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macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support (macrumors.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-an-era dept.
The first macOS Tahoe beta appears to drop support for legacy FireWire 400 and 800, making it impossible to sync or mount older iPods and external drives that rely on the standard. MacRumors reports: Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app. Of course, this could all end up being a false alarm. It is still early in the macOS Tahoe beta testing cycle, and FireWire support could return in a later beta version, or in time for the final release.

FireWire was primarily developed by Apple, but it was later standardized as IEEE 1394 and licensed for use in non-Apple devices. iPods started to transition from FireWire to USB for data transfer in 2003, so the standard is very outdated, but it would still be the end of an era if macOS Tahoe drops it. The last Mac with a FireWire port was released in 2012, so connecting older iPods and FireWire drives to newer Macs has long required the use of adapters.

macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support More | Reply

macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support

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  • "FireWire was primarily developed by Apple, but it was later standardized as IEEE 1394 and licensed for use in non-Apple devices."

    FireWire was developed by Apple as an interprocessor interconnect but it was never productized. Sony took FireWire and further developed it as an IO interface specifically for the new DV standard, getting it standardized as IEEE 1394. 100% of all "FireWire" products were branded 1394 and had nothing to do with Apple. Apple later integrated 1394 into its products and branded th

    • You might be right about FireWire, but the USB timeline sounds wrong. Apple did not “follow the industry.”. Apple launched products in 1998 with USB as primary ports, when there was virtually no USB on any “PC” computers (Windows-based intel personal computers). For about another decade, various keyboard and mouse ports remained common on PCs, while Apple lineup
      • (1998 about matches the Slashdot website style and editing experience.) whereas the entire Apple lineup switched entirely to USB for mouse, keyboard and basic peripherals.

      • I brought a beige box PC from Micron in early 1998 and it already had two USB ports in the back.

        • Right next to the PS-2 ports for keyboard and mouse, and the stack of RS-232 serial, and the parallel port. Which would remain on PCs for years even though USB 1.0 could do all of those things. And that's the point people are making about Apple embracing it - they were the only company that really could, because it would have been suicide for Dell to say "fuck you and fuck all your peripherals. Buy new stuff because we say so!"

          Only Apple dares to do that, and somehow gets away with it every time. I'm hon

        • I brought a beige box PC from Micron in early 1998 and it already had two USB ports in the back.

          I recall talking to some people that saw USB on Windows computers years before the iMac. A quick look at Wikipedia puts the earliest date of production at 1996 so it checks out, though that could barely be called "years" earlier. USB was pretty worthless on Windows computers though because drivers were either buggy or nonexistent for Windows 95 and Windows 98. USB on Windows was a joke until about 2001 when USB 2.0 and a few updates to Windows XP came about to support it.

          I don't know for sure what is rig

        • Which at the time would have been known as the "useless serial bus".

      • 'Round about 1996 the computer lab at the university I went to had 486 and Pentium Gateway 2000 desktops with USB ports. They went completely unused, and we regularly turned off USB in the BIOS to free up IRQs for other things. The first time I saw a USB peripheral of any kind were the keyboard and mouse on an iMac.
      • USB was a slightly wierd one because it was very much an Intel pet project. Not sure if there was any arm twisting involved in terms of chipset pricing or similar; but they quite deliberately made the then-ubiquitous '2 USB 1 ports forlornly doing nothing' a cheap to implement default chipset feature; rather than USB being a 'premium' chipset upsell or a discrete controller(obviously those existed as well; but only really became relevant once people actually wanted USB ports).

        As a result the standard for
        • There were about 5 years in there where USB keyboards and mice would come with a PS2 adapter, since the computers either didn't have USB, or worked poorly with it. Windows XP was where USB really started to work properly.
  • This qualifies as "news", how? Apple hasn't made a Mac with a firewire port in 13 years.. And it's been 22 years since IPods were moved to USB? Who the hell is this going to impact? One person is South Who-gives-a-phuc?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      This qualifies as "news", how? Apple hasn't made a Mac with a firewire port in 13 years.. And it's been 22 years since IPods were moved to USB? Who the hell is this going to impact? One person is South Who-gives-a-phuc?

