Support for FireWire Removed from macOS 26 Tahoe

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Originally published at: Support for FireWire Removed from macOS 26 Tahoe - TidBITS

Early in the macOS 26 Tahoe beta cycle, reports emerged that Apple had removed support for FireWire, the once-ubiquitous peripheral connection technology that took over from SCSI around 1999 and powered high-speed Mac accessories until Thunderbolt 1 and USB 3.0 superseded it in 2011 and 2012. Also known by its technical standard name of IEEE 1394, FireWire operated first at 400 Mbps and later at 800 Mbps, much faster than SCSI’s paltry 40 Mbps but far behind USB 3.0’s 5 Gbps and Thunderbolt 1’s 10 Gbps.

Stephen Hackett confirmed the removal back in July 2025, writing:

The reports are true: FireWire’s run on the Mac has ended after 26 years. RIP, my once-fast friend.

Nothing changed between the betas and the official release of macOS 26, and you can see that FireWire no longer appears in System Information.

FireWire removed from System Information

Although no Mac has had FireWire ports since the 13-inch MacBook Pro that Apple released in mid-2012 and sold until October 2016, the technology’s software support has remained in macOS until now. Many users have relied on the Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter to connect FireWire-based hard drives, scanners, audio interfaces, camcorders, and other peripherals, including the original iPod.

Some of those devices may have alternative interfaces, most likely USB or Thunderbolt, but if not, you’ll need to keep a Mac running macOS 15 Sequoia or earlier to use them.

While there’s no question that USB has taken over from FireWire in every way that matters, I’ll miss FireWire’s evocative name, which so aptly described it. Thunderbolt is nearly as expressive, but it’s a shame that USB falls so short in comparison. Between its name (Universal Serial Bus), acronym (USB), and hodgepodge of versioning identifiers (USB 2.0, USB 3.2, USB4, and we won’t even get into connector types), USB’s branding is a stultifying combination of confusing and tedious (also see “USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables,” 3 December 2021, and “USB Simplifies Branding but Reintroduces Active Cables,” 29 September 2022).

 

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At some point, after I’ve upgraded to 26 (not happening soon), I’ll connect by TB-FW adapter an a FW hard drive to see if anything happens.

Although it’s unlikely, part of me wonders if they may have removed it from System Information without removing the underlying device drivers.

If anyone has an adapter and wants to try it before I’m able to, please do so and let us know.

I have several FireWire devices. I don’t use them right now, but I don’t like the idea that I won’t be able to in the future:

  • A few hard drives. These also have USB ports. So they’ll work, albeit slowly.
  • My old iSight camera. The last time I tried it (several macOS releases ago), I was able to get video, but not sound from it.
  • My scanner. But I had to switch from FW to its USB interface a long time ago, when my scanner software (SilverFast) dropped support when I upgraded from version 6 to version 8.
  • My VXA tape drive. This one has no alternative. Which bothers me. On the other hand, anything on those tapes that I haven’t migrated to my current computer won’t be compatible with anything newer than my PowerMac G4 - which can still use it.
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I’ve always considered Thunderbolt more as the actual successor (i.e. TB1 succeeding FW800). While 5 Gbps USB 3.0 did offer enough bandwidth to succeed FireWire (and for a lot of peripherals the switch was indeed to USB3), USB’s host/slave topology, lacking DMA, and latency made sure that FW800 remained in use deep into the Thunderbolt era (first on the MBP in Feb 2011, so about 18 months before 3.0 came to the Mac) and long after USB 3.0 showed up.

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Certainly Stephen Hackett found that they had in the beta, so it seems highly unlikely. But you never know until you try.

That’s a good point. I somehow had it in my head that Thunderbolt came later, so I was focused on USB 3 in MacTracker. I should update the article.

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As Adam says, it was confirmed during the beta cycle that the drivers were gone and adapters wouldn’t give access to FireWire devices. What I’d be curious to know is if in Tahoe one created a UTM virtual machine running Sequoia (or earlier), would FireWire devices be accessible in the virtual machine? That would be an acceptable workaround for my extremely occasional use.

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I understand UTM does not (yet) support mounting external disks and drives, just images. So it might be that other external devices will not be accessible.

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True that. The Mac Mini (late 2012) was a great machine due to it being a nexus of the old and new connectivity. Supporting FW800, TB-1, USB 3 and SD Card for data; separate analog audio I/O ports and HDMI (digital multi-channel); support for SSD+HDD in certain configurations, plus easy upgrading. Wish I had one! Mac Mini tech specs.

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Connecting and importing from MiniDV devices (ie. Sony, Canon camcorder) with FW400 / Sony iLink requires a daisy-chain series of adapters.

If memory serves, my setup was:
iMac > TB3-to-TB2 > TB2-toFW800 > FW800-to-FW400 > FW400 cable to 4-pin > camera/device

TIP: Using iMovie (2020 iMac with macOS 10.15) I set it to just record the entire import as ONE video file. In other words, set iMovie to NOT segment video into clips (auto-detecting places where recording stopped and started again). I discovered iMovie drops a lot of frames in the process of making clips. This is probably because it does not buffer incoming video signal while writing out the previous clip and starting a new one.

I may be inconvenient, but you have far more control over segmentation by doing it yourself in editing (NLE) after the video is converted to a file. It is also impressive to see the richness of colors and contrast after importing vs. simply patching the camera into a display that supports S-video (or worse, composite RCA) connectors.

There are many people discussing solutions for importing older video formats. It is also worth noting that not all devices/software work with DV format, as noted by J. Richardson in Jan. 2024, when he tried importing via his Caldigit TS4 dock and had to find other non-linear editing (NLE) software. This appears to be due to macOS changes that prevent iMovie and Premiere from working with DV.

