My M4 transfers mini dv through FireWire all day long!
FireWire to to Thunderbolt 2 than Thunderbolt 2 to 3 + adapter…
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macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support
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FireWire to to Thunderbolt 2 than Thunderbolt 2 to 3 + adapter…
Maybe they'll be downloadable? Like what happened with a lot of drivers in macOS Snow Leopard? We're all panicking here over a) a first developers beta that's b) dropping a standard that hasn't been used in new devices for probably 10 years and that's been effectively followed up by Thunderbolt.
Dont know about OP but my wife’s been on a couple year long project now to digitize all her family’s old home videos, including using a sony camcorder with firewire to handle the hi8/digital8 tapes
not as unsustainable as some people say. those who say that often feel the need to upgrade their apps without reason. I know such a person. he has an Early 2015 MacBook Pro. it struggles with new macOS, but he refuses to downgrade to 12 (last officially compatible release), because he thinks he has to use the newest version of Sketch for his hobby. he could use a slightly older version, but he just doesn't want to.
On the other hand, macOS Catalina (10.15) was my daily driver until March of last year. And it was completely usable, because I was fine with the apps I already had, I wasn't chasing the newest and shiniest stuff. Safari was bit of a pain point, but I solved that by switching to Orion (also WebKit based). I'm on 14.3 now only because M2 Macs can't run Catalina.
That’s a silly question. There are untold thousands upon thousands of tapes out there still in urgent need of transferring while there is still functioning playback equipment.
I once owned two FireWire 800 HDD enclosures in the design of a small Power Mac G5 or Mac Pro (until 2012). They looked so great. I used them as backup drives for my 17" Late-2011 MBP that lasted until 2022. Not sure if they were FireWire only or also had an USB port.
I upgraded the 2011 MBP later with a two USB 3.0 ports Express Card.
Sadly I "lost" those FireWire enclosures. They are far away and I can't collect them in the near future. Would have been nice to test them with the macOS 26 beta that I already have installed.
But not even my Caldigit TB2 Dock still has a FireWire port, instead there is eSATA. Maybe I find a TB1 Dock for cheap and those enclosures again.
I just recognized the Mid-2011 iMac standing around on the floor of my sleeping room includes a FireWire port. If it wasn't so heavy I would try that OpenCore patcher to see if the port is listed in System Information.
I upgraded the 2011 MBP later with a two USB 3.0 ports Express Card.
Sadly I "lost" those FireWire enclosures. They are far away and I can't collect them in the near future. Would have been nice to test them with the macOS 26 beta that I already have installed.
But not even my Caldigit TB2 Dock still has a FireWire port, instead there is eSATA. Maybe I find a TB1 Dock for cheap and those enclosures again.
I just recognized the Mid-2011 iMac standing around on the floor of my sleeping room includes a FireWire port. If it wasn't so heavy I would try that OpenCore patcher to see if the port is listed in System Information.
I don't really think that's a silly question given that your answer is equally silly. If they are in "urgent" need, why haven't they been transferred in the last decade? Someone else gave a similar response but was actually civil in his reply. He mentioned his partner wanted to transfer some home videos. Even if there's thousands of those home videos, nobody is forcing her to update in September and she can still take her time to do that.
This is your second post by the way where you just start with an aggressive response. Why is that? Do you really feel the need to get so confrontational about this?
I professional digitize mini dv, and digital 8 through FireWire as well as Hi8, Video8, VHS through an analogue capture card so I still need FireWire support… looks like I will need to get an older Mac just for capturing DV.
No one is forced to upgrade macOS in September or October. Why not just stay with an older version? You get security updates and new Safari versions for at least two years with Sequoia.
Maybe there is even a workaround and you can just copy the driver from an older version. Or it will be automatically installed if a FireWire device is connected. I remember macOS downloading printer and scanner drivers that weren't pre-installed.
I like the new macOS but at least the first Beta is making my M4 Pro Mini very warm, while doing almost nothing. It was permanently cold before the update, switching to low power mode does help a little and is making it only slightly warm.
But if Beta 2 isn't coming in the next days and fixing this I'll downgrade back to Sequoia. I don't want to risk damaging my Mac because it's permanently hot, although not hot enough for the fan kicking in. It normally always stays at 1.000 RPM, what is standard and I don't hear anything. But something must be wrong. It was even worse before until I deleted a Creative audio driver that suddenly used more than 100% CPU and also deleted something else that was using much CPU. Now there isn't anything left. Just the system processes.
