It's been 10 years since any Mac shipped with a FireWire port. That was only because they kept selling a single 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro model for several years. That model was also the last MacBook Pro to include a built-in optical drive, a spinning hard disk drive, and a built-in Ethernet port.
I still have a FireWire-based MiniDV cam I use for digitizing video, so this provides good reason to keep an older machine around for said purposes.
I’m not asking to keep the physical port, just the software/driver support.
If someone has a perfectly good FireWire device that they’ve been using for 10 years, and they upgrade to macOS 26 to find out they lost support, they are then put in the position to spend (potentially) hundreds of dollars on a forced upgrade. Change their workflow. Possibly spend hundreds on an old computer on eBay to facilitate a migration… all for what? To save a few mb of disk space?
I don’t see it much differently than removal optical disk support. Remove the drives, no problem. Stop selling the SuperDrive, sure thing. But killing all access for any old hardware to connect by removing the software support? That’s a bridge too far.
These are often quiet removals, probably to avoid a protest, but people should be made aware when support is being dropped, so they can prepare if necessary.
To be clear, I'm all for making the end of support very obvious and clear, not doing it quietly. People should not be surprised to lose support during an upgrade, especially on an OS that doesn't support downgrades.
> To save a few mb of disk space?
No, the removal of functionality is not a matter of disk space. It's a matter of maintenance effort. Drivers require updates, ongoing work, forward-porting each time internal APIs change, regularly running tests on a variety of hardware, and so on. For hardware that few people have, that's a high burden, and at some point it becomes too high.
I guess this means this will be the end of support for old iPods as well. Not to mention old video cameras.
While I haven’t used FireWire in years, this still feels premature and rather arbitrary.
It's been 10 years since any Mac shipped with a FireWire port. That was only because they kept selling a single 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro model for several years. That model was also the last MacBook Pro to include a built-in optical drive, a spinning hard disk drive, and a built-in Ethernet port.
I still have a FireWire-based MiniDV cam I use for digitizing video, so this provides good reason to keep an older machine around for said purposes.
> premature
No matter how long people wait, there will always be someone saying it was too soon.
Technology moves on. At some point, if you want to use an old technology, you need an old computer.
I’m not asking to keep the physical port, just the software/driver support.
If someone has a perfectly good FireWire device that they’ve been using for 10 years, and they upgrade to macOS 26 to find out they lost support, they are then put in the position to spend (potentially) hundreds of dollars on a forced upgrade. Change their workflow. Possibly spend hundreds on an old computer on eBay to facilitate a migration… all for what? To save a few mb of disk space?
I don’t see it much differently than removal optical disk support. Remove the drives, no problem. Stop selling the SuperDrive, sure thing. But killing all access for any old hardware to connect by removing the software support? That’s a bridge too far.
These are often quiet removals, probably to avoid a protest, but people should be made aware when support is being dropped, so they can prepare if necessary.
To be clear, I'm all for making the end of support very obvious and clear, not doing it quietly. People should not be surprised to lose support during an upgrade, especially on an OS that doesn't support downgrades.
> To save a few mb of disk space?
No, the removal of functionality is not a matter of disk space. It's a matter of maintenance effort. Drivers require updates, ongoing work, forward-porting each time internal APIs change, regularly running tests on a variety of hardware, and so on. For hardware that few people have, that's a high burden, and at some point it becomes too high.