The Mac mini has the longest lifecycle of any modern (post-1998) Mac. If you bought the Core 2 Duo Mac mini when it came out, you’d better have AppleCare Protection on it, or you’d be out of warranty already.

The Mac mini is the only system that requires a significant revision to be OpenCL-ready, so, well, it’s a no-brainer at this point. The Mac Pro just needs a graphics card swap.

My wish list for the new Mac mini? eSATA. I can understand losing FireWire, but eSATA would be a huge improvement, and would allow the Mac mini to sit for lots longer without a product rev. By making the mini the first Mac with eSATA, Apple can spend the next year adding it to the rest of the lineup. FireWire? I’ll miss it, but eSATA would be a happy tradeoff right now.

(Note, I seriously doubt Apple will embrace eSATA until it is on every single PC on the planet, in self-powered configuration no less).

P.S. I haven’t had a chance to say it on this blog, but cheers to Apple on the new MacBooks. I know it’s long overdue, but I was a key critic of the graphics in the MacBook and MacBook Air. There really aren’t any major complaints that I have with either system now… I just have to chose between the two for my next portable.

For those of you new to the Mac, Target Disk Mode is a revolutionary feature which takes advantage of FireWire’s ability to directly connect two machines together. When you put a Mac into Target Disk Mode, it puts the machine into a special mode, which basically converts the Mac into an external hard drive (it also works with the optical drive as well).

This is critical if you have a sick Mac in the field. Especially with a Mac portable, fixing problems can take minutes with Target Disk Mode, even if a Mac won’t start up! Essentially, with Target Disk Mode, you can run repair tools from another Mac, and fix a sick Mac without having to take it apart. You can rescue files without needing to pull out the hard drive. You can even check the drive for bad disk sectors.

When I say that this is “critical”, I’m not joking. When I used to do IT consulting, this saved my clients hours in billing. I was able to repair damaged directory and filesystems within minutes. Without Target Disk Mode, I would have spent an hour diagnosing, before being resigned to taking apart the computer… which would have taken hours as well. Finally, fixing the problem, and putting the Mac back together again.

Now, Apple does have a point: FireWire is no longer a consumer tool. USB 2.0 replaced FireWire even in digital and HD camcorders. Fine. But, Apple still needs to innovate a solution to Target Disk Mode, and I’m about to tell them how.

See, you can’t just plug two computers together via USB. There are, however, some special Data Transfer Cables, which Microsoft tried to use to promote Vista. Apple even sells one at their retail stores, bundled with software which will let you migrate your Windows files to a new Mac.

And, that cable would work perfectly for Target Disk Mode via USB. Simply sell a special USB cable (similar, if not identical to one of the existing data transfer cables), with custom firmware on the controller in the cord. That cord could communicate with updated EFI/TDM firmware on the slave Mac. The result? The master Mac would “see” (and mount) the drives just like any other external hard drive or optical drive. Just like FireWire Target Disk Mode.

And, we wouldn’t have to wait for new revisions of MacBook Air and MacBook to support this… it could be added right now, to every single Intel-based Mac, with a simple firmware update. That’s the beauty of EFI… if only Apple would take advantage of it.

I know just about every Mac technician would buy one up… just for repairing the new MacBook and MacBook Air. Every IT department that handles Mac would keep one on-hand as well. At $49/cable, just think of the revenue potential right there.

Now, down the road, I would like to see Apple innovate in FireWire again. I think that there is plenty of room for innovation (and yes, profitable innovation), especially since the SIG has indicated that they could embrace using the RJ45 connector as a standard port. Think about it… that Ethernet port that goes relatively unused on MacBooks, could one day be used not just for Gigabit Ethernet, but for FireWire 400, 800, and S3200. But, then again, that would actually be… downright logical, so I doubt it will be implemented.

Now, there are some Pro FireWire uses for audio, but it’s pretty limited. If you recall Asteroid, it was Apple’s planned FireWire breakout box, meant to give pro-grade audio connectivity over a single FireWire port. No need to hunt down a card that will work for Mac, and no more MacBook Pro users left out in the cold. Asteroid has yet to materialize in the marketplace, but there are several theories as to why.

