Oh, boy-- Apple's got the whole computer industry in a teeth-gnashing tizzy, again. This time the brouhaha is over FireWire, Apple's keen new high-speed peripheral expansion bus that makes adding hard drives simple-- you just plug them in. No SCSI IDs, no termination worries, and in many cases, no external power supply for each drive. Up to 63 peripherals can be connected at once, and they can be plugged and unplugged at will with restarting or any other such song and dance. In the great Apple tradition, it's simple and it just works. Great. Players across the entire industry, including such bigwigs as Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and others, are thirsting for simplicity, and would love to see FireWire catch on as the Next Big Thing™. Even better. But then Apple went and changed their licensing scheme to include a royalty of about a buck a port. Consternation! Uproar!

Now, plenty of you have written in wondering just what the whole big deal is about a dollar-per-port FireWire license, and on many counts, we have to agree; what's another $2 or so per hard drive? Why not just raise the price of the whole drive another $5 to absorb the cost and then be done with it? For a device that's going to cost at least a couple hundred dollars anyway, if $5 more or less going to make a big difference? Of course, we're not in the hard drive business, so we're surely missing something obvious-- our naïveté is legendary in such matters. Suffice it to say, the industry is not at all happy with Apple right now; we're reminded of the way the multimedia developers responded with suddenly Apple started charging for QuickTime. We can't judge one way or the other, but either Apple's trying to grab a lot more money than they "should," or the rest of the industry is simply shocked to discover that Apple is no longer functioning as their unpaid research and development center. Whatever.

What is certain is that potential FireWire licensees aren't a bit happy about the whole thing. In fact, according to EETimes, they're considering trying to write Apple completely out of the picture by "designing around Apple patents." Welcome to 1394B, Son of FireWire, the sequel that's twice as fast-- and Apple-free. Or, at least relatively Apple-free; as things now stand, many of Apple's patents don't apply, but not all. But the message certainly seems to be that if Apple doesn't play ball, they could be ditched completely. The only catch is, a backwards-compatible and fully-functioning "Apple-free B" won't make it out of developers' labs for a couple of years yet. So right now, it's pay Apple or stick to SCSI or IDE. We anticipate a long, bitter struggle on this one...