Firewire to thunderbolt
I have a brandnew Macstudio. I want to connect my audio-interface to this mac. The interface has a firewire 800. The Macstudio has a thunderbolt 4. How can i connect it?
Apple Watch Series 8, watchOS 10
As far as I know, nobody makes Thunderbolt 3/4 to FireWire adapters, or Thunderbolt 3/4 docks with FireWire ports. The technology would support it – but there are no vendors.
That leaves using an Apple Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter to connect
- A discontinued Apple Thunderbolt-to-FireWire 800 adapter, or
- A discontinued third-party Thunderbolt 1/2 dock that has a FireWire port
Aside from the problem of finding the equipment that you need on the used market, note that Apple has reportedly removed support for FireWire audio devices from recent versions of macOS. Plug-and-play Firewire audio devices that did not need special drivers won't work anymore, because of the removal of OS support. As for any that need drivers, their drivers likely take the form of old Intel-only kernel extensions that can't run on Apple Silicon Macs like the Mac Studio.
So it's not just a problem of finding equipment, but of finding or writing new drivers that will work on Apple Silicon chips, and with the security changes that Apple has made to deprecate kernel extensions in favor of system ones.
It might be easier to replace that interface with a USB-based one (low end) or a Thunderbolt-based one (high end), as painful as that might be.
