how much the USB protocol/mode has developed over the last couple of years, and the number of low cost chip implementations that are available for it. Compared to USB, firewire is a specialty protocol/mode. Most implementations for firewire that I've seen recently have been for high bandwidth audiovisual data, while something like an iPod typically needs much less bandwidth to be efficient.

It's true that Firewire 800 IS faster than USB 2.0, but that doesn't convince a company that has to make a profit to use more expensive parts for a smallish part of their overall market. It's business kids, that's all. But the petition won't hurt.

[inkhead]

Please apple DO NOT add firewire back onto any ipods, please smack anybody who doesn't have usb2 upside the head.. thank you.

[dwishbone]

just curious has anyone actually tried to use the old firewire cables on the new iPods to see if they work? probably wont but worth a shot.

[ort888]

They don't work.

[dwishbone]

k. just wanted to make sure this was not a case of once again many of the whiners jumping the gun without testing things throughly.
like the 3G iPod not including a USB2 cable and only a Firewire cable. the lack of firewire does certainly suck for users with older machines. there are always problems like this when things are changed. out of the 2 USB is the way to go simply because more people have that connector. as someone said like or hate it more pc users have ipods than mac users and that is their format of choice.

[Weyland-Yutani]

In my experience USB sucks so much it is sad. I have USB 2. Plugging in USB devices can cause kernel panic, something that never happens with FW. USB doesn't have the electrical power of FW. All in all it is the inferior option. The more USB devices you hook up the slower the whole enchilada becomes etc.

In the nano there isn't room for USB and FW, so go with USB. In the big iPods there is space for both and they should use both. If both were offered I'd use FW (and I can choose between FW and USB2) because it is much much much better IMO and experience.

cheers

W-Y

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

In my experience USB sucks so much it is sad. I have USB 2. Plugging in USB devices can cause kernel panic, something that never happens with FW. USB doesn't have the electrical power of FW. All in all it is the inferior option. The more USB devices you hook up the slower the whole enchilada becomes etc.

Yea, beacuase Apple has never had a problem with 3 of their own Firewire devices not working together. USB does have a lower power limit than FW, but most FW ports aren't able to supply the bus's maximum anyway (if they were, the draw from two ports would exceed the capacity of the PowerBook's AC adapter). And of course, Firewire has to share bandwidth too when you daisy chain or hub devices; just like Firewire, you can (and my computer do) have more than one USB channel.

Where's the petition to thank Apple for following consumer demand and cutting costs?

[dwishbone]

id prefer firewire as well, but cant please everyone and in the case apple was trying to please the masses. and my brother has an older iPod and a g5 that gets kernel panics quite often from the firewire bus. we cant figure out if its the ipod or the g5 causing it, but just saying its not unheard of.
on the windows side ive had more problems with usb devices. they cause more blue screens and other problems than anything else. usb sucks. i agree, but from a business stand point its clear why apple did it.

[subego]

Uhh... Didn't Apple develop FireWire?

I can't see this as a decision that was made lightly.

[dwishbone]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

"FireWire was developed primarily by Apple Computer in the 1990s, after work defining a slower version of the interface by the IEEE 1394 working committee in the 1980s. IEEE proposed the standard as a serial replacement for the SCSI bus. Apple's development was completed in 1995. It is defined in IEEE standard 1394 which is currently a composite of three documents: the original IEEE Std. 1394-1995, the IEEE Std. 1394a-2000 amendment, and the IEEE Std. 1394b-2002 amendment. Sony's implementation of the system is known as i.Link, and uses only the four signal pins, discarding the two pins that provide power to the device in favor of a separate power connector on Sony's i.Link products."

[tooki]

Frankly, USB 2 is good enough for iPods. Both FireWire and USB 2's throughput exceed that of the iPod hard disks or flash media by a large margin, making it pretty much irrelevant what interface is used.

