Iria

It's not a good sign when the developer of a format doesn't support it, yet with the announcement of its new MacBooks last Tuesday, Apple omitted FireWire ports from the new models. This stirred up a lot of criticism among Apple users, who expressed it on forums.
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Source: Tech-Ex

ExitiosuS

Weird that this is such a big deal...

I haven't used Firewire in years. Maybe even a decade, lol.
Oh well... my Laptop has one currently, but it's just a waste of a port. I'd rather it be an extra USB 2.0 port... I've only got 4. :/

Tipstaff

Firewire is far more reliable when transferring very large files back and fourth to external storage compared to USB. I've seen USB, especially USB2.0 cause a high rate of transfer failures with large files. Sometimes those files will be corrupted, or you will see a lot of timeout errors. In contrast I've yet to see that with Firewire. And with external video/audio editing or capture hardware, Firewire can't be beat.

Still, is it necessary for Macbooks, whose major market is the average consumer, to have Firewire? Maybe not, but with Macbook Pros they'd be stupid to remove Firewire given who uses those laptops. A very large percentage of Macbook Pro users do some sort of editing on them, and of those that do almost all of them use Firewire driven/capable devices.

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