I already checked everything and I fear it must be the new UI doing this. The WindowServer process seems to use the GPU very much.
It's always jumping between zero and up to 50% GPU usage just when writing here with a single tab open and doing nothing else. I am pretty sure the GPU was always at or near 0% when doing light tasks like this before in Sequoia.
I don't notice any difference in speed and the fan is also not needed yet. But when I touch it, it's almost hot. I wonder how an M1 without a fan is doing. Or one of the last supported Intel Macs. Could be like Vista on recent PCs back then.
I am using an app that can kick the fan to run with maximum speed when any sensor exceeds a certain temperature. This is nice to test what is stressing the CPU or GPU. Even just launching Safari is triggering this for a few seconds when set to 90 degrees Celsius, Firefox doesn't, also Safari is launching very slow. I turned off the profiles but it didn't help much.
All Effecincy Cores have the same tempertature and it's always higher than before in "almost idle" mode. Strangly only Performance Cores 6-10 get hotter than normal. Only 1-5 have the same temperature as in Sequoia. For everything else I can't remember how it was before. But there are four GPU Clusters and all of them look like they are too warm for what I am doing at the moment.
I don't know what WindowServer and kernel_task are showing in Seqouoia when you don't do anything else than watching the Activity Monitor in Low Power Mode on a 14/20 core M4 Pro. Normally the browser was always on top when in use. Firefox Nightly is open with 5 tabs and isn't even visible in the top 5.
Maybe there is even a workaround and you can just copy the driver from an older version. Or it will be automatically installed if a FireWire device is connected. I remember macOS downloading printer and scanner drivers that weren't pre-installed.
I like the new macOS but at least the first Beta is making my M4 Pro Mini very warm, while doing almost nothing. It was permanently cold before the update, switching to low power mode does help a little and is making it only slightly warm.
But if Beta 2 isn't coming in the next days and fixing this I'll downgrade back to Sequoia. I don't want to risk damaging my Mac because it's permanently hot, although not hot enough for the fan kicking in. It normally always stays at 1.000 RPM, what is standard and I don't hear anything. But something must be wrong. It was even worse before until I deleted a Creative audio driver that suddenly used more than 100% CPU and also deleted something else that was using much CPU. Now there isn't anything left. Just the system processes.
I already checked everything and I fear it must be the new UI doing this. The WindowServer process seems to use the GPU very much.
It's always jumping between zero and up to 50% GPU usage just when writing here with a single tab open and doing nothing else. I am pretty sure the GPU was always at or near 0% when doing light tasks like this before in Sequoia.
I don't notice any difference in speed and the fan is also not needed yet. But when I touch it, it's almost hot. I wonder how an M1 without a fan is doing. Or one of the last supported Intel Macs. Could be like Vista on recent PCs back then.
I am using an app that can kick the fan to run with maximum speed when any sensor exceeds a certain temperature. This is nice to test what is stressing the CPU or GPU. Even just launching Safari is triggering this for a few seconds when set to 90 degrees Celsius, Firefox doesn't, also Safari is launching very slow. I turned off the profiles but it didn't help much.
All Effecincy Cores have the same tempertature and it's always higher than before in "almost idle" mode. Strangly only Performance Cores 6-10 get hotter than normal. Only 1-5 have the same temperature as in Sequoia. For everything else I can't remember how it was before. But there are four GPU Clusters and all of them look like they are too warm for what I am doing at the moment.
I don't know what WindowServer and kernel_task are showing in Seqouoia when you don't do anything else than watching the Activity Monitor in Low Power Mode on a 14/20 core M4 Pro. Normally the browser was always on top when in use. Firefox Nightly is open with 5 tabs and isn't even visible in the top 5.
I found the question confrontational to begin with, nobody should be interrogated on why they “still need” something. The matter is urgent because the data is more at risk with each passing day and not everyone is in a position to complete the work, now or a decade ago. So yes, there are people who still need to be able to interface with miniDV machines, and removing that ability arbitrarily only further harms or inconveniences those people.
The question was out of interest, not meant confrontationally. I've seen several people here claim that *people* need it or even broader that "entire industries rely on it" without any examples or proof given. So when someone claims they need it themselves, I wonder what for out of interest and to see if maybe I need to change my point of view (which was: hardly anyone uses it, so why does it need to take up disk space for everybody). I have several old Firewire peripherals in my drawer, but I haven't used any of them in many, many years. So I'm curious why people still need them.
