FireWire was Apple’s brand name for the IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus. The standard was started by Apple, but funded by a working group with money from Texas Instruments, Sony, IBM, and others. Apple intended FireWire to be the replacement for the SCSI standard–which was a cumbersome and finicky way of connecting devices together.
IEEE 1394 was included in the PC98 spec–which was accepted by Intel, Microsoft and other PC OEMs. It was understood and agreed upon that IEEE 1394 was to be the future of connectivity between computer devices as well as consumer electronics.
However, after years of promotion and use by Apple, the entire standard failed for a few key reasons.
First, Apple demanded a royalty fee of several dollars for each PC using FireWire–which was originally Apple’s patent. The chips used for IEEE 1394 also proved to be power hungry and unusable for many PC laptops.
Instead of FireWire, we all got USB 1.1, which was open, available and low-powered. It’s major drawback was its slow-as-dirt speed.
Now, Apple no longer makes FireWire 400 ports into any of their products. And Apple remains just a handful of companies to be still using FireWire 800 standard.
Thunderbolt was announced by Apple and Intel on Feb 24th, 2011, as the next big thing for high-speed ports. However, close to a year later, the grand promise of Thunderbolt remains generally unfulfilled.
There are just a handful of drives available (at the Apple Store mostly) that have Thunderbolt ports. And most of these are ridiculously expensive. There is news that in spring of 2012, there will be some PC makers (Acer and Asus) shipping products with Thunderbolt. However, the bad news is that HP–which is the world’s largest PC maker, despite initially claiming support for the standard, has decided against Thunderbolt. Also, neither Lenovo, Toshiba, or Dell–another large PC maker, has decided to go with Thunderbolt.
Many EOMs and manufacturers are also facing production issues and chip shortages to fully implement the Thunderbolt protocol.
Given all of these problems, analysts think that it may be a year from now before you see commonly available drives and other hardware with Thunderbolt.
A year is a very long time in the tech world. A lot can happen. Reports are already circulating of the Wireless USB standard–which offers 480Mbps at 9 ft and 110Mbps at 30ft, that may be worth considering as the way to connect devices.
My guess is that whenever the promised Thunderbolt-equipped hardware arrives–if it ever does, it will probably be too little, too late.
Sources: tuaw, arstechnica, larryjordan, techrepublic, cnet.
