It has been around for a long time now. Why am I seeing fewer and fewer things use it (like HDs)?
It provides faster bus speeds, but so does USB2.0…so why use it if USB ports are more common? In the early days of USB1.1 (also the early days of DV camcorders), firewire was popular because it was faster. Now it serves almost no purpose.
Because it’s generally not needed anymore thanks to USB 2.0.
I’m confused exactly as to what USB 2.0 is.
USB used to be way slower then firewire, but because Apple decided to be dicks and charge per port to license firewire, since they held the majority of the intellectual property of it, the USB core companies saw this as excessive and decided to work on upgrading the standard so USB would have speeds comparable to firewire.
Yeah and thats a good thing. Unlike other technology “upgrades” which are more of a way for one company to shoehorn licensing control from another, USB1.1 -> USB2.0 uses the same port and interface. You can’t tell the difference between the two. The main difference is 2.0 is way faster than the original 1.1 standard…plus i think any machine with 2.0 ports needs to be able to boot from USB? Not sure about that though.
Firewire is still faster than USB2.0, i think, but its a marginal difference now (and new technology like eSATA is getting rid of firewire for good. Back in the day you couldn’t even run things like external drives over USB.