macOS Tahoe is ending support for FireWire, formerly Apple’s high-speed transfer bus of choice. Stephen Hackett put in the work to confirm things:
It has been reported that macOS Tahoe doesn’t include support for FireWire devices. To see for myself, I dug out an old FireWire 800 drive I used to use in my Apple service tech days….
On my Sequoia machine, the volumes all appeared in Finder and System Information app, under FireWire. When I moved the drive over to my MacBook Air running macOS Tahoe, it was a very different story. With the dongles in place, I held my breath, but it was in vain.
Stephen’s adapter chain was a FireWire 800 cable to a Thunderbolt 2 adapter to a Thunderbolt 3 adapter to a MacBook Pro. A while back I did something similar, but I took it all the way back to a digital camcorder from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 to a Sony iLink cable.
Now I just need to remember that macOS Sequoia is the latest OS that I can use if I ever need to reach back to a FireWire device again…