Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
off topic.
about firewire connections. I see that recent apple computers are not supporting it anymore. but they're selling (plus other brands of course) firewire to thunderbolt adapters. I've read reports online stating that it was ok except for the energy part, you still needed to plug the DC even on firewire 800 connections (that is bus powered). Wonder if anyone here has ever tried to use such adapters and how it all turned out for them!
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Without wanting to sound anti-Apple (I'm not, I love their iOS devices) Apple is notorious for change for the sake of change at the expense of the consumer. They were all huge on Firewire for the longest time, almost anti-USB even, then Thunderbolt became all the rage and they are anti-Firewire. They will do this again, long before the music hardware industry catches up with them. This is why I want the flexibility to put in cards. If the Virus TI3 was announced tomorrow with Thunderbolt support only, I'm a $20 card away from making that happen with my current PC with no other changes required. Apple makes money on the hardware, unlike Microsoft, so they have a huge incentive to insert planned obsolescence into their hardware products. How else can they sell you a new one every couple of years? Look at what they did with the connectors for the iPhone going from version 4 to version 5 and the crappy lightning connector that rendered many aftermarket accessories obsolete.
I do realize that sounds like a biased rant, but I've put a lot of time into investigating this from both sides, and I truly am both a PC and a Mac person. I can tell you from the developer side of the food chain, Apple has a very half-hearted commitment to the Mac. Being part of the Apple developer program, I usually see changes coming down the pipeline about a year or more before the general public does (in some cases I cannot even discuss the things I see without violating an NDA).
I think for someone gigging live, there might be a lot of advantage to an Apple laptop. In a laptop you're going to have bad airflow no matter whether Mac or PC and make lots of performance tradeoffs that might not matter much if playing live or DJ-ing. But if you do everything in the studio, I think power and flexibility are more important.
Back to your question of this particular thread, I'm not aware of anyone using a Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter; I would be really skeptical about that for music production use where every bit of latency matters, not so skeptical for something like a storage device. I mostly went Firewire for my audio interface only because I wanted to keep "everything else" off the USB bus in case I get another Virus or just keep the Ultranova on USB. So basically I've got a dedicated USB3 card the Ultranova sits on, and dedicated Firewire card the Saffire uses. At least that way trouble with one doesn't affect the other, and I don't have to worry about things like the FW chipset on my motherboard or whether I'm overloading the onboard USB etc.
Also I'd say to anyone please don't compare Windows XP to Mac OSX, it's not fair to compare a 12 year old OS to Apple's latest. Windows 7 and 8 are nice. Windows 8 has gotten some bad press because of the tablet interface stuff, but that aspect doesn't affect music production and they are remedying the complaints in a few weeks with the release of Windows 8.1.