Comment by hatsix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hatsix | Hacker News Reader

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It's exactly how Apple operates. The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012, though it was sold for several more years. MacOS 13 (2022) dropped the Firewire CoreAudio driver (as well as other, more niche support for Firewire). So... exactly 10 years.

If you're going to put me in a bucket, I'd be in the "Apple Hater" bucket, but I honestly think that the way that they do this is fine. It would have been better if they had jumped on the USB bandwagon earlier, they certainly love to build their own solutions that are incompatible with where the rest of the industry (see also, their proprietary wireless audio, their proprietary bluetooth codec, their proprietary thunderbolt extensions, their proprietary magsafe power connectors, their proprietary Lightning cable/connector, their forking of webkit off of khtml, their changes to webkit that are part of Safari but haven't been pushed upstream to webkit)

Anyways, this is exactly their MO and it's not bad. Apple doesn't need you to contradict everything people say about Apple.

Apple sold the first widely-available computer with USB connections, the iMac G3.

> To replace the removed ports, the iMac has Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, which were faster and cheaper than Apple Desktop Bus and serial ports but were very new—the standard was not finalized until after the iMac's release—and unsupported by any third-party Mac peripheral.

  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#Design

It would not be possible for them to jump on a bandwagon they started any earlier than they did.

> The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012

Thunderbolt supports the Firewire protocol in the transport layer. So this means that people who need to support a Firewire device need a dongle now. Apple used to sell the adapter, apparently it's been discontinued, but they're still manufactured by third parties, and the originals available on the secondhand market. Which, given that Firewire is dead and buried, and no one is making new Firewire stuff, is also where you'd need to go to get something expecting Firewire to begin with.

I do not see this as the problem you seem to.

> Apple sold the first widely-available computer with USB connections, the iMac G3.

They were also, simultaneously, the first manufacturer to really go all-in on USB. Some PC manufacturers at the time were including one or two USB ports on their systems, but relied on legacy ports (PS/2, serial, parallel, etc) for most functionality. Their USB ports were mostly a show of "look, we have the new thing" - much in the same way that modern PC motherboards may have a single USB-C port on the back, actually.

I interpreted it precisely the opposite. PC mobos were like "Look, you can use the new things if you have any, but we're not gonna make you throw out your PS/2 peripherals that you know and love, or even buy adapters for them, because all that stuff, and the support circuitry for it on the mobo, all works just fine."

The all-in approach required a forklift upgrade and generated a ton of e-waste.

> The all-in approach required a forklift upgrade and generated a ton of e-waste.

It really wasn't that bad. I lived through it.

The iMac was pitched as an entry-level Internet computer for new computer users. Many buyers didn't have a computer at all previous to purchasing an iMac, or only had one which was old enough that its accessories would have been irrelevant (e.g. an external modem). Probably the most common USB accessory purchase was external floppy drives - and a lot of users ended up discarding those after they realized they weren't using them.

Maybe you missed the part where I said "this is fine". I don't have a problem with what they're doing, I have a problem with people saying that Apple doesn't do something that they very clearly do.

Also, I thought I was fairly clear in my comment, but Apple removed support in MacOS 13 for Firewire Audio... so it doesn't matter what kind of dongles you have, as soon as you update to 13, your firewire camera no longer works.

It's weird that Apple is removing driver-level support for a protocol. It's unexpected. It's also a dead tech that nobody cares about. The person I was responding to wanted an example of accessories that Apple stopped supporting, and "Anything with Firewire Audio" falls into that category. It is completely, utterly unusable with stock MacOS 13, though it's likely that some people have found a way to put it back in.

I might be missing something but Apple was the first (major) company to ship USB 1.1 in 1998 on the iMac. It was a big deal IIRC also because they removed the floppy drive at the same time.

But maybe you are talking about something else?

I don't know if you were around in ~2005 ish, but for the longest time Apple backed Firewire 400/800 over USB2.0, because it was faster. Apple supported USB, of course, but it was clear that Firewire was the connector of choice.

You’re right Apple has a playbook of changing port types every few years, but there are adaptors available. The devices themselves still work, just that Apple knows they can use this one trick to encourage some customers to upgrade.

With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original Airpods, which came out 8 years ago and use some custom protocols alongside vanilla Bluetooth.

Maybe in the future they’ll start deprecating parts of the protocol (“in order to save your phone’s battery life” or something), but I don’t believe they have so far.

Apple is to charging ports as Sony is to mass storage media.

Specific to my comment, Apple removed code that supports audio over Firewire. It doesn't matter if adapters are available, cameras and microphones that used Firewire no longer work on MacOS 13+.

Again, it had a long run, I'm not upset that they "only" supported it for 10 years... but let's be very clear, the devices don't work. Also, this is them removing support for a protocol that is part of the base MacOS, so it's exactly like what will eventually happen when Apple stops supporting the original Airpods protocols.

I don't think that's any time soon, and if you're in the Apple ecosystem, go ham... let's just be very clear about the comparisons here.

FireWire hard drives still work fine though. (FireWire 800 to Thunderbolt adapter, connected to a Thunderbolt to TB3 adapter).

Why support the adapter and hard drives, but not audio devices?

(What else used FireWire besides mass storage, audio stuff, the original iSight, and Time Warner Cable boxes from 2005?)

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