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I'm attempting to use legacy FireWire hardware peripherals in macOS 11 Big Sur.

Apple has provided an OEM hardware dongle connectivity path that is confirmed working in macOS Catalina:

  1. Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter
  2. Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter

Unfortunately, the one piece of FireWire hardware that I'm trying to use does not appear to work in Big Sur (on an M1 Mac).

Various threads online seem to indicate that FireWire products are either not supported in Big Sur or have various incompatibility issues.

To confirm: was FireWire support dropped in Big Sur, on Intel and/or Apple Silicon?

Was there an Apple announcement of this change?

Do any of your FireWire peripherals work in Big Sur? Has anyone tested a FireWire device and found it to work correctly?

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2 Answers 2

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FireWire support, in general, has not been removed from macOS Big Sur or Apple Silicon.

This video demonstrates daisy-chaining 3 FireWire peripherals to an M1 MacBook Pro running macOS 11 Big Sur:

  • FireWire Hard Disk
  • FireWire Audio Interface
  • FireWire Video Camera

So all-in-all I'm really surprised all this equipment still works, or at least it works the same way as it did in the previous versions of Macs with Intel processors.

I honestly expected Apple would have dropped FireWire support on these newer Macs but, surprisingly, it's still possible as long as you have the right adapters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ISyI3VcWo

FireWire M1

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My Motu 828 mk2 firewire interface doesn't work with Big Sur. This was confirmed by Motu's technical support. This is my experience !

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    That sounds more like compatibility issue with that audio interface, not the firewire itself.
    – Skye-AT
    Commented Sep 1, 2021 at 8:41

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