SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LET GO TO MOVE FORWARD

Apple recently introduced its newest MacBook computer that sports many of Apple's latest designs. These include its unibody enclosure where the computer is fashioned from a solid piece of aluminum. Being carved out from a block of metal has many advantages including the added strength and rigidity not found in its predecessors. Other new features are its glossy LED-backlit display, up to five times faster graphics performance and the new, smooth glass Multi-Touch trackpad. But even with all these wonderful new features and abilities, I just kept hearing the same lament from people who have owned Apple products in the past and who were considering the purchase of the newer model. Apple didn't include a FireWire port. This got me to thinking about something that's been bugging me for a long time and I guess this was just what it took to bring it to the surface. How long do you have to support a legacy technology?

Take the floppy disc for example. Does your computer still have a floppy disc drive and if it does, when was the last time you used it? What about external hard drives that use the SCSI interface? Or how about a parallel and serial interface for a printer? I can go on and on citing examples of older technology that you may still have laying around but do you really want a new computer supporting al of these antiquated devices? Because if you do, then the price you pay for all that backwards hardware and software support is performance degradation. If manufacturers and publishers keep having to make their newest products support all that aging technology, eventually it's all going to come to a screeching halt. So the question to ask is where do you draw the line? How far back do you want your new system to go? Perhaps the answer is giving people a choice.

Your computer doesn't have a floppy drive but you can still buy one that plugs into any USB port. You can buy a SCSI card to run SCSI drives. And you can still get cards to connect most of the other older devices as well. But there are some bridges that eventually must be burned as newer standards become available. I mean if you still want a green phosphor monitor or cassette-tape interface on your PC, then perhaps a new computer just isn't in your future. My point is that most technologies are eventually going to become obsolete and if you find you're clinging to one or more of them, you could be holding yourself back.

I realize that the FireWire standard isn't that old and that there are still many products out there that support it. And while the MacBook Pro only offers a FireWire 800 port, at least there's an 800 to 400 conversion cable included. I guess the lament occurs when the new product doesn't give you a choice. The MacBook totally abandons the FireWire port. It does have USB but there's no way to convert USB to FireWire. The door has been slammed shut and there's no way to reopen it. So while I applaud Apple on its innovative design and product technologies, my hope is that they try and avoid just slamming the door. Granted this may be an opportunity for some innovative company to develop a USB to FireWire converter device if the market shows it needs something like that.

Yet it's also unreasonable to ask companies like Apple to keep supporting legacy products without end. Doing so will only cripple the upcoming generations of products as they struggle to support everything ever made in the past. Sometimes you just have to let them go in order to move forward. Unfetter the upcoming generations of computers so that they can embrace the newer and ever faster technologies that make our lives so much more interesting.
 

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