macOS Tahoe Drops FireWire Support

Lionel Wong at Yale first told me about FireWire in 1992. Amazing technology that was peer-to-peer unlike USB that puts the CPU in the driver’s seat, and thus not in Intel’s best interests, which is why they only gave lip service to supporting it on PC platforms.

I guess maybe I can finally get rid of all the Firewire 400 and 800 cables I have sitting in a box in my office closet.

When I was a "PC guy" I bought PCI adaptors for my boxes so I could use the technically superior FireWire.

Worst mistake I ever made. Notwithstanding the stupid move St. Steve made to hike the fee in a way that seemed pretty clearly intended to keep the PC market out (which actually came down shortly afterward, but not until the damage was done), FW, like so many technologies, is proof that technical excellence isn't everything—in fact, in the grand scheme of things, it's barely anything. USB won for a simple reason: economy. No conspiracy required, nor per-unit fees. My PCI cards let me down the moment USB 3 happened, and until those machines died I was forced to buy (and keep buying) expensive, Mac-oriented drive enclosures (with or without drives) in order to keep ready access to my data and backups, and so I could continue to do my backups at anything better than USB "full" speed.

So yeah, good riddance, honestly. The only downside AFAICS is that I'll no longer be able to use my 2011 Mac Mini in Target Disk Mode, but I don't think I'll need to again now that Snow Leopard is long in my past. Gone, and probably forgotten before long, too.

Oh, and IP-over-IEEE1394. I'll miss that!

"good riddance"

Why? Did support for FireWire hurt anyone? I still have an old FireWire-capable camcorder. How does not being able to hook it up to my computer make things better for me?

@Plume Obviously, if you want to keep using FireWire today, it's a dead loss to you, though as I said, it was mostly just a burden to me. The same can, of course, be said of any long-dead technology, and especially one for which there was always limited vendor support. I'd love to get my old Parallel Syquest drives going again, but I think we both know it's not happening any time soon.

But note that your USB devices, going back to the beginning, don't have the same problem. If there's one good thing to be said for Thunderbolt, it's that it's a venture with genuine industry-wide support, so long as you're prepared to pay a somewhat higher premium, and that form factor and, now, USB4 protocol compatibility requirements mean that your investment will likely pay long into the future. I totally get the desire for conservation, especially if you have the adaptors and it's still physically possible to interconnect your old FireWire, but I don't think it's realistic to expect the software support to remain long after it's mainstream and well after the transition to its replacement. Especially when we're talking about Apple-centric technologies. Your best bet in this situation is probably a Linux box.

Everything seems to disappear eventually, but I'll admit it's still sad to see this happening.
And for an entire connector to just disappear, honestly does feel a little bit soon. So, I get that we are 20 years from Apple's latest devices in one sense, but the most recent MacBook Pro's were sold through 2015 that still had FW800.

The iPod 4th gen (the first iPod to be truly USB-- though the 3rd gen support ed USB sync but not charging IIRC) was released in 2005. There are still plenty of audio interfaces, camcorders, media decks, scanners that supported firewire only. There are of course plenty of external drives which were Firewire, but those are at least easier to swap to USB. The thing is, you can use 20+ year old scanners and they can still work great on modern Macs (like early 2000's Nikon film scanners). It really wasn't until a decade ago that Thunderbolt began replacing firewire on some of the last devices, though certainly some had moved to USB.

But old USB devices, they still work. Heck, it's not even too hard to adapt other old serial connectors to USB. Yes, time marches on, and those of us who need firewire will find ways, or just keep old devices around, but it would be great to have a few more years of support or maybe some optional kexts we can setup. Comical set of adapters be dammed, FW devices still work great today!