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.
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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