^^^USB does not work as a substitute where latency is concerned. eSATA was never offered on a Mac (reiterate for clarity). The fact that you are using Firewire's demise as a comparison is not accurate at all. One=never, the other=10+ years on all products. I think we have hit total misunderstanding.
I suppose I was a bit unclear in my first post - I should have said "Every transfer technology I can think of is considerably more ubiquitous for drive interfaces, and not all professional work involves plugging in a camera." I picked eSATA because I'd argue its the one most directly analogous to the drive interface role of FW800 (in contrast to the camera interface, which is even less relevant to me).
USB3 works well enough for straight data transfer, and I find USB
or eSATA to be sufficiently more ubiquitous that I'd never choose Firewire over them - the odds of me being the only one in the room with a FW800 port are just too high. Though honestly, I can't remember the last time I had to hook up an external drive to my machine heftier than a thumb drive.
What the heck did you use to move data in and out of your earlier Mac's if not for firewire? USB 1.1? 10T ethernet? You did use Firewire but commented that you didn't. That was it, my point. "Who hasn't"?. Have you used FW? You currently don't use it. But at some point you did. Easy. Not at all how your initial post came across.
I say I didn't use Firewire 800, which was in response to your original post..."Seriously, who has been on OS X professionally for even a few years and not use FW800?" I used an original Firewire 400-based drive, back when it was just called "Firewire" for...a year or two? Ironically, this was during the period where I wouldn't really have called myself a "professional" user.
Most of the file transfer I did was over Ethernet of progressively faster speeds, with a smattering of burned CDs, then DVDs, and now a USB3 drive for the laptop for a backup drive. I've never had a file transfer from the Mac Pro
to something that didn't go over the network, or wasn't served well enough by a thumb drive. The few times I've been given a drive and needed to read off it, it's been either USB or eSATA based - I've never, ever had a collaborator come to me with a FW800 drive.
This is largely because my
professional use of the Mac Pro doesn't create large data files. Nearly everything I do takes a data file of modest size, does something absolutely horrific to it that makes a number of very large files written to disk, and then gets boiled back down to a single file that's usually fairly small. If I have to save and transfer something large enough to really want a FW800 drive, I've probably done something wrong.
My only assertion is my usual pushback on here - whenever someone says "How can you not do $thingIdo and be a professional user?" there are use cases where $thingIdo doesn't come up. That's all. I could care less about FW800 - or indeed Thunderbolt and the loss of internal drives, which I'd place as "Irksome, but not fatal". I care rather more about the processor, RAM and GPU.
You're correct, I did utterly forget the old form factor Macbook Pros. Mea culpa.
