Apple Computer Inc reports that over 20 new Firewire (or IEEE 1394) enabled devices were introduced at last week’s MacWorld event in San Francisco. FireWire ports are now being included on all the new G3 PowerMacs. There are already around 4 million Firewire-enabled digital video cameras on the market, meaning that the most obvious immediate impact of Firewire for Mac users will be desktop digital video. But the new devices also included hard drives, printers, scanners, analog to digital converters, digital audio mixers and large capacity storage devices. New products included a 2.2Gb Firewire-enabled Orb removable storage drive from Castlewood Systems Inc, a printer interface card from Epson Corp, CD-recorder from Mactell Corp, audio-video converter from Newer Technologies Inc, and a digital audio mixer from Yamaha Ltd. Apple expects Firewire, which is also supported by Intel Corp and Microsoft Corp, to show up in a variety of consumer multimedia devices, including set-top boxes, digital VCRs, DVD players and digital televisions. It supplies data transmission rates of up to 400 megabits per seconds, and up to 63 devices can be attached to a single bus. Firewire devices, which look increasingly likely to replace the more cumbersome and much slower SCSI, can be hot plugged into a PC without the need to reboot, and multiple computers can be attached to the same Firewire bus for peripheral sharing in small workgroups. Firewire is about four times faster than USB, the Universal Serial Bus also supported by Apple, which offers speeds of up to 120 megabits per second and which was designed for peripherals requiring low and medium bandwidth. Apple says that there are now over 100 USB Universal Serial Bus peripherals available for the iMac and PowerMac G3 machines, 40 of them launched at MacWorld last week. The new USB devices included printers, graphics tablets and storage devices. Apple says it’s now come down firmly on the side of high-speed serial interfaces and plug-and-play, as opposed to parallel ports.
