Is Apple aban­don­ing FireWire or is it just poor mar­ket­ing? We’ll get to that later. FireWire or IEEE 1394 is a serial bus inter­face for high-​speed com­mu­ni­ca­tions and isochro­nous real-​time data trans­fer, fre­quently used in per­sonal com­put­ers, dig­i­tal video camera’s and data stor­age devices. The inter­face is also known by the brand names of FireWire (Apple Inc.), i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx (Texas Instru­ments). FireWire has replaced Par­al­lel SCSI in many appli­ca­tions, due to lower imple­men­ta­tion costs and a sim­pli­fied, more adapt­able cabling system. IEEE 1394 has been adopted as the High Def­i­n­i­tion Audio-​Video Net­work Alliance (HANA) stan­dard con­nec­tion inter­face for A/V (audio/visual) com­po­nent com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­trol. FireWire is also avail­able in wire­less, fiber optic, and coax­ial ver­sions using the isochro­nous pro­to­cols.

So why the hell has Apple ditched FireWire in the new Mac­Books? The Mac­Book Pro has a FireWire 800 port. Will these ports also be dumped with the revamped iMac? Is this due to the Intel deal or only in con­sumer machines? Only time will tell! FireWire is far supe­rior to USB in a lot of ways. But with USB 3.0 at the hori­zon, which aims at speeds of 4.8 Gbits/s (600MB/s), FireWire S3200 (which uses the same con­nec­tor as exist­ing FireWire 800 and is fully com­pat­i­ble with exist­ing S400 and S800 devices) will soon be out­dated! One thing is clear it will com­pete with the forth­com­ing USB 3.0. Did the market choose (cheaper) USB 2.0 in favor of FireWire 400 (VHS vs Video2000)? Apple states clearly yes with the release of the new Mac­Books. But if Apple wants to com­pete with USB 3.0 it HAS to include it in con­sumer machines because Intel will surely roll it out like USB 2.0 (no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between high-​end or low-​end). USB doesn’ t sup­port Target Disk Mode for man­ag­ing files or cloning sys­tems, as USB 2.0’s archi­tec­ture lacks the capac­ity to sup­port that fea­ture. Con­clu­sion Yes and No, the future isn’t quite clear, for con­sumers USB will prob­a­bly do but for Pro’s Apple prob­a­bly keep FireWire 800 a little while alive.

For all ya gadget lovers out there, Dane Elec announced the future avail­abil­ity of a pencil allow­ing record­ing your text as you write it.
The system is based on 2 com­po­nents: a pencil and a small USB key (on the top) which fea­ture micro­phone and elec­tron­ics able to local­ize pencil’s posi­tions and move­ments. Vector-​based infor­ma­tion are then recorded on the 1GB NAND memory included, you will then simply trans­fer the writ­ten text to a com­puter thanks to a ded­i­cated appli­ca­tion (Mac OS X ver­sion avail­able).
The ZPen should be avail­able for Q1 2008 and its price is announced around €129.

I’ve bought an exter­nal hard drive from Iomega from the Silver Series for €184,-
The short mes­sage: that’s el-​cheepo! Stor­age cost diddly-​squat nowa­days, so this was the time to give my stor­age a little Oompf. I’ve con­nected it to my Air­port Extreme, so every­body in the familiy is happy.
Just to put it in per­spec­tive: the National Archives of Britain, which hold 900 years of writ­ten mate­r­ial, con­tains nearly 60 ter­abytes of data. What can you do with all those lovely bytes? Here are the tech specs for this drive:

• Holds 4,000,000 photos
• Holds 18,500 hours of music
• Holds 1,500 hours of video
• USB 2.0 Trans­fer Rate - 480 Mbits/s
• Hard Drives = 2 SATA
• Rota­tional Speed - 7200 RPM
• Memory Cache - up to 8MB
• Format - FAT32
• Volume Con­fig­u­ra­tion - JBOD