Support for FireWire Removed from macOS 26 Tahoe
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technology that took over from SCSI around 1999 and powered high-speed Mac accessories until Thunderbolt 1 and USB 3.0 superseded it in 2011 and 2012.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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do I remember correctly that Firewire supported daisy-chaining several compatible peripherals whereas USB and Thunderbolt require multiport hubs?
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.
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).
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.)
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:
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.
That should work just fine since the old macOS you need is Sequoia and your M1 MBP supports that macOS. Multiple macOS versions on the same drive (internal or external) can get a bit confusing (eg. an internal SSD with at least 10 volumes spread over at least two groups), but there’s good documentation (see below) to help with that. Keep in mind that if you decide to install one version of macOS on an external drive, for that initial install to work, the drive may NOT be connected to your Mac’s DFU port.
Yes. Dual-boot is installing multiple operating systems on the computer (whether on internal or external storage). You will boot the computer with one of them, and the others don’t do anything. To switch between them, you need to reboot the computer.
Virtualization and emulation are mechanisms for running another operating system at the same time as the computer’s primary operating system.
Virtualization usually provides better performance, but it can only run operating systems compatible with the host system’s hardware architecture. Emulation will let you run completely incompatible software, at the expense of a significant loss of performance.
It should be possible. For a dual-boot solution, you can download the Tahoe installer, boot into Recovery mode and install it to a new set of volumes on your SSD or to an external SSD. I haven’t done this, but here’s an Apple support article about how to install macOS on external storage devices:
Virtualization is also an option. You will need to get a suitable VM platform. I don’t know if all can virtualize macOS, but I do know about this one (from Howard Oakley):
I know about three other VM platforms (VMWare Fusion, Parallels Desktop and VirtualBox), but I don’t know if or how well they can run macOS in a VM on Apple Silicon.
Regardless of which VM platform you choose, you will create a virtual disk (a large multi-GB file used to emulate a storage device for the VM) and you will install macOS onto that virtual disk.
Of course, if you need FireWire access, it limits your options. You’ll need one of:
You will not be able to use a macOS 26 host, running 15 in a VM. Although you should be able to get macOS working, it will almost certainly not be able to access a FW device.
USB will definitely work (but you’re right that USB 2.0 will be slower than FW).
There are eSATA-USB adapters. I don’t know how well they work.
Also, depending on the drive, you may be able to remove the drive from its enclosure and put it in a modern USB3 enclosure. This may not work for all drives - some external drive manufacturers use drives with custom firmware, making them incompatible with anyone else’s enclosures. But if it works, that’s a good way to upgrade the interface.
Apple states dual-booting is temporary.
I had saved a bookmark to a very similar Apple support page which is a few weeks older than the page David C. linked to. There Apple states that a dual-boot setup is only a temporary solution, particularly when maintaining an older system version. This is due to changes introduced by ongoing updates to the new OS for security etc. which potentially conflict with the older OS.
Run two versions of macOS on a Mac - Apple Support
Yes, they state (on the page you linked to, emphasis mine):
The section I emboldened explains why. Basically, they’re saying that future macOS releases may install firmware updates to various components (e.g. an Intel Mac’s T2, a Wi-Fi module, the pre-boot system, etc.) that are incompatible with old versions of macOS.
We know they already did this once. Apple changed the organization of the non-macOS APFS containers when moving from version 11 (Big Sur) to 12 (Monterey). The new organization pretty much breaks Big Sur installations, making dual-boot difficult if not impossible.
In other words, I don’t think they’re saying that they plan on eliminating dual boot capability, but it’s not a viable approach for keeping an old version of macOS (e.g. version 12 or 13) running into the indefinite future. If you want to do that, you’ll pretty much need to dedicate a computer to the task or see if you can do it through emulation (which should eliminate any dependencies on the host OS installation).
I agree with David. Apple’s approach to OS management is almost entirely forward-looking, as opposed to legacy support. If I am not mistaken, the last Macs with actual FireWire ports were released in 2012.
If your needs are occasional and Mojave or Catalina will suffice, a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with an SSD will do very nicely, as will an SSD-equipped 2012 Mac mini. Of course, many newer machines will work with the right set of adapters.
Depending on the application, you may even find a current Windows 11 desktop to be a suitable host for a FireWire device, but you need to do a little research to ensure that any third party FireWire card you add to the machine will work in Windows 11. Apparently, many cards work using legacy drivers, but some don’t.
What is the chance of third party drivers? I very rarely use FW now days but I have an OWC Thunderbolt dock with FW and some peripherals. It’s not a big loss but a bit annoying.
Doubtful:
Sad to see my old OWC and Glyph drives go into retirement. Amazing how durable and reliable they’ve been. At least some of them had USB ports and piggybacking them got to be problematic for reasons I never figured out.
“Piggybacking?” I’m unfamiliar with that term.
I guess I am relieved I kept my Mac Mini (worked fine prior to Mac Studio upgrade) in a box. Along with an OWC Thunderbolt dock, I have an LaCie Optical DVD-RAM drive that the media I have, I didn’t catalog, I’ll wait till I retire and fire “pun” them up and realize maybe a good thing or maybe waste of time and storage. Even have brand new, never used DVDRAM carts.
But this points out the failure for Apple to not permit Virtual Machines to interface with archival legacy media, but instead, risk to keep older machines on a shelf for purpose to network or sneakernet anything relevant to access that isn’t supported.
Funny. I kept a Powermac G3 (beige) incase I ever needed OS9 to 10 stuff. Even have that MacSE for dust collection. Guess hoarding macs and adapters is OK…