The Null Device

Apple giveth, Intel taketh away

Another casualty of Apple's move to Intel: FireWire 800. Apparently Intel's chipsets don't support it, so the new Macs don't either, and that massive FW800 hard disk you bought at a premium suddenly doesn't look quite so futureproof. Perhaps FW800 will reemerge when Intel pull their finger out and revamp their chip sets, or perhaps it has officially been declared stillborn, with the future of Apple's hardware platforms to be decided at WinHEC conferences from now on, along with all the other PC manufacturers.

There are 3 comments on "Apple giveth, Intel taketh away":

Posted by: threeze http://neuralvoid.com Mon Jan 23 23:35:32 2006

I only hope that someone comes out with a FireWire 800 ExpressCard/34 thingy.

Posted by: Fugly http:// Tue Jan 24 00:23:52 2006

Apple's Expresscard slot will take cards which can offer *two* Firewire800 ports.

It boils down to (1) Apple using vanilla Intel hardware (w/ Intel having no interest in Firewire) and (2) the ability to add features for those who need it, while keeping costs down (as we see with Apple's removal of an internal dial-up modem).

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/ Tue Jan 24 08:06:38 2006

Though the removal of a dialup modem is rather timely, though, much as the removal of a floppy drive on the Macintosh was.