Whither USB2.0
Derrick Story writes in his blog on oreillynet about USB 2.0 probably not making an appearance on the mac any time soon. I've talked on some lists about this, as I would have thought Apple would have already had it if they were going to any time soon. Some people think this will help boost the firewire market and actually make USB 2.0 against firewire, and that on the basis of merit firewire will stomp all over USB.
Unfortunately merit often has nothing to do with one technology winning over the other, and if you are stuck with the technology that lost you're screwed. This is really, really not a good thing for mac users, or for Apple. Here's why:
USB 1.1 is a decent protocol, but dead slow. It just wasn't really made for a lot of the needs that are out there right now, such as digital cameras or hard drives. Apple has a technology out there called "firewire" which is a very good solution for peripherals that need the faster speeds, but isn't suited for things like mice when you compare it to USB1.1. It's pretty much agreed that firewire is architecturally the better system, yet the vast majority of peripherals are USB-based, not firewire, even when they would be much better served by firewire.
You can boil down the reasons why into: apple scared off adopters early with licensing issues, intel's chipsets make USB practically ubiquitous now so 3rd parties know that users buying their products will almost certainly have USB but not firewire, implementing USB chipsets/licensing is dirt cheap compared to firewire.
Nothing has really changed from the above- USB still has all of those advantages, plus speed approaching firewire and backwards compatibility with USB1.
Firewire will always be a bit faster than USB2, but will USB2 be fast enough? In almost all cases, yeah. First, the mac market is irrelevant. It just doesn't factor into the manufacturer's minds, it's much too small. So we have to look at how the PC user uses peripherals, and what you find is that while Apple's computers have these very tight and un-upgradeable designs compared to PC users.
If a PC user wants to add a hard drive to their box, most often they have extra slots in their mini-atx form factor and just slap one in whereas a mac user has to go out and buy an external firewire hard drive for their iMac. Since a USB1 hard drive is painful to experience due to the speed of the interface, and since mac users often can't add extra internal drives they end up buying firewire drives which just usually aren't necessary for the PC.
So the vast majority of USB2-targeted peripherals will be things like digital cameras, scanners, cd burners, webcams, printers, high-capacity MP3 players and camcorders.
All the items I just mentioned are either constrained by USB1, and need something faster, but don't need the capabilities of firewire and USB2 will do. There are even a bunch of places where firewire was chosen simply because USB1 wasn't fast enough but now will probably switch to USB2...
The market for USB2 drives is exploding- they're pretty much everywhere now, and fairly soon the low and mid-range digital cameras, scanners, burners and printers will be shipping as USB2, not USB1 or firewire. Without USB2 support on the mac, built-in, mac users will be forced to either pay for "mac versions" which are always much more expensive or they'll have to make sure they have compatible drivers and buy external cards.
Since many macs don't have PCI slots or any way to upgrade anymore they'll just end up using USB2 products hooked up to USB1 ports at a fraction of the speed. I can of course see why Apple wants to not push a competitors technology, but it seems to be a case where they've blown it early in the race and they can either try to ride the wave of USB2 and let firewire slip into its niche or go through a long struggle, hurting their users all the way.
Posted by drunkenbatmanMarch 20, 2003, at 12:19 AM