While I prefer FireWire, USB does "work" these days. Frankly, I've never had any trouble with it on Macs. The only thing FireWire can be used for right now that USB can't is to boot Mac OS X from hard disks/flash media. (Booting a Mac OS X install disc on a USB optical drive does work.) This isn't because of a USB limitation, though. It's a limitation with the Mac OS X bootloader, and I entirely predict that this will eventually be fixed.

tooki

[mduell]

Originally Posted by tooki

Frankly, USB 2 is good enough for iPods. Both FireWire and USB 2's throughput exceed that of the iPod hard disks or flash media by a large margin, making it pretty much irrelevant what interface is used.

While I prefer FireWire, USB does "work" these days. Frankly, I've never had any trouble with it on Macs. The only thing FireWire can be used for right now that USB can't is to boot Mac OS X from hard disks/flash media. (Booting a Mac OS X install disc on a USB optical drive does work.) This isn't because of a USB limitation, though. It's a limitation with the Mac OS X bootloader, and I entirely predict that this will eventually be fixed.

Both FW and USB2 have bandwidth in excess of what the iPods little disk can push, but the chipset that the iPods use is about 40% faster for USB2 than FW.

If not in the PPC era, the Intel Macs should boot off USB; many existing PCs do.

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by mduell

Yea, beacuase Apple has never had a problem with 3 of their own Firewire devices not working together.

And USB devices can cause a kernel panic just by being plugged in.

cheers

W-Y

[icruise]

Originally Posted by mduell

Both FW and USB2 have bandwidth in excess of what the iPods little disk can push, but the chipset that the iPods use is about 40% faster for USB2 than FW..

Are you speaking from experience, or just repeating what you've read? Because USB2 seems to be clearly slower in syncing my new iPod than firewire was with my old one.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

And USB devices can cause a kernel panic just by being plugged in.

So Apple's USB implementation and/or drivers are broken. My point was their Firewire isn't much better.

[JoshuaZ]

NO! Apple needs to add back on a actual Firewire port like in the old models! Thus making it super easy to plus ANY firewire cable into your iPod! Quick, sign more online petitions! Its our only hope!

[volcano]

Oh please.

I agree with those posters that say USB 2 is good enough for the iPod. It is. I'm sick of the lame "I KNOW that USB 2.0 is slower than Firewire..." arguments. We can't do anything about it. Although I can't say I like USB 2.0, I've never had any issues with it whatsoever; USB 1.1 on my PC was a different story though. Since I bought my 20GB iPod w/ color display, I've used firewire to sync it with my Mac. Just to experience a supposed "change", I unpacked the USB 2.0 cable and started using it instead. Is there a noticeable difference in speed worth mentioning at any rate? No!

Frankly, I think Apple dropped Firewire support because A) The module inside the iPod would have increased it's size and B) The lack of firewire support enabled Apple to price the new iPod the SAME as the old 20GB version. That's pretty impressive. Video support, higher quality recordings, a larger screen, 10GB more space, 31% smaller than the previous 20GB version.. for the same old price of $299? I couldn't be happier about it.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Icruise

Are you speaking from experience, or just repeating what you've read? Because USB2 seems to be clearly slower in syncing my new iPod than firewire was with my old one.

This is a bananas and oranges comparison. Your old iPod and your new iPod are different machines, even if they are the same model. You can't draw conclusions based on what you've stated. It's like saying "my Ford sedan gets poor mileage with regular gas, but my previous, Dodge got great mileage with premium, so regular gas is crap."

The only valid comparison you could do is to find out how long it takes your OLD iPod to update with BOTH USB and firewire, and then compare the old iPod's USB time to the new iPod's USB time. This must be done WITH THE SAME UPDATE to be valid, so maybe you should reset both and then let them update the whole thing and time it. That's scientifically valid, though a real pain, but hey! that's the only way you could honestly be able to say what you did.

