How dead is FireWire support in macOS Tahoe 26? As dead as the iPod, as far as the Mac is concerned, which is at least a little sad. Stephen Hackett checked.
In classic 512 Pixels fashion, he’s conjured together a real world demonstration using a battle-tested FireWire 800 cable-connected drive, two Thunderbolt adapters including a Thunderbolt 2 to 3 dongle, and a Mac. Woof.
The result? A drive that correctly appeared as several volumes on macOS Sequoia just looks like an adapter to nowhere on macOS Tahoe. macOS deprecation defeated FireWire before bit rot could take its toll on the drive.
Top comment by Rico R.
I'm more concerned about old DV camcorders than I am about the odd hard drive or first-gen iPod. They connect over FireWire, and it seems like the only option is to keep an old Mac (or a modern Mac kept on macOS Sequoia) around if you want to transfer tapes losslessly. Using an analog capture card with a camcorder's composite and RCA outputs is not lossless. Not all DV camcorders have USB support, and even fewer support transferring DV content over it. What's worse, those in the Windows world can still do this, but no Windows 11 on ARM VM solution allows to connect thunderbolt devices to VMs like USB devices. And while you can with the Pinnacle MovieBox (a mid-to-late 2000s device that doubles as an analog capture device and a USB-Firewire bridge for DV camcorders), they rely on drivers for the x86 or x86-64 platform, so no ARM support. I tried UTM and a Windows XP VM, but one, transferring between the VM and the host is problematic, and two, the connection is not stable on there and it doesn't transfer once the connection is disconnected for even a split second. Apple better rethink this somehow.
On one hand, no one should really trust a FireWire drive to work in 2025. On the other hand, dropping FireWire support for no apparent gain beyond simplicity makes the Mac just a little less capable.
If someone were to stumble upon an old FireWire drive filled with long lost family photos from another generation, the Mac should be able to see those photos. Hopefully there’s a compatible Mac in the same discovery.
It’s even more unfortunate that a Mac running macOS Sequoia can still interface with the original iPod (using one more dongle than Stephen’s example: a FireWire 400 to 800 adapter), but the same Mac running macOS Tahoe can’t. Just feels wrong on principle.
I’m not losing sleep over FireWire support being removed, but it does make me a little sad.
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