All this news about iPods, but nobody has picked up on this yet!

None of Apple's iPods ship standard with any sort of firewire connection. I don't know if this move is to save $ or if their suppliers are not supporting firewire or if its a cross platform thing, or all of the above. Seeing that all Macs ship with USB 2.0, it doesn't really affect the user experiece, but its just interested that a Hard Drive based product from APPLE is not using technology co-developed by APPLE.

Well, I guess it makes sense, unless you have a 400mhz Indigo or something like that and wanted a new iPod. Wow, that's a kick in the old keister, but at the same time it makes sense and opens it up to more machines in the long run.

Not actually quite true, they appead to have dropped support for firewire from the iPod Mini range, and no longer include a firewire cable with the ipod photo, though they are still available as an optional extra. The standard ipod 20GB does include a firewire cable as well as a USB 2.0 option. Looks like the 20GB is the old model with a new price tag and the two ipod photos are new, they both have 15hour claimed battery life as apposed to the 12hour for the 20GB "plain ipod" version.

I assume it is still firewire compatible, but the cables/adapters don't come with it standard anymore...

Makes sense really, since iPods are not meant for heavy duty media streaming/authoring, etc. Firewire is a more stable standard with higher throughput and less latency, but a bit overkill for what iPods need to do - even if you are using you iPod to play Apple Lossless or WAV files, the drives inside the iPod are so slow as to make the need for firewire over USB2 irrelevant.

So if I'm apple and I want to drop the price on iPods, I know I need to include USB2 cables for PCs (and Mac people are already "in my pocket" so to speak on iPods) - I can see the need to drop the firewire cable and say if you need one, you can buy it for $20 or 30 as add-on...

I got my 60GB iPod, and it came with firewire... corse that was three months ago...
Also apple just yesterday released an update for iPods, and it is adding "• Support for charging and syncing over USB with Mac OS X v10.2.8 or 10.3.4 or later" which you previously could not use USB with any iPods, of corse that is only for the iPod mini, its still stepping twoards making all iPods work only with USB...

-Knife

i bought an ipod mini a month ago and it came with firewire, i only use firewire

the discussion titaniumpearl is on the new ipods that were released today. Its no longer stocked with firewire, its an option.

correcting myself from earlier, according to apple site the mini is still compatible with firewire but as zkeeball said the mini will not come with firewire cables anymore.

http://www.apple.com/ipod/specs.html

I think that this is crap. My brother (who successfully replaced his own iPod battery) still has an iPod with FireWire. I mean, we still got devices out there waiting to be connected. By ditching FireWire, Apple may also be ditching iMovie.

I think firewire still has a future in camcorders and DVR/digital TV applications, but its also awesome for ext HDs. I personally prefer it over USB 2 and I think that the iPod would help drive the adoption of firewire on PCs. ACtually, most PC mobos have firewire on them these days.