[dwishbone]

USB2 is faster than firewire on paper, but not real world. USB2 techincally runs at 480 and Firewire at 400. difference is Firewire has a sustained rate of 400. USB2 has a burst speed of 480...it cant maintain that speed. real world sustained speed is more along the lines of about 250-300. its still plenty fast for the iPod. also as mentioned before i never have problems with USB devices on the mac, but on windows its horrible.

[snaggs]

Originally Posted by inkhead

Please apple DO NOT add firewire back onto any ipods, please smack anybody who doesn't have usb2 upside the head.. thank you.

Why? Firewire 400 is about 4 times faster than USB 2.0 in practice. Get a Firewire CF card reader or harddisk and you'll see what I mean.

Please smack your own head into a wall, thanx.

Daniel

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by snaggs

Why? Firewire 400 is about 4 times faster than USB 2.0 in practice. Get a Firewire CF card reader or harddisk and you'll see what I mean.

Please smack your own head into a wall, thanx.

Daniel

It still doesn't matter when the hard drive or flash memory in an iPod can't take input any faster than USB's sustained throughput.

[Geezus_Aach]

USB is everywhere...every computer made or being made has USB ports...apple did this to attract the masses...to be able to sell an ipod to anyone who has a computer. Firewire is nice, but not an industry standard.

fwiw, last night i downloaded 2 videos to my vipod, both over 4 mins. long... using my 'ol' skool' 400dv imac, a cable modem on ethernet, and usb 1.1. Download times were less than 45 seconds per video. It took me only 1 minute to then copy BOTH videos to my vipod... not bad, huh?

[Geezus_Aach]

oh, and i think the next iPod video revision should have bluetooth, wi-fi internet access, and built in speakers. might as well add a keyboard/mouse attachment...and a lite version of os x.

so now we've just created an apple pocket pc device.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by dwishbone

USB2 is faster than firewire on paper, but not real world. USB2 techincally runs at 480 and Firewire at 400. difference is Firewire has a sustained rate of 400. USB2 has a burst speed of 480...it cant maintain that speed. real world sustained speed is more along the lines of about 250-300. its still plenty fast for the iPod. also as mentioned before i never have problems with USB devices on the mac, but on windows its horrible.

Originally Posted by snaggs

Why? Firewire 400 is about 4 times faster than USB 2.0 in practice. Get a Firewire CF card reader or harddisk and you'll see what I mean.

Originally Posted by ghporter

It still doesn't matter when the hard drive or flash memory in an iPod can't take input any faster than USB's sustained throughput.

It's not about the peak, or sustained, speed of the bus.
I will repeat myself.
It's not about the peak, or sustained, speed of the bus.

It's about the chipsets. And for the communications chip that the iPod uses, USB 2.0 is 2.5 - 3 times as fast as Firewire.
iPod Photo, 60GB: Transfer times were excellent as well at a brisk 7.5MB per second over USB 2.0. For those interested, over FireWire (cable sold separately), the iPod Photo reached only 2.6MB per second.
iPod mini, 4GB: Over FireWire, our songs transferred at 2.5MB per second; over USB 2.0, they synced at a much brisker 6.3MB per second.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by mduell

It's not about the peak, or sustained, speed of the bus.
I will repeat myself.
It's not about the peak, or sustained, speed of the bus.

It's about the chipsets. And for the communications chip that the iPod uses, USB 2.0 is 2.5 - 3 times as fast as Firewire.
iPod Photo, 60GB: Transfer times were excellent as well at a brisk 7.5MB per second over USB 2.0. For those interested, over FireWire (cable sold separately), the iPod Photo reached only 2.6MB per second.
iPod mini, 4GB: Over FireWire, our songs transferred at 2.5MB per second; over USB 2.0, they synced at a much brisker 6.3MB per second.

OK, as far as I'm concerned you win hands down. Lab results trump all speculation, and you sure have them!

[jasong]

I'm thinking of starting a class action suit against Apple, asking for my money back and 20% of their profits.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by ghporter

OK, as far as I'm concerned you win hands down. Lab results trump all speculation, and you sure have them!