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Good question. It’s going to depend on the virtualization architecture. If a Thunderbolt port can be virtualized, then its raw data will go to the VM, and I would expect the adapter to work. If it doesn’t do that, then there would need to be a virtual FireWire device driver interface, which clearly won’t exist if the host operating system doesn’t support FireWire.

But you could have combined the FW800-400 adapter and cable to a single 9pin-4pin FireWire cable.

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I don’t think that any of the available virtualization solutions have support for Thunderbolt pass through like they do for USB. Certainly not VMware Fusion. Parallels documentation says that there is only support for FW/TB mass storage devices, but it’s not clear that that is real pass-through of the device or a disk once it’s detected by the host. Certainly doesn’t look like generic PCIe passthrough.

It isn’t looking very good for UTM, VirtualBox, or Apple’s own Hypervisor/Virtualization frameworks either.

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I have an iSight camera, which I used with a G4 iMac, both inherited, a FireWire backup external OWC drive, and, the device I will try to use with the G4 a fully functioning first Gen iPod.

I may try to have the iPod converted to SSD and USB-C, someday. There are providers who do this, and upgrade/relace the battery.

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Do you have a source for FW-USB conversion? This is the first I’ve ever heard about it.

I know all about the iFlash series of adapters, which will let you replace the hard drive with SD/microSD/CF/mSATA storage (but only for 3rd gen and later). And I know iFixit has a procedures and parts for some iPod models, but I’ve never heard of a FW-USB conversion. That sounds like it would require a motherboard swap, and afterward, it really wouldn’t be the same iPod anymore.

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All of the above having been said, it does seem to me like FW-USB adapters should be possible, at least in theory.

Since the invention of USB-attached-SCSI (UAS - a protocol used in most USB3 storage enclosures these days), it should be possible to tunnel FW data (which is SCSI) over a USB interface. This should work, at minimum, for storage devices. I hold out much less hope for it working for other types of devices (e.g. cameras, scanners, tape drives), mostly because I doubt any host operating system will have the necessary driver support.

Sounds like a really great project, if someone here has the skills and desire to make such an adapter into reality.

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There are FireWire to USB dongles, but they don’t work on Tahoe. They did work on Sequoia.

A former colleague sent his iPod to an iPod after market service to be converted to USB-C from Firewire, the drive replaced with SSD, and a new battery installed. It worked; I don’t know what if any changes were made to circuit boards but both end panels were replaced. I can’t remember if the audio/headphone jack was removed or not. I just assume if it worked for him, I could find a service to do the same. I haven’t looked.

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Those are going to be like the Apple adapter. They are basically a Thunderbolt-connected FireWire interface. Which will require a device driver in the operating system.

What I suggested does not, as far as I know, exist at this time. A device like that would require a bridge chip or FPGA of some kind to terminate the FireWire bus and generate equivalent USB/UAS data flows.

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Do I remember correctly that Firewire supported daisy-chaining several compatible peripherals whereas USB and Thunderbolt require multiport hubs?

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Having seen the writing on the wall, I sold my Imacon 848 and Hasselblad X1 film scanners. I still have a Nikon LS5000 and a couple of older Macs to use it with. Such a shame to see such fantastic film scanners coming to an end.

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Not quite. Many FireWire devices have pass-through ports, but ultimately it is a bus (similar to the old SCSI parallel bus). FireWire hubs were always a thing (I used a 6-port hub with my PowerMac). On a FireWire hub, all ports are equivalent - there’s no concept of an upstream/downstream port like there is on USB and Thunderbolt.

Thunderbolt versions 1-2 were daisy-chain-only. A device connected to a computer would process the data it knows how to handle and propagate everything else downstream to the next devices.

TB3 supported hubs as an optional feature, but as far as I know, nobody actually implemented the capability. TB4 (and USB4, which is the same thing) made hub support mandatory.

USB 1-3 has always been a tree topology. One root hub in the computer (possibly several root hubs, if the ports don’t all share a single controller chip), and hub peripherals to permit multiple devices to share a port. A hub can support up to 7 downstream ports (hubs with more actually implement two or more hubs inside the enclosure). peripheral devices are always leaf devices and can’t pass data downstream (things like Apple’s USB keyboard fake it by putting a hub in the device’s enclosure).

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At the risk of asking an uninformed question … dual-boot is a very different thing from virtualization, right? If so, can I create a new volume on which to install Tahoe, import all my stuff there, and keep a bare Sequoia volume for when I need FireWire? Any reason that wouldn’t work?

My M1 MBP is docked to an Apple Thunderbolt Display, which gives me a FW800 port. My key use case is importing old MiniDV video tapes off a camcorder.

(I also have a lot of external FW drives but most of them also have an eSATA port which can be connected to a modern Mac via a USB-C adapter (that’ll still work in Tahoe, right??) and the rest have USB 2.x ports so at least I can access those drives at low speeds.)

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I have some old quad port OWC devices with Firewire ports. I now use USB to eSATA cables; of the available ports it is the best choice. One example is the Mercury Elite-AL Pro, with USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA.

Another is a Newer Technology Voyager Q SATA Drive Dock. It has:

  • USB 3.0
  • eSATA
  • FireWire 400
  • FireWire 800

You’d think that USB 3.0 would be the best choice, but guess what? That port works with USB 2.0, but never has worked with USB 3.0. It isn’t a cable problem.

The only other FireWire device I have is a 100 GB LaCie backup drive (FireWire & USB 2.0) that I used with my PowerBook G4. 100 GB was a lot back then, but now it is a rounding error. So 10 years ago I copied it to a compressed disk image. I do dive into it every once in awhile.