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macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support
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All the older FW 400 & 800 devices, scanners, digital tape, audio interfaces have always been able to connect to the latest Thunderbolt ports via two Apple adapters. Why remove the drivers when the adapters allow connecting to the latest port?
Now I can see why Apple discontinued the Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 Adapter A1463. Prices starting to rise on eBay.
Now I can see why Apple discontinued the Thunderbolt 2 to FireWire 800 Adapter A1463. Prices starting to rise on eBay.
The other day I did a Target Disk Mode from a 2009-era Mac mini to a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro), the connection was FireWire 800 to FireWire800 cable, then FireWire800 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, and then Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter. The MacBook Pro was running macOS Sequoia 15.5. It hard crashes the MacBook Pro as soon as it saw the Mac mini and I could reproduce it.
I love FireWire, but the supporting cycle is really ending.
I love FireWire, but the supporting cycle is really ending.
Uh, Apple up until recently sold a Thunderbolt (2) to FireWire adapter. With a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, these have been working great with Apple Sillicon macs.
I use these mainly to rescue data from older stuff like old harddrives and DV cameras.
Removal of FW support will now require yet another computer in my collection to do that data rescue.
Although FW is no longer a daily thing for me, there are really expensive sound and video equipment that use FW and those are not cheap to replace.
FireWire-to-USB cables are available and work well, from own experience with older music equipment.
God dammit. I was just thinking of firing up my old miniDV camera again.
I would posit that emojis take up much more system space currently than the firewire driver
I use Firewire for 2 devices. A HDV player and a Nikon Coolscan 35mm Film scanner. I use 3 dongles to get firewire 400 to 800 to thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3. It works for me. I hope firewire will be supported. Or, I will have to set up this on my 2012 MacMini.
How is that Nikon coolscan? I’ve been looking into new solutions for 35mm (my canon scanner is networked and can be accessed over ethernet/wifi, but it’s on its last legs and has gone through multiple repairs in recent history)
I also keep a FireWire card in my pc because I still have a GREAT number of DV and HDV tapes in need of transferring (well over 100 left to go, closer to 200) which itself required expensive repairs to the old failing tape mechs in the cameras… then I put the project down because it was so time consuming. I should really complete all of that before something else happens to the cameras, or Windows goes and deprecates FireWire in some W11 update.
Wasn’t there also a hybrid cable where you can use USB instead?
Waiting for the other shoe to drop and Apple to drop USB A 1&2 and older iOS devices using 30 pin connector or iOS 11 and below.
Earlier iPods did not have any USB support. That hybrid cabled was for charge over USB and Sync over FireWire.
This won't really affect my day to day but I do have some older FireWire drives and it will be very disappointing not to be able to access them on my current machine. I'm hoping they add this back in. No reason to remove it.
I would argue their track record leans towards backwards compatibility. You can still mount floppy drives. You can't write HFS+ anymore but you can still read it, I believe.
Heck, the update servers for ancient PowerPC machines are still online. Connect a 10.3 machine to the internet and it will download updates. Same with lots of old software.
Heck, with a Serial to USB adapter I can write programs to my Apple //c.
It’s on a lot of older but high quality sound gear in studios that are still in use, those are going to be the folks hardest hit
I have literally never seen an actual functional firewire to usb bridge, just adapters that do pin mapping for the exceedingly few devices that supported both protocols off a single port (and would fry any standard firewire device), would you care to link to one?
Considering no supported Mac has a FireWire port and current M-series Macs don't support FireWire add-on cards, this isn't a big deal.
Hey @Nekomichi , thank you so much for your effort and detailed testing—seriously appreciated! 🙏 I actually created this account just to reply to your post and say thanks for putting in the work. I’ve been trying to sync both my iPad 4th gen and iPod mini 1st gen for almost a week now on macOS Tahoe beta 1, but no success so far either. Both appear in Finder, just like you said, but I can’t sync any music or podcasts to the iPod.
I have to admit though—I’m not using an original Apple 30-pin cable, which might be part of the problem… 😅 Still, your post gave me a bit of clarity on what’s going on.
Looking forward to your update on restore testing and fingers crossed FireWire support gets sorted in future betas! Thanks again 🙌
People say it’s missing from the System Information app entirely, so it’s the whole OS. I also checked the Apple online store, and the FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter is nowhere to be found.
No, it’s still in the OS as of Sequoia. I can confirm as I used a FireWire camcorder with my M1 MacBook Air.
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Silly timing. If this would coincide with the end of Intel support or the end of Rosetta then it makes more sense. People still relying on FireWire are likely to also be using legacy Intel-based Macs and software.
Doesn't cost much to support it for 1 or 2 more releases. In fact, it may cost less than to end support now due to the lower volume of angry support calls.
Doesn't cost much to support it for 1 or 2 more releases. In fact, it may cost less than to end support now due to the lower volume of angry support calls.