macOS Tahoe Beta Drops FireWire Support (macrumors.com) 39
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 iPods started to transition from FireWire to USB for data transfer in 2003, so the standard is very outdated, but it would still be the end of an era if macOS Tahoe drops it.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.
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 iPods started to transition from FireWire to USB for data transfer in 2003, so the standard is very outdated, but it would still be the end of an era if macOS Tahoe drops it.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.
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Original iPods were 5, not 10. But FireWire existed on the connector until it was replaced by Lightning.
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1,000 songs in your pocket (Score:2)
5MB of music?
Yes. And it was revolutionary. The alternatives being a CD-ROM or cassette tape.
I am not 100% sure, but Apple's advertising at the time might have been something like 1,000 songs in your pocket.
Which might be about 80 albums. It was an amazing amount of music to take with you when you left the house. It was like your friend's briefcase full of cassette tapes that he took to parties.
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5MB of music?
Yes. And it was revolutionary. The alternatives being a CD-ROM or cassette tape. I am not 100% sure, but Apple's advertising at the time might have been something like 1,000 songs in your pocket. Which might be about 80 albums. It was an amazing amount of music to take with you when you left the house. It was like your friend's briefcase full of cassette tapes that he took to parties.
Oops, 5 GB not MB.
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Original iPods were 5, not 10. But FireWire existed on the connector until it was replaced by Lightning.
Not really, no. The iPod stopped supporting FireWire data transfers with the iPod nano (2005) and the fifth-generation classic (2005). They continued supporting FireWire charging up through the original iPhone (2007), and phased it out beginning in 2008, a full four years before they dropped the 30-pin connector.
Re:FireWire iPod? (Score:4, Interesting)
FireWire is apparently still in use in audio equipment. Not home hi-fi but more like broadcast radio and TV, recording studios, DJ gear, and similar. It's falling been falling out of use for some time with USB and Ethernet replacing it. If Apple drops support then that's likely the final nail in the coffin for that.
There's FireWire in aerospace equipment but I doubt people are plugging that into their Mac.
I don't know if they claimed it "impacted" anyone really, other than enthusiasts of old Apple gear. It was more that it was the sign of the end of an era. This would be something like Apple finally ending use of ADB with the PowerMac G3. Or was it the G4? Or the end of an era with no longer having SCSI on the motherboard.
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off by a few orders of magnitude (Score:2)
You can store a lot of low bitrate MP3s on a 5 GB hard drive (lowest spec of 1st Gen iPod)
USB to FireWire adapters are around $10-20. They tend to only support a subset of FireWire and don't support chaining multiple devices, but it's kind of what you need in this scenario.
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5 or 10GB. Not Megabyte, GIGABYTE's.
And only for a generation. It also had a mechanical scroll wheel (as opposed to the touch-based which didn't turn) and could easily be used as an external boot device.
iPods still have their active fanbase. I have an old 80GB Video that the internal 1.8" LIF hard drive died. I replaced it with an SD Card with adapter that converts it to CF-Flash. and I replaced the front, as well as the battery. It can last a long time on a charge, and use it in the car because the 128GB i
macOS 26 does not impact a 2012 Intel Mac (Score:2)
Didn't they hold like 10MB? I don't really believe that anyone is using these, at all. I'd like to see proof this is "impacting" anyone, as the summary claims.
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro with a firewire port, I think these were sold until 2012. I also have the original 5GB iPod. However I am not impacted. This Mac has not been eligible for a macOS upgrade for about six years.
wildly misleading (Score:2)
"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
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Re: wildly misleading (Score:2)
I brought a beige box PC from Micron in early 1998 and it already had two USB ports in the back.
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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
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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
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Which at the time would have been known as the "useless serial bus".
Okay.... (Score:1)
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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)
Great savings (Score:1)
Could be multiple kilobytes.
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It's probably more about not having to maintain it.
Last Macs with firewire ports were from 2012 (Score:2)
It's probably more about not having to maintain it.
I think the last Macs with firewire ports were from 2012.
FireWire pci-e cards will still work? (Score:2)
FireWire pci-e cards will still work?
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What Apple Computer has expansion slots?
The Mac Pro's?
Were Mac Pro PCIe slots limited to GPUs? (Score:2)
What Apple Computer has expansion slots?
The Mac Pro's?
I am not 100% sure, but I think there might be something about the Apple Mac Pro PCIe implementations that limit them to GPUs? That they are not general purpose PCIe?
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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?
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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)
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:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
No one will lose anything (Score:2)