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MacCentral har en längre artikel om Apples två nyaste implementerade standarder: FireWire 800 och 802.11g, dvs AirPort Extreme.

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"Speed, speed, speed," was the answer that Boger gave as to why Apple decided to move to FireWire 800. Boger said that Apple also decided to implement FireWire 800 because of the added distance and speed that the high-end of the specification provides.

However, the 1394b, or FireWire 800, specification provides for transfer rates of up to 3,200Mbps over specialized fiber optic cabling. Additionally, FireWire 800 can be used over both standard Cat-5 Ethernet cabling or optical fiber at distances of up to 100 meters.

Consumers will most likely only see FireWire 800, with later increases to FireWire 1,600 or even 3,200 over copper cabling up to 4.5 meters away as FireWire evolves.

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Maxtor was demonstrating two daisy chained 200GB FireWire 800 drives striped into one RAID array on a Mac OS X desktop. Paul Striet, a marketing manager at Maxtor, said that they were not making any FireWire 800 announcements at Macworld other than the "demo car" array he was demonstrating.

Streit said that the major benefit for FireWire 800 is the increased bandwidth. "Current drives are faster than FireWire 400," Streit said. "So even with one drive, users can have a portable drive that is just as fast as an internal drive with FireWire 800."

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Apple has yet to commit to including USB 2.0 on any of its machines, but Rubinstein said the company is watching the technology. All of Apple´s current CPUs are come with the slower USB 1.1 technology, which is mainly used to attach keyboards, a mouse or other peripherals to the computer.

"We think FireWire is a fundamentally better technology," said Rubinstein.

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This week also brought together developers for the annual PlugFest, an event to show-off the latest technology. Companies attending the event included Maxtor showing a prototype FireWire 800 hard drive; LaCie showing a prototype FireWire 800 hard drive; Oxford Semiconductor showing a FireWire audio chip that they used to create a 5.1 speaker system; SmartDisk showing FireWire hard drives; Texas Instruments had their PHY Chip which is used in each of these products. Additionally, FireWire prototypes of cameras, recorders and even a coffee mug warmer were shown.

Developers attending the event joked that the coffee mug warmer would never have made it if it were USB 2 since it would take a week to warm it up.

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Jag tyckte "Oxford Semiconductor showing a FireWire audio chip that they used to create a 5.1 speaker system" lät väldigt spännande faktiskt.

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Apple embraces two new fast standards