How does USB compare with the FireWire standard?
USB s data rate (12 megabits per second) is more than adequate for many common, low-cost applications such as keyboards, mouse devices, joysticks, game controllers, printers, etc., and is much less expensive to implement than FireWire. However, USB is not intended for ultra high-performance peripherals such as digital video camcorders, DVD players, and high-speed disk drives; the data rate of the FireWire bus (200 megabits per second, and soon 400 megabits per second) is much better suited. Because of their complementary nature, both standards will be aggressively adopted by Apple in its future products.
