Yes. I am bummed. I've enjoyed Firewire (aka IEEE 1394) for years now and it seems Apple is really pushing consumers toward USB2. To not include a Firwire cable was one thing. Okay, if I can afford an iPod, then I can afford a freekin' cable. But now with the release of the nano, Firewire is not even supported for song syncing. Even though it uses the same dock connector as previous iPods that can use either Firewire OR USB2, the nano can only use a Firewire cable for charging. WTF? While USB2 may hold an ever so slight advantage in transfer speed (480Mbps for USB2 and 400Mbps for Firewire... ooh big deal), Firewire is iosynchronous. In other words, all devices on the Firewire bus have the full bandwidth, while on the USB2 bus, all the devices share the bandwidth. My other problem with this, USB2 implementation on the Mac has always SUCKED when compared to a PeeCee. There's an article on BareFeats.com that supports this. Sure it's an older article, but you get the gist. The other issue is that older Macs (like mine - G4-533 MHz Dual Digital Audio) do not have USB 2.0, only USB 1.0, which yes... is backwards compatible, but only up to 12Mbps. Even my wife's Mac (G4-1.25 GHz Dual MDD) has USB 1.1. I know we can get a USB2 cards for our Macs. That's not really the point. I DON'T FUCKING LIKE USB!!!! Why not go with Firewire 800? USB can't even hold a candle to Firewire 800.

Apple did not explicitly state a reason for excluding FireWire on the Nano. Presumably, the company wanted to save the expense of supporting both USB and FireWire, as well as any power and space cost to including both connections.

Steve Jobs really should have checked with me on this first. [-(

Source: c/net's news.com.

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