Since ghporter objected to comparing my old iPod to the new one, I did a couple of tests using my 3rd gen iPod. It can use both USB and firewire. I used my PowerBook. I copied a file that was just under 1GB (996MB) using the finder to the iPod using both USB2 and firewire and used the 5G iPod's handy stopwatch to time it.

By USB2 it took 1 minute 40 seconds. By firewire it took 1 minute 25 seconds.

Then I took a folder of 266 smaller files that added up to around 1GB. This time USB 2 took 2 minutes and 12 seconds and firewire took 2 minutes and 2 seconds.

I then moved over to my Windows XP desktop. By USB 2, the 1GB file took 57 seconds to transfer, and the smaller files took 1 minute 21 seconds. By firewire, the 1GB file took 1 minute 6 seconds and the smaller files took 1 minute 33 seconds.

You can interpret this as you like, but but it does back up my claim that (for me anyway) USB2 is slower than firewire on a Mac (and considering that we're on a Mac board, I think the Mac's USB 2 performance is certainly relevant). It also shows that CNET's results are very strange indeed. I don't have the very same models that they tested, so maybe there's something wonky with their firewire implementation, but even on the Windows machine firewire was only marginally slower than USB 2, not 1/3rd the speed as CNET's tests indicate.

So mduell, do you even have an iPod?

[icruise]

By the way, I know that the writing is on the wall with regard to firewire on the iPods. But I think Apple jumped the gun by going to USB2 only when their own computers sold as little as 2 years ago have no USB 2 and no way to add it.

Anway, there are reasons to choose USB2 over firewire, but speed really isn't one of them, as I hope I have shown.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Icruise

Since ghporter objected to comparing my old iPod to the new one, I did a couple of tests using my 3rd gen iPod.

<snip meaningless comparison>

So mduell, do you even have an iPod?

Your 3G iPod uses a different chipset than the Photo and mini iPods. You've demonstrated that the old chips were faster with FW than USB.

No, I do not own an iPod. I don't listen to music much and when I do I use my PDA (20-30 hours of battery life on a charge). There are few features I want in the iPod before I buy, including gapless playback, 30 hour battery, and a more durable exterior.

[icruise]

Do you have any source aside from the CNET review indicating that firewire performance decreased so dramatically with 4g iPods? I had one briefly and I didn't notice the transfer speed being cut by 2/3rds.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Icruise

Do you have any source aside from the CNET review indicating that firewire performance decreased so dramatically with 4g iPods? I had one briefly and I didn't notice the transfer speed being cut by 2/3rds.

No, but Barefeats has benchmarks showing ~18MBps over USB on a Mac, demonstrating that the ~7MBps the iPod pushes is not limited by the bus or the Mac's chipset.

[icruise]

What I am trying to demonstrate is that firewire (both in general and as it is implemented on the iPod) is not inferior to USB2 in terms of speed.

The times that I recorded for firewire were:

Around 12 MBps for a single 1GB file
Around 8 MBps for lots of MP3 files of 4 or 5MB apiece.

Now I would imagine that the second scenario would be a lot more realistic for someone using an iPod with iTunes, so we'll use that figure. The CNET review quoted a transfer speed of 2.5MBps, so the same batch of songs that took 2 minutes and 2 seconds to transfer would, by their numbers, take 6 minutes and 38 seconds to transfer. That's a pretty major difference.

I find it hard to believe that the 4G ipod would drop to less than 1/3 the firewire transfer speed of the 3G without anyone, you know, noticing it. Especially since we Mac users tend to make a big deal out of even little issues.

Does anyone with a 4G iPod and access to both firewire and USB cables want to do a couple of comparative tests?

[mduell]

And indeed someone did notice the drop in speed; from CNet's review of the 4G: Although slightly slower than the previous generation's transfer rate of 6.9MB per second, the new iPod's numbers came in at a brisk 5.2MB per second over FireWire (equivalent to about one song each second) from Macs and Windows machines. At this point, we attribute the slower transfer speed to the iPod's new chipset.

