When I was growing up in the '90s I always read about this mythical connection called FireWire. It was a connection mainly found on Macs, and I had never even seen a Mac in person until I was an adult, but long before then it had lost to USB decisively even on its home Macintosh turf. Or did it?
The relationship between FireWire and USB is an interesting one, and it turns out that we're basically still using it today. Even if you didn't know it.
FireWire was never really about consumers
For the pros only
Art789/Shutterstock.com
From the start, FireWire was marketed (especially by Apple) as a high-performance data transfer technology. Not as a general-purpose replacement for the serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports.
As far as I know (and based on a few minutes of furious internet searching) no one was making mice for FireWire. It just wasn't what the goal was. Instead, this was the interface you needed to get external storage running at speeds that made it usable. A true alternative to the SCSI interface used by devices like the Iomega Jaz drive , which also eventually got a FireWire adapter.
What made FireWire special wasn't just speed. It offered deterministic data transfer, meaning devices could rely on consistent throughput without interruptions. It also allowed peer-to-peer communication, so devices could talk directly to each other without constantly involving the CPU.
External storage devices and cameras were the main devices, and so FireWire was common in the media industry. Professional sound interfaces, video capture devices, and even peer-to-peer computer networking were some uses the FireWire port was put to. Back then, these were not devices or use cases the average home user had any interest in. This was before live-streaming, making YouTube videos, or even editing home videos were common. Something that even our mobile phones can do today and we all dabble in to one degree or another.
USB won the market, not the capability race
It was actually universal
Tim Brookes / How-To Geek
As I pointed out already, it's not completely fair to compare USB to FireWire since they weren't designed to compete, but since USB was so versatile it inevitably started doing the same jobs. The first version of USB that the public could use in their computers was USB 1.1 with a maximum speed of 12Mbps or about 1.5MB/s.
Compare that to the first generation of FireWire, which could move data at up to 400Mbps or about 49MB/s and the difference is laughable. That is, until USB 2.0 pushed that number to 480Mbps. FireWire would get faster, but for most people who were not professionals and who didn't care about the lack of CPU impact FireWire boasted, USB 2.0 was more than enough.
Even over two decades after its release, USB 2.0 is still with us but FireWire was effectively dead by 2008. Incidentally, that's the same year we got 5Gbps USB 3.0. FireWire had 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps versions at the end, but these were rare and there was no time for new device to come out that supported the new standards before Steve Jobs and the other major decision makers canned the standard. Meanwhile, Apple's latest new MacBook, the Neo, still has a USB 2.0 port. There's some irony in that.
Firewire's DNA lived on in Thunderbolt
The legacy remains
If the story stopped there, it would be interesting enough, but it takes a much stranger twist. You see, Apple and Intel went on to co-develop Thunderbolt, and if you look at what sets Thunderbolt apart, it starts to sound a lot like FireWire.
Thunderbolt supports direct memory access, allowing devices to move data without constantly waking the CPU. It also enables daisy-chaining multiple devices on a single port. And it provides extremely high bandwidth while maintaining low latency.
USB and FireWire have fused (sort of)
If you consider Thunderbolt the spiritual successor to FireWire, then there's a somewhat poetic denouement to all this. First, Thunderbolt adopted the USB-C connector, and then later the USB4 specification included Thunderbolt 3.
So the two peripheral technologies which were seen as being in competition with each other ended up resolving their differences in a way. FireWire proper even hung around longer than you might think. People still used these devices for years after the official end, and in fact FireWire support was only removed from macOS with macOS 26 Tahoe !
