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At the time the IEEE 1394 standard is finished, Apple decided to charge US$ 1 for every single port that uses the FireWire in a PC. This resulted in significant fallout for FireWire, particularly from Intel. Other computer makers also found this to be economically unattainable, thus paved the way for USB. Many found this a reason enough to drop the support for IEEE 1394, and try to improve the USB specification instead. Apple finally dropped their demand to US$ 0.25, but it was too late.
Availability
The greatest achievement of USB is evident when Apple’s own iPod, formerly outfitted with FireWire ports, neglected FireWire support in favor of USB.
Final Words
While USB is present in almost everything, FireWire is not by any means vanished. Some computers intended for home or professional audio/video use have built-in FireWire ports including Apple, Dell and Sony laptop computers.
Which one should you choose then, FireWire or USB?
It is not actually that hard to decide. Unless you intend to do video editing on your PC, USB is the safer bet. Besides, even if yours only has one of them and needs the other one, it can be easily supplemented by an expansion card.
I have 5 firewire ports, and 6 USB ports, i find that not many things at all are even compatible with firewire, almost everything uses USB (my computer is very new, it has a Q6600 quad core, 4gb ram, liquid cooling,
I think the only thing I have ever purchased that required firewire was a sony camcorder, I still haven’t managed to get the footage of the tapes!
firewire is used mostly in video camcorders and related devices. there aren’t many other devices that use it at all. usb wont be taken over by firewire because of its comparatively small market presence even if it may be a better product. just like the vhs/beta max saga its not always the better product that wins. with the relies of usb 3.0 looming firewire will find itself unable to compete at all.
My SONY DIGITAL Handycam
only works with fire wire.
NOTE to phil:
Use the new Ulead video studio.
It is just what you need for transfering tapes to any format
on your hardrive.
I’m looking forward to USB 3.0 which set to multiply USB 2.0 bandwidth tenfold when available in 2010. It will make a big difference to peripherals such as external HDD.
I still believe that USB connectivity is not perfect. I have found that USB internal addon cards are very flaky, where as USB built into the motherboard work OK, however they to can be problematic. On board USB will often not recognize a device properly because it will only work with the first device plugged into the port. In other words these sometime these USB ports can a have residual memory issue. This problem can only be fixed by draining residual power left in the capacitors by unplugging the computer from the wall socket and leaving it overnight to completely drain the system of power.