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A comment on Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire.

Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by charlesju on Friday October 17, 2008 @04:03PM (#335949)
I think this was a necessary transition for Macs to take. There is no reason to have so many different ports serving the same purpose. You can do everything with USB 2.0 that you can do with Firewire. USB has essentially won the war, supporting Firewire would just perpetuate this unnecessary battle even longer. In the long run, this is better for the consumer.
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by greyboy on Friday October 17, 2008 @04:37PM (#335981)
Until just recently, camcorders work off firewire ports. Firewire audio interfaces are much more advanced than their USB counterparts. And users with lots of money wrapped up in firewire (like me) cannot substitute USB in.
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by kylec on Friday October 17, 2008 @04:18PM (#335964)
The only thing I use FireWire for, Target Disk Mode, cannot be done with USB. This omission has made the new MacBooks a lot less appealing.
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by kqr2 on Friday October 17, 2008 @05:32PM (#336028)
An alternative is to use an ethernet cross-over cable and just use standard file transfer methods.

Or perhaps someone will write an os x driver to take advantage of usb-usb (aka usb bridge / networking) cables that work for PCs.

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-compu...

The advantage of these solutions is that you can work with other non mac os x computers.

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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by kylec on Friday October 17, 2008 @07:37PM (#336122)
What they should have done is used the ethernet port for 1394c:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire#FireWire_S800T_.28IEEE...

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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by cstejerean on Friday October 17, 2008 @11:23PM (#336228)
Yes, lots of hacks and workarounds. Unlike Target Disk mode however it's not something I can explain to my parents over the phone.
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by Angostura on Friday October 17, 2008 @07:05PM (#336106)
Sorry - how exactly do you mount the disk of an unbootable Mac on another machine, via an Ethernet cable?
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by iigs on Friday October 17, 2008 @07:26PM (#336116)
The protocol you'd use is iSCSI. You could hack this together with commercial iSCSI initiators on the working machine, and some kind of LiveCD target, but Apple would need to release an initiator in OSX to make it slick and easy. There is one for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, and Solaris, so asking for this feature in OSX doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by jeromewbrock on Friday October 17, 2008 @09:29PM (#336175)
look up openfiler

http://www.openfiler.com/

put that on a boot cd and you're all set.

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Re:Jobs responds to outrage over MacBook's missing FireWire by kqr2 on Friday October 17, 2008 @08:11PM (#336139)
You can try booting off of a live CD which in most cases will allow you to mount the disk and access the ethernet port.
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