FireWire! It's the coolest peripheral interconnect technology since sliced bread-- or, rather, it would be, if sliced bread were a really cool peripheral interconnect technology instead of just raw toast. Regardless, Apple's hot-swappable, plug-and-play, no-IDs-and-no-termination 400 Mbps industry standard bus has been fighting an uphill battle for acceptance for years now. The industry's reluctance to embrace it is partly historical, stemming from the tussle over the royalties that Apple originally planned to exact on every single FireWire port included on every single device manufactured. That mess has since been cleaned up in a more or less satisfactory manner, but even now the industry seems unwilling to adopt FireWire (or IEEE 1394, or i.Link, or whatever you want to call it) as quickly as one might have guessed. These days it's still mostly used just for the transfer of digital video between computers and camcorders.

But what happens if the cord goes away? Mac OS Rumors is once again talking about wireless FireWire (FireWireless?) reaching the Macintosh by the middle of next year. If it's indeed real, supposedly the technology will allow up to 400 Mbps transfer rates over a range of "50-200 feet"-- all without any of those cumbersome wires to trip you up or limit your movement. It sounds like a needless luxury at first (after all, how much trouble is it to plug in a hard drive?), but once we started thinking about shooting video on a FireWireless camcorder, editing the footage on a Power Mac in the den, and dubbing the results back out to a VHS machine in the living room, we started drooling at the possibilities of losing the cables.

And that's just the video end of things. Even near its 200-foot limit, FireWireless is rumored to support data rates of up to 150 Mbps-- faster than 100-base-T Ethernet. Since Apple's current 802.11-based AirPort wireless networking tops out at a respectable-but-not-mind-blowing 11 Mbps, we wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that FireWireless will be the basis for AirPort 2. In any event, a wireless version of FireWire might be just what the doctor ordered to get the support of the technology into prime time; of course, this might just be another pipe dream like the Apple-branded Palm device and the 17-inch iMac, but hey, slow news days are perfect for dreaming about the future...