Clamshell iBook + FireWire?

[amrcnidt961]

Hi, I'm the proud owner of a Clamshell iBook, 300Mhz original. Today, I dove into it and did a full dissasembly and reassembly. (I was really, really bored.)

During my hacking and slashing and unscrewing and screwing back together, I noticed something: there are pin spots on the logic board for a FireWire port. Also, near those pins, is a spot for a chip, presumably FireWire. Although I don't plan on actually finding a FireWire chip and installing it, I would like to know if it would be at all humanly possible.

It would be cool if someone with more skill in the modding category could figure it out, I'd love to hear about functioning FireWire on my old little clamshell.

Just a random thought I had this afternoon.


G'night,
jlange

 

[symphonix]

It wouldn't surprise me if it were possible, but Apple ditched the feature late in development because it wasn't ready yet. Firewire would have been in its final stages of development at that time and drivers/software would have been still in testing, so they probably just felt it wasn't worth putting it into the iBook until the software was there to handle it.

Another possiblity is that at that time, with Firewire still new, the chipsets might have been very expensive and hard to get supplies of, so Apple chose to hold off.

Another possibility is that the Firewire chipset they had planned to use either produced a little too much heat or used too much power. This was apparently true of the ethernet chipset on the first iMac G5's: the provision is there for gigabit ethernet on the bus, but a gigabit ethernet chip was not used as it would generate too much heat at that time.

Its interesting to note that the very first generation of Mac mini has a second, fully functioning Firewire port wired up inside it, on top of the riser card used for the hard drive. All you need is a socket connected to it. Some people suspect that the Mac mini may have been intended - well into its development - to have an iPod dock built into the top of it. It would have been canned partly because the iPod team were planning on phasing out Firewire and instead moving the iPod to USB2.0. Also, it probably looked pretty stupid and indulgent on the prototypes and was abandoned.

 

[macworks]

Well considering higher-end iBook clamshells had firewire ports, it's likely that the logic board used is the same over-all design for all models. In other word, Apple knew they were going to add firewire to the higher-end models when they built the first ones and rather than redesign the logic board later, why not do it right now -- thinking ahead!

The higher-end models simply got the chip and port while the lower-end ones did not.

 

[amrcnidt961]

So, if I were to find a port and a chip, I could theoretically add FireWire to the old iBook? Sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I can eBay up a dead clamshell with FireWire to get the chip

Thanks for the thoughts - if you'd like a photo of the contacts on the board, I'll open her up again

-jlange