I personally don’t care why, I think that Mac’s ability to reign supreme in creating content will only increase as it gets easier to do so. The more you can take the studio out of the studio, and into prosumer’s hands… the more people will evangelize the platform.

Oh, and no, I don’t buy the theory that Asteroid was a fake product, conjured up to catch leaks inside Apple. There’s technical evidence inside products like GarageBand which dispute that, and, Apple would not have needed costly litigation (which they ultimately lost) to seek out who did the leaking.

So, with that, here’s hoping to a Macworld that will finally deliver something to use that FireWire 800 port for. No promises, no rumors, just a hope that Asteroid might come back, purely based on Apple’s attention to their (largely unused) FireWire Audio APIs in Leopard.

And, they have had some good reasons. Between USB 2.0 and SATA, existing FireWire technology is only really effective for certain products, Digital Video being the only one that a consumer would really want to touch. FireWire 400 (the one everyone uses) is deployed in everything from camcorders to HDTV cable boxes. However, camcorders have started reaching out to slipstreaming DV files via USB 2.0 and other means, so the deathwatches had started on IEEE 1394, FireWire and the whole consortium.

Apple hasn’t helped this trend either. For years, Apple had a web site that touted the benefits of FireWire (now replaced with a semi-cheesy developer page). But then iPod went USB 2.0, and aparrently word came down to provide only the same level of support as any other port on the Mac. Apple essentially decided to forget that it designed FireWire in the first place. And, there may have been good reason, FireWire 800 (the one nobody uses) has been a collossal flop. It’s expensive, slower than SATA, and with eSATA… why pay for slower gear?

This is the time where you cue the Star Wars music, and prep the Chapter IV: A New Hope line… enter FireWire S3200.

FireWire S3200 hasn’t been a big secret… I’ve been chatting it up with Apple… folk, for years. In fact, there was supposed to be an interim FireWire 1600, but that was scrapped after FireWire 800 failed miserably. Anyways, on to S3200! The new platform for FireWire tops SATA in every respect, it’s more than 2.5 times faster than SATA-150, and it’s almost 1.5 times faster than SATA-300. Plus, it accomplishes this without losing all the DV and anti-dumb-serial technologies that FireWire has always had (try daisy chaining USB… just try).

However, I haven’t had a chance to see if S3200 addresses some of the other ATA-based complaints about FireWire. For example, FireWire doesn’t have a standardized means of communicating SMART data from hard drives, crucial for anyone that cares about the life of their drive. But, judging by the press release, those kind of technical details shouldn’t be too hard to get a hold of within the next month.

My Home Server only has two SATA ports, though I’m thinking of expanding to a new system with four. So, once I had filled those up, I went outside the box and plugged a SATA 2.5 GB Seagate in with USB 2.0. Eating up three empty USB connectors (a whopping two for power, and one for USB data)… everything seemed to go fine. Until I got home one day to hearing constant knock-of-death noise.

Thinking the drive was dead, I unhooked it from WHS and plugged it in via eSATA to my MacBook Pro running Vista. The nice thing about eSATA, is that you can run drives and have the full range of diagnostic tools… eSATA has all the SMART diagnostics that PATA and SATA do with internal drives. To my surprise, the drive passed all tests… repeatedly, even on full sector scans. The conclusion? The enclosure isn’t passing proper power, and in a server environment, those subtle power problems can crop up in the form of failures.

Bottom line: Windows Home Server is now going through the hours-long process of removing the drive (to be safe, rather than using the backup copy on another drive, WHS moves the data from the original drive to another hard drive when possible).

The good news is, enclosures are getting dumber. Meaning, they’re doing less. For example, eSATA enclosures have no real need for a bunch of complicated chipsets or circuitry to get in the way. So, if you’re going eSATA, I’d say you’re fine with going cheap. If not, and you’re using USB 2.0, I’d go with high-end gear. FireWire is a bit of a mixed bag… with fewer chipsets, there are fewer cheap bad guys; go with an Oxford chipset to be safe however on FireWire.