Re:MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch
by spectre3d on Saturday October 23, 2021 @08:30PM
(#28973742)
>Firewire external hd that I now dongle to Thunderbolt, have noooo idea how I'm going to get that to work).
Simply add another dongle, the Apple “Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter” and you’re good to go.
I just tested mine before posting this, from a FW800 drive with the Apple FireWire-Thunderbolt adapter plugged in to the Apple Thunderbolt 2-3 adapter. Works on M1 Macs too.
I think it's a bit unfair to say that Apple deliberately change interfaces in order to push their adapters.
They've got 2 different problems to address, firstly they want to update and be in control of the interfaces to their hardware, Firewire,Thunderbolt,USB-C but, at the same time their machines seem to last quite a long time, so at any time there's a pretty significant number of users stuck on older interfaces and with hardware that uses older interfaces too (e.g. I have an older Firewire external hd that I now dongle to Thunderbolt, have noooo idea how I'm going to get that to work when I get this new machine).
So in order to allow all that to work they need to support a multitude of interfaces because getting a new laptop shouldn't mean throwing everything else out.