Sounds like you need to reprioritize things then and get it done now before it's too late. Seriously, when were you planning on getting that done? Holding out assuming firewire will still be around in 5/10/15/50 years is a bit ridiculous, get it done while you can or deal with having to keep an old Mac around, plain and simple. Technology doesn't stop and wait for anyone to catch up, in case folks haven't noticed.
Or better, get a windows/Linux PC where functionality of devices that work one day aren’t patched out of usability the next
Linux dropped support for my 486. I actually did have a 486dx/33
Linux drops support for 486 and early Pentium processors - 20 years after Microsoft
I can still remember when the 33MHz 486DX was the fastest chip around.
www.zdnet.com
edit:
seriously though, every OS drops support eventually, even those maintained by volunteers without profit motivation
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I have a MacPro 4.1 with ROM flashed to MacPro 5.1. Upgraded Radeon 5870 video card, max out memory, 7TB of Harddrive (3-2TB drives, 1-1TB drive, 2 SATA SuperDrives. FW800 ports. One FW400 PCIE card. (I had EyeTV back in the analog cable tv days but since cable has gone digital it won’t work any longer) I’m selling for $400 + shipping/handling if anyone is interested
Your 486 can’t run windows 11 or Mac OS Tahoe either. Dropping support for an older processor is an entirely different matter when we’re discussing an update that is removing functionality from current systemsLinux dropped support for my 486. I actually did have a 486dx/33
Linux drops support for 486 and early Pentium processors - 20 years after Microsoft
I can still remember when the 33MHz 486DX was the fastest chip around.
edit:
seriously though, every OS drops support eventually, even those maintained by volunteers without profit motivation
Still using a Nikon 9000ED via FireWire-to-Thunderbolt on a daily basis to scan my medium format film. Got a M4 Mac last year to edit those huge files for the years to come. And now it will be stuck on the current OS forever… though the Nikon 9000ED is from 2004 it is still one of the best devices for this use case.You could always either multi-boot the machine, keep the current os and install any later OSes on a different partition or drive and toggle when you’re doing the capture portion, or grab an older machine for capture
Another possibility I’m curious about is if you can pass the device to VM of an older OS, the TB bridge to FW should still show up as an addressable device. I dont know what the state of IOMMU with that would be though
It's pretty useless headers if you don't have compiled and signed by KEXTs.
TL;DR: Apple deliberately left the FireWire KEXT scaffolding in place, but removed the IOKit personality matching required for the drivers to load, effectively rendering them inert. The KEXTs were also left unsigned, which ensures that they won’t be loaded even in reduced security configurations without user intervention. Despite this, Apple incremented the version numbers and updated the build metadata, clearly indicating that this was an intentional act of deprecation rather than a case of legacy code being forgotten.
I did a brief investigation into the state of FireWire support in macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 2 (26.0) — here’s what I found.
The current state:
Code:
mrmidi@MacBookAir ~ % codesign -dvvv /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext: code object is not signed at all
mrmidi@MacBookAir ~ % ls /System/Library/Extensions | grep -i firewire
IOFireWireAVC.kext
IOFireWireFamily.kext
IOFireWireSBP2.kext
IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport.kext
mrmidi@MacBookAir ~ % codesign -dvvv /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext
/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext: code object is not signed at all
mrmidi@MacBookAir ~ % uname -a
Darwin MacBookAir 25.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 25.0.0: Tue Jun 17 00:04:39 PDT 2025; root:xnu-12377.0.122.0.1~120/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 arm64
mrmidi@MacBookAir ~ %KEXTs are present, but not signed. They even bumped the version for some reason.
But for now it's a placeholders without any binary data payload (only property lists placeholders) making them totally inert.