So Firewire performance has steadily declined. I'd guess this is due to the concentration on lower power consumption, and the Firewire bus being relatively power hungry.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by Icruise

Do you have any source aside from the CNET review indicating that firewire performance decreased so dramatically with 4g iPods?

That looks kinda like... yes it is... a CNET review.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Icruise

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icruise
Do you have any source aside from the CNET review indicating that firewire performance decreased so dramatically with 4g iPods?

That looks kinda like... yes it is... a CNET review.

My previous quotes from CNet were for the Photo and mini, not a 4G, so I assumed you made a typo.

Can you find any other 3G, 4G, Photo, or mini iPod benchmarks online? I looked at Google:"ipod benchmark" but all I see is CNet.

[icruise]

Yes, this is surprisingly difficult to find information about. However, I did find this paragraph in the iLounge review of the 5G iPod:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/rev...0gb-60gb-ipod/

File transfer speeds for the 5G iPod were OK. Without FireWire as a transfer option, you'll need to rely on a USB 2.0 port, the speed of which can be significantly dampened by other things going on with your computer. Without trying to optimize our test machine in an unrealistic way, a test transfer of 548MB of music to the 30GB iPod took exactly 90 seconds, a transfer rate of 6.1 Megs per second. This compared with 7.6 megs per second with an iPod nano, 6.7 Megs per second for the color 4G iPod, and 5 Megs per second with the iPod mini. However, in a longer test transfer of 3.0GB of music (560 songs), the iPod took 10 minutes and 52 seconds, for a transfer rate of 4.6 MB per second.

However it's not entirely clear if the 4G iPod and mini speeds are for firewire or USB. It sounds like they might have been firewire from the way it's written, but then again maybe not.

[icruise]

OK, I finally found something that addresses the matter at hand. It's a discussion thread on Apple's web site

Like many of you, I was concerned about Apple's decision to eliminate Firewire from its new 5th generation video iPod. My concerns were mostly based upon the lack of hard information as to how fast the 5th generation iPods would update with USB 2.0 now that Firewire is gone.

With that in mind, I performed a simple test to determine the difference in update time with Firewire vs. USB 2.0. Specifically, my iTunes library contains 6719 items totalling 32.41GB. Of that total, I have 6 music videos which were uploaded onto my new 60GB iPod Video. In both cases, I did not load any photos onto the iPods. The upload times are:

5th Generation 60 GB iPod Video via USB 2.0 - 1 hour, 44 minutes
4th Generation 60 GB iPod via Firewire - 1 hour, 22 minutes

For what it's worth, I performed the test using a Powermac G5, Dual 2gig, with 4gigs RAM, running OSX 10.4.2 and iTunes 6.0.1.

So he got 6.58 mbps with firewire on the old 4G iPod photo, and 5.19 with the 5G iPod using USB2. That's slower than my test, but his methodology was different. Actually syncing with iTunes involves more than just copying the files, so it would take more time.

If CNET's figures were correct, it would have taken him 3.6 hours to copy instead of 1 hour 22 minutes.

Of course, this still leaves open the possibility that 4G iPods are only a lot slower when using firewire on Windows (since I imagine CNET used a Windows machine for their test) but that seems unlikely.

[jasong]

Just making a guess here, but could the HD in the different generation iPods have something to do with the difference?

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by jasong

Just making a guess here, but could the HD in the different generation iPods have something to do with the difference?

Not only the specific HD model, but also the interface chipset could affect transfer speeds.

Icruise, did you do the other half of the test I described-find out how fast the USB connection with your new iPod (and the same files) is? That would be very interesting-though it still won't isolate the connection from the system. As jasong points out, the destination device has to be able to accept data, so it throtles throughput to a level it can accept.