      Everybody who still has FireWire audio interfaces. I've been trying to get MOTU hardware to go from large quantities of ADAT inputs to AVB for almost a year now, and the hardware is completely unobtainable. I will not be able to move to Tahoe for the foreseeable future because of this.

    • bro (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Audio production is hugely on Macs and a lot of audio equipment is, for lack of a better word, "legacy." Combination of "why throw out thousands of dollars of stuff that works fine" and just plain preferring the old stuff. USB is not really a substitute.
    • It will impact somebody who uses Apple Mac and a firewire device, you fucking idiot. Not hard. Try using that big brain sometime.

      • How will it impact them, though? They can simply choose to....not upgrade to the new OS that drops the support they need.

        Don't put the machine on the Internet and carry on with your life.

  • Could be multiple kilobytes.

  • FireWire pci-e cards will still work?

    • FireWire pci-e cards will still work?

      Apparently not. There's a lack of drivers and settings seen in the beta so while the connection can be made physically there's no means for the OS to communicate with the hardware. Would there be third party drivers like was seen with Windows when Microsoft started to kill support for FireWire?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        FireWire pci-e cards will still work?

        Apparently not. There's a lack of drivers and settings seen in the beta so while the connection can be made physically there's no means for the OS to communicate with the hardware. Would there be third party drivers like was seen with Windows when Microsoft started to kill support for FireWire?

        In theory, nothing stops someone from writing a FireWire Audio PCI driver using PCIDriverKit and AudioDriverKit, but I'm pretty sure nobody is going to do it unless I magically find myself with a lot more free time. You'd have to start by writing a FireWire OHCI card driver, and then write the drivers for the actual devices on top of that. It would be a huge pain in the you-know-what.

        It would be easier, in all likelihood, to just keep Apple's (open source) FireWire drivers working, so long as they don't r

  • FFS it's right there in the summary ! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ZombieCatInABox ( 5665338 ) on Thursday June 19, 2025 @09:13PM (#65462389)

    The last Mac with a FireWire port was released in 2012

    The oldest intel macs that will be compatible with tahoe are from 2019. IOW, none of the machines compatible with tahoe have firewire port.

    This will impact no-one. That's why Apple are removing support. Apple never removes support for hardware that it lists as compatible with a given macos version.

    • Re:FFS it's right there in the summary ! (Score:5, Informative)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday June 19, 2025 @11:40PM (#65462589) Homepage Journal

      The last Mac with a FireWire port was released in 2012

      The oldest intel macs that will be compatible with tahoe are from 2019. IOW, none of the machines compatible with tahoe have firewire port.

      This will impact no-one.

      Sorry, thanks for playing. Apple supported FireWire even in current Macs using the Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire adapter (though you also need a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter on any Macs built from 2016 onwards). I used multiple MOTU FireWire audio interfaces with my M1 Mac (still running Sonoma) just a couple of months ago.

      Apple also supports FireWire PCIe cards in all versions of the Mac Pro, and in Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures attached to any Mac.

      Yes, this impacts people. No, Apple doesn't care about pro audio folks. They demonstrated that long ago, and keep doing so over and over again.

      • Yes, this impacts people. No, Apple doesn't care about pro audio folks. They demonstrated that long ago, and keep doing so over and over again.

        You had me at "care"

        As someone who had the B&W G3 Macintosh and was told by Apple "yes we fucked up the ATA controller, the same chip works OK in Sun US5 workstations but we botched hooking it up, and you can either buy an add-in card or use FWB Toolbox to slow down your devices by putting them into PIO mode so you don't get data corruption, and no we won't replace the logic board we fucked up" I know Apple DGAF in general. And hey, tie-in, that machine had firewire onboard.

      • I used multiple MOTU FireWire audio interfaces with my M1 Mac (still running Sonoma) just a couple of months ago.