Here is a diff between Sequoia 15.5 and Tahoe 26.0 Developers Beta 2:
Code:
mrmidi@MacBookAir Developer % diff -u \
"/Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/Contents/Info.plist" \
"/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/Contents/Info.plist"
--- /Volumes/Macintosh HD/System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/Contents/Info.plist 2025-05-04 07:39:22
+++ /System/Library/Extensions/IOFireWireFamily.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleFWOHCI.kext/Contents/Info.plist 2025-06-19 10:04:50
@@ -3,13 +3,13 @@
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>BuildMachineOSBuild</key>
- <string>23A344011</string>
+ <string>23A344014</string>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>AppleFWOHCI</string>
<key>CFBundleGetInfoString</key>
- <string>AppleFWOHCI version 5.7.5, Copyright © 2000-2020 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.</string>
+ <string>AppleFWOHCI version 5.7.6, Copyright © 2000-2025 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI</string>
<key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key>
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
<string>KEXT</string>
<key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
- <string>5.7.5</string>
+ <string>5.7.6</string>
<key>CFBundleSignature</key>
<string>????</string>
<key>CFBundleSupportedPlatforms</key>
@@ -27,72 +27,25 @@
<string>MacOSX</string>
</array>
<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
- <string>5.7.5</string>
+ <string>5.7.6</string>
<key>DTCompiler</key>
<string>com.apple.compilers.llvm.clang.1_0</string>
<key>DTPlatformBuild</key>
- <string>24F65</string>
+ <string>25A5295b</string>
<key>DTPlatformName</key>
<string>macosx</string>
<key>DTPlatformVersion</key>
- <string>15.5</string>
+ <string>26.0</string>
<key>DTSDKBuild</key>
- <string>24F65</string>
+ <string>25A5295b</string>
<key>DTSDKName</key>
- <string>macosx15.5.internal</string>
+ <string>macosx26.0.internal</string>
<key>DTXcode</key>
- <string>1630</string>
+ <string>1700</string>
<key>DTXcodeBuild</key>
- <string>16E6052g</string>
- <key>IOKitPersonalities</key>
- <dict>
- <key>AppleFWOHCI,OF</key>
- <dict>
- <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
- <string>com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI</string>
- <key>CFBundleVersion</key>
- <string>5.7.5</string>
- <key>IOClass</key>
- <string>AppleFWOHCI</string>
- <key>IONameMatch</key>
- <array>
- <string>pciclass,0c0010</string>
- </array>
- <key>IOPCIPauseCompatible</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOPCITunnelCompatible</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOPCIUseDeviceMapper</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOProbeScore</key>
- <integer>4096</integer>
- <key>IOProviderClass</key>
- <string>IOPCIDevice</string>
- </dict>
- <key>AppleFWOHCI,PCI</key>
- <dict>
- <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
- <string>com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI</string>
- <key>CFBundleVersion</key>
- <string>5.7.5</string>
- <key>IOClass</key>
- <string>AppleFWOHCI</string>
- <key>IOPCIClassMatch</key>
- <string>0x0c001000</string>
- <key>IOPCIPauseCompatible</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOPCITunnelCompatible</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOPCIUseDeviceMapper</key>
- <true/>
- <key>IOProbeScore</key>
- <integer>4096</integer>
- <key>IOProviderClass</key>
- <string>IOPCIDevice</string>
- </dict>
- </dict>
+ <string>17A6231r</string>
<key>LSMinimumSystemVersion</key>
- <string>15.5</string>
+ <string>26.0</string>
<key>OSBundleLibraries</key>
<dict>
<key>com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily</key>
mrmidi@MacBookAir Developer %
I don't think it's just a matter of bandwidth, it's also the amount of CPU required to handle the I/O operations. My understanding is that USB requires more OS/ CPU intervention which could potentially affect the total amount of plugins you can run for example. Similar could be said of the old SCSI controllers vs EIDE. SCSI had a sophisticated controller chip that handled most functions independent of the OS and thus was quite fast. I think the same can be said of Firewire and Thunderbolt.
Not only that, but you can get lower latency with thunderbolt vs USB, probably for the reasons mentioned above.
That is incorrect. IOFirewireFamiy.kext allows Sequoia and previous macOS to support FireWire if you have compatible 3rd party drivers and a compatible adapter. My MOTU 828mkII FW Audio/MIDI interface works fine over Sequoia, for example. The kext is found in MacintoshHD/System/Library/Extensions — this Library folder cannot normally be added to, unlike the HD/Library and Users/…/Library folders.
My Tahoe Test drive still contains the extension since I updated the OS from Sequoia.
In fact, all of the FW extensions are still present.
My MOTU 828mkII FW that worked fine over Sequoia no longer functions over Tahoe — I won't bore anyone with all of the things that I tried—and some of the processes did run—but macOS 26 prevented my interface from working. Throwing in the towel.
CoreAudio FW support was removed in Ventura. This means that FW hard drives, DVD writers etc. that do not have drivers will not work. I have an old FW box for external drives and burners that stopped working in Ventura.
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