Apple users rage over missing FireWire

Apple customers unhappy that the company dropped FireWire from its newest notebooks are venting their frustrations on the company's support forum in several hundred messages.

Within minutes of Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapping up a launch event in Cupertino, users started several threads on the company's support forum blasting the omission of a FireWire port on the new MacBook laptop.

"Apple really screwed up with no FireWire port," said Russ Tolman , who inaugurated a thread that by Thursday had collected more than 200 messages and been viewed over 5,000 times.

"No MacBook with [FireWire] -- no new MacBook for me," added Simon Meyer in a message posted today.

The two new MacBook configurations, which are priced at US$1,299 and $1,599, include a pair of USB 2.0 ports, as did earlier models, but lack the FireWire 400 port their predecessors boasted.

FireWire is Apple's name for the IEEE 1394 interface and data transfer specification. Ironically, Apple has been one of the biggest boosters of the spec and was one of the primary drivers of the technology when it began development in the late 1980s.

Apple first added FireWire to its computers in early 1999, when Jobs -- who had returned three years earlier to the company he co-founded -- unveiled the technology at a MacWorld Conference and Expo. "Think of FireWire as USB, but rather than running at 12 megabits-per-second it's running at 400 megabits-per-second," said Jobs then. "And it's already an industry standard."

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