        Yes, and those firewire interfaces will keep working under tahoe, because as far as macos is concerned, these interfaces are seen as thunderbolt devices.

        Apple also supports FireWire PCIe cards in all versions of the Mac Pro, and in Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures attached to any Mac.

        Again, the thunderbolt pcie enclosures will work as before under tahoe. The only valid point i've read so far is the case of firewire pcie cards in mac pros. But this is the first developper beta of tahoe. My advice would be: Register for the beta program. If firewire support impacts you, file in a bug report. That's what the beta program is for. Tahoe fina

        • That's not how that kind of Thunderbolt device works:

          TB handles the PCIe tunneling; but the PCIe device still acts more or less as an ordinary PCIe device would. On the plus side that means that TB can support basically arbitrary PCIe peripherals(barring some very fiddly assumptions most commonly found in GPUs, especially if the firmware or OS expects a GPU to be available very early in boot); but on the minus side it's still up to the OS to know what to do with the PCIe device.

    • There are plenty of audio engineers that will disagree that nobody will be impacted. But do go on telling other people their business - I hear that goes over really well.

      • The only people that could be impacted are those using firewire pcie cards in mac pros. On this point I stand corrected. But again, this is the first developper beta of tahoe. Plenty of time to register to the program and file bug reports to Apple if impacted. This is what the program is for.

    • Apple never removes support for hardware that it lists as compatible with a given macos version.

      Unless they forget what hardware they install in their computers. Over the decades, I've had lots of Apple hardware fail because they removed a driver for hardware they were using in one of their models, especially hardware that wasn't fully PCI compliant.

      Audio hardware, in particular, has this problem a lot. Nothing like updating your OS only to find out you have no sound on a "supported" model.

      This will impact no-one.

      Yeah, yeah... I've heard that a million times before. People are always affected. The real issue is how hard

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        Wacom dropped support for my drawing tablet because it's old. Never mind the fact it's essentially an overblown joystick and a working driver could probably be coded up in a half hour. That's why Linux still supports it, and the official Wacom drivers don't.

        It's more than a half hour. It's testing on every single release. Having to have all the different models of tablets. Old PCs and Macs with the relevant ports or adapters. It's kind of messy to do right and at some point just not worth it. I've worked at companies making inout devices, not Wacom. I've been the guy inheriting the collection of old PCs, Macs, and devices to be used for testing. Not as an "intern" getting stuck with the task, but as a veteran dev who knows how to get all this old stuff running

      • This is why it won't impact anyone. https://www.amazon.com/Firewir... [amazon.com]

      • Unless they forget what hardware they install in their computers. Over the decades, I've had lots of Apple hardware fail because they removed a driver for hardware they were using in one of their models, especially hardware that wasn't fully PCI compliant.

        I'm sorry but I'll have to ask you for specific examples of that. To my knowledge, all macs running the latest version of macos they support have all their internal hardware fully functional. But if I'm worng, please enlighten me.

        Audio hardware, in particular, has this problem a lot. Nothing like updating your OS only to find out you have no sound on a "supported" model.

        Audio hardware from Apple ? Or external audio hardware from other manufacturers ?

        A few years ago, Wacom dropped support for my drawing tablet because it's old.

        How is that Apple's fault ?

    • I have a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter and a Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire 800 adapter. String those together, with a Firewire 800 to 400 cable if necessary, and I can connect all my firewire devices to my MacBook.

  • It dosen't matter anyway. https://www.amazon.com/Firewir... [amazon.com]

  • I've got an RME FireFace 800 audio interface. Expensive, top quality, tons of features. I use it with Windows and a PCIe card, so of course what Apple does or doesn't do is irrelevant to me. If I had to replace it with a current RME model, they've got a USB equivalent now. But I'm very happy with my current setup. Amazing sound quality (I run a small recording studio), and totally stable -- never a glitch or problem. PCIe card uses a TI chip -- I had problems at first with another off-brand card, but never

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