FireWire lost out because Apple wanted royalties for its use. Hence the 1394 disparity that made FireWire different on every platform and ultimately doomed.
It wasn’t because of technological reasons that it lost to USB but because chipmakers like Intel balked at including it in their chips when Apple wanted royalties.
Both. Until USB2, FireWire was king for anything multimedia. It made home DV possible, and for a few years, it was the only option.
Eventually, the nominal 480 MBps of USB2 was “good enough” and roughly equivalent to FW400, while being cheaper. FW800 was relevant for storage only (audio doesn’t really need the bandwidth), and as CPUs got faster, the CPU dependence of USB ceased to matter.
FW800 had a brief window of limited appeal, but the USB roadmap quickly sidelined it entirely.
I’m not saying this is the end of Apple or anything but it’s kind of too bad — one of my two “pro level” audio interfaces is FireWire and I still have an old Sony video camera with FireWire. I probably should try and get any video of off tapes that I haven’t already transferred.
Slight correction to the article: 2012 was the last year of Firewire ports on shipping Macs. The last old style "Cheesegrater" MacPro released in mid-2012 had FW800 ports. (as did the mid-2012 MacPro Server released at the same time.) Also my 2012 MacBook Pro 13" has a FireWire 800 port as well. Still use that MacBook Pro actually.
Remembrances of FireWire would be incomplete without mentioning the procedure to reset the FireWire bus -- unplug all devices, powering down the Mac, and waiting for some time period I don't recall. Or something to that effect.
And FW Target Mode. Boot up holding Command T and the Mac becomes an external hard-drive on the connected Mac.
I also remember fondly the Iomega parallel to FW adapter for my portable Zip drive and the FW LaCie 250gb external hard drive.
My dear old G3 iMac DV may have only come with a 10gb hard drive and USB 1.0 but FireWire kept it going for years!
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RIP