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sailin74 · Sep 8, 2003, 10:15 PM

What are the thoughts on Apple finally caving and putting USB 2.0 on the boxes?

I'm mixed about it. For things like the USB 2.0 keychain drives it's awesome, but I'm concerned about driver compatability issues. I suppose that Apple will do their standard stellar job of writing drivers so it shouldn't be a problem.

Is this the beginning of the end for Firewire? I've heard that USB 2.0 and FW 800 are close to same performance, but I'm not sure.

I'm suprised I haven't heard more about this recent addition.

-Jason

willab · Sep 8, 2003, 10:40 PM

No, firewire is on all DV cameras, it will be here for a long time. FW 800 is 800 mbps USB 2 is 480Mbps FW 400 is 400 mbps.

giantmike · Sep 8, 2003, 11:03 PM

Cave? Apple was the first computer maker to put USB 1.0 as a standard port on computers. If it wasn't for Apple, we may not had USB devices today.

As for drivers, Apple normally only makes generic drivers (for USB mice, digital cameras, etc.). It's up to the company to write Mac drivers for their products if they want users to have beyond basic functuality (Or work at all in the case of printers, scanners, etc.).

Putting USB 2.0 on the G and now the iMac is a good move IMHO. Apple needs to embrace these standards.

jbelch3 · Sep 9, 2003, 07:46 AM

Originally posted by willab:
No, firewire is on all DV cameras, it will be here for a long time. FW 800 is 800 mbps USB 2 is 480Mbps FW 400 is 400 mbps.

Everyone keeps quoting these specs. Unfortunately I've never heard of any FW 800 device achieving this type of throughput. I've heard that even FW 400 hard drives do not max out the 400 mbps.

fireside · Sep 9, 2003, 08:34 AM

its a theoritical max speed. meaning it could happen, but usually doesnt. i'd say fw 800 right now (its a fairly new technology so im sure its going to be not as good as it can) gets maybe 600 mps, while usb 2.0 might get 400 mps, and firewire 400 might get 350.

NYCFarmboy · Sep 9, 2003, 10:01 AM

I'm very happy Apple has started putting USB2 on their new macs. I hope there will be some sort of firmware update so that current 1.42 dual G4's/1.25 G4's can also use USB2.

I understand that the guts of USB2 are in the machines presently, but that Apple has to release a firmware update to use it.

I wonder if that will happen?

sailin74 · Sep 9, 2003, 12:15 PM

Cave meaning that USB 1.X should be used for slower speed devices ie Mice, Keyboards, printers, but Firewire for Drives and High data through put. Apple didn't put USB 2.0 on machines for a long time, it must have been on purpose. Personally I think Firewire and USB 1.x are quite complimentary but like the added functionality of the 2.0.

I've also heard that FW 800 doesn't hit it target performance numbers. I have no way to test to back that up, but that's been the "word on the street."

-Jason

ryarber · Sep 9, 2003, 03:26 PM

Originally posted by sailin74:
What are the thoughts on Apple finally caving and putting USB 2.0 on the boxes?

I'm mixed about it. For things like the USB 2.0 keychain drives it's awesome, but I'm concerned about driver compatability issues. I suppose that Apple will do their standard stellar job of writing drivers so it shouldn't be a problem.

Is this the beginning of the end for Firewire? I've heard that USB 2.0 and FW 800 are close to same performance, but I'm not sure.

I'm suprised I haven't heard more about this recent addition.

-Jason

I think it is great. It allows you to mix and match some things to be more efficient on your machine.

As far as the key drives, they are like the compact flash cards readers, etc. They do support USB 2.0, however, their speeds currently are only marginally better than the USB 1.1 devices. There is some performance advantage to using them with a USB 2.0 connection, but not that great.

As far as the comparison between 1394a/b and USB 2.0.... You wouldn't be able to test the throughput of a 1394b chain unless you had something like a RAID array there that could actually chew up the bandwidth of the USB 2.0 drives. Currently, hard drives don't max out either spec, but you can get some burst throughputs in excess of USB 2.0 or 1394a throughputs. However, the sustained throughput is where the current harddrives are lacking.

I don't see any problem with apple having two competing standards peacefully coexisting on the same machine. I remember back in the '80's and '90's when mac users couldn't get peripherals because we only had ADB, AppleTalk, and SCSI inputs while the rest of the 95% of computer users could go to WalMart and buy a parallel printer for a mere $350 or get an IDE hard drive, etc. We were stuck ordering our peripherals from MacWarehouse or some other mail order house. because no stores within a hundred miles would cater to just mac users with peripherals that did't sell that well.

Glad to see Apple do an about face and rely on standards rather than what they did back then.

Eriamjh · Sep 12, 2003, 07:48 AM

Panther has built in ability to use USB2 for EHCI compliant PCI cards.

The G4s with the NEC USB2 controller have it disabled in the machine's firmware. Yesterday's Xlr8yourmac.com page had something about someone trying to figure out a hack to make it work. Check it out. Someone will probably figure it out.