[icruise]

Originally Posted by ghporter

Not only the specific HD model, but also the interface chipset could affect transfer speeds.

Icruise, did you do the other half of the test I described-find out how fast the USB connection with your new iPod (and the same files) is? That would be very interesting-though it still won't isolate the connection from the system. As jasong points out, the destination device has to be able to accept data, so it throtles throughput to a level it can accept.

No, and frankly I've already spent more time on this than I should have. The new iPods are reasonably fast with USB2. The main thing I wanted to demonstrate was that firewire was as good or better, especially on the Mac.

[icruise]

double post

[Hairllama]

Originally Posted by Icruise

double post

I agree that Firewire is faster, but I have a consipiracy theory about no Firewire. I recently read (rumor) that Apple was not going to include Firewire booting on the Intel Macs. Could it be that part of the Intel deal is to drop Firewire from future Macs? That would explain the ipod's non support of Firewire.

[ryju]

Just so you know, no internet petition has ever worked in the history of the internet.

Good luck though!

[Person Man]

Originally Posted by Hairllama

I agree that Firewire is faster, but I have a consipiracy theory about no Firewire. I recently read (rumor) that Apple was not going to include Firewire booting on the Intel Macs. Could it be that part of the Intel deal is to drop Firewire from future Macs? That would explain the ipod's non support of Firewire.

No, they won't drop Firewire, because so many digital video cameras use it.

[Helmling]

WHAT!

I didn't even know that the new iPods didn't have FireWire. That sucks!

I ain't gettin' one now, that's for sure!

Of course, I wasn't going to get one before either, but...

[inkhead]

nobodoy cares, get a life. so the test you did on your computers, came out 20 seconds longer. Oh that's horrible my god, if only you'd have those 20 seconds of your life back. Maybe if you had the 5 minutes of your life back you took to post you could use it for something productive...


Anyone who has USB 1 shouldn't be dropping $400 on a new ipod PERIOD. If you have only usb 1 your computer is an OUTDATED PIECE OF CRAP (not directly to this poster but to everyone) REGARDLESS OF WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT, "but it's only 2 years old!" stop your whining. Use your damn old ipod, and either buy a new computer or shut the f*ck up. I'm tired of progress and innovation being HALTED by legacy support for everything. YOU THINK apple didn't think about dropping firewire for MONTHS before they did it? EVER LITTLE DETAIL WAS THOUGHT THROUGH AND TESTED.

Anybody who can WASTE $400 on a new mp3 player, can figure out how to afford a new computer. Hell even a windows machine from the last 5 years has USB2, you can pick one up for $100.

Originally Posted by Icruise

Since ghporter objected to comparing my old iPod to the new one, I did a couple of tests using my 3rd gen iPod. It can use both USB and firewire. I used my PowerBook. I copied a file that was just under 1GB (996MB) using the finder to the iPod using both USB2 and firewire and used the 5G iPod's handy stopwatch to time it.

By USB2 it took 1 minute 40 seconds. By firewire it took 1 minute 25 seconds.

Then I took a folder of 266 smaller files that added up to around 1GB. This time USB 2 took 2 minutes and 12 seconds and firewire took 2 minutes and 2 seconds.

I then moved over to my Windows XP desktop. By USB 2, the 1GB file took 57 seconds to transfer, and the smaller files took 1 minute 21 seconds. By firewire, the 1GB file took 1 minute 6 seconds and the smaller files took 1 minute 33 seconds.

You can interpret this as you like, but but it does back up my claim that (for me anyway) USB2 is slower than firewire on a Mac (and considering that we're on a Mac board, I think the Mac's USB 2 performance is certainly relevant). It also shows that CNET's results are very strange indeed. I don't have the very same models that they tested, so maybe there's something wonky with their firewire implementation, but even on the Windows machine firewire was only marginally slower than USB 2, not 1/3rd the speed as CNET's tests indicate.

So mduell, do you even have an iPod?

[inkhead]

duplicate, forum reload issues.