Down these mean streets a man must go, and if he's carrying a modern camcorder, then it's going to have USB 2.0, not FireWire. And that, in a nutshell, is why it's farewell, my lovely, to FireWire - according to no less an authority than Steve Jobs.
There's been plenty of outrage and despondency from would-be Apple MacBook buyers over the fact that the latest versions of the low-end laptops don't have FireWire, the high-speed data transfer system invented by Apple and Sony that basically kicks USB's bum (even USB2.0). It's being taken out the back and getting an icepick in the neck.
And for why? Because, as Jobs explained to an upset customer who emailed him, and reproduced at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (which says it's checked the headers; we'll take it on trust), "Actually, all of the new HD camcorders ofthe past few years use USB 2."
The guy's complaint being that "I used to tell friends: 'you can easily connect your digital camcorder and edit your own movies!' Now I'll just tell them that Dell and Sony still make affordable laptops that have a firewire [sic] connection."
(I had almost exactly the same conversation with my own brother, who's considering a MacBook: I had to ask the video question, since people update their camcorders less often than their computers, I think.)
True, Pure's Flip and the Kodak Zi6 and others do use USB2 - even though it's an inferior method for data transfer compared to Firewire (the reasons are complex, but basically USB2 involves the CPU, while FireWire is peer-to-peer, so if you're doing anything at the same time as moving data, Firewire is faster).
So wait - FireWire is faster, yet USB2 wins out? Yup. Why? Because USB was originally driven by a group that included Intel, which pushed it further with USB2. Intel dominates in this field; the Intel-backed standard wins. It's a classic case of "good enough" coming through in technology. (Apple uses FireWire for other things beside video, including a "Target Disk Mode" that lets you boot from an external FW drive - useful for repairing problems on your main disk from a backup, or transferring data from an old computer to a new one. That's not possible with USB2, apparently.)
So say a long goodbye to FireWire; it became the little sister to USB. It's getting pushed out of a high window and you might not see it again. [Ta PointyShinyBurning for suggesting "a long goodbye".]
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