Firewire Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Thunderbolt: Apple and Intel's new interconnect

by Michael Rose (Feb 24th, 2011)

It's been a while getting here -- Intel first demoed Light Peak at IDF in September 2009 -- but the first production laptops featuring the new, rebranded Thunderbolt interface are about to ship, in the form of shiny new MacBook Pros. Thunderbolt's raw speed (10 Gbps) and purported simplicity ...

New MacBook Pro could arrive in April 2011 with SSD, Light Peak, no DVD

by Sam Abuelsamid (Nov 29th, 2010)

Update Put your checkbooks away, folks. Electronista has all but debunked this rumor. By crunching the numbers, they confirmed that (at today's prices at least), such a MacBook Pro could easily be priced out of the market. Read on and dream, but don't expect this machine to appear on your desk ...

OWC offers DIY kits for Mac minis, laptops

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Apr 1st, 2010)

Other World Computing (best known on the net as OWC) has released more than 50 storage upgrade kits for laptops and the Mac mini. The kits start at $65.99 and include everything for do-it-yourself replacements including: A new drive ranging from 250GB to 1TB. An enclosure for your old drive ...

Ask TUAW: Clocks, screen guards, MacBook hard drive replacement, NFS automount, and more

by Mat Lu (Mar 14th, 2010)

Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about replacing a MacBook hard drive, refreshing a NFS mount, getting a simple clock on screen, improving iCal's note handling, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave ...

New unibody MacBook loses two ports

by Chris Rawson (Oct 20th, 2009)

The new polycarbonate MacBook released today has gained some tantalizing new features, but in the process of redesigning the case to accept the new integrated battery, it's also lost two ports. Just like the unibody aluminum MacBooks released last year, the latest version of the plastic MacBook ...

Using FireWire to help speed up the iTunes Home Sharing process

by Sang Tang (Sep 17th, 2009)

One of the new features of iTunes 9 is Home Sharing. The feature allows you to manually browse, import, and automatically add iTunes content from up to five authorized computers in your house. While Home Sharing is certainly a welcome feature, it's so slow that you may not live long enough to see ...

TUAW's review of the DroboPro, plus a discount deal for readers

by Steven Sande (Sep 4th, 2009)

Data Robotics delivered their "super-sized" version of the Drobo earlier this year. DroboPro has 8 drive bays into which you can drop 3.5" SATA drives of almost any capacity, from the old 160 GB model you've been using to hold the backup of your iTunes library to that 2 TB Western Digital Caviar ...

A weekend with FireWire

by Sang Tang (Aug 7th, 2009)

My MacBook Pro and I had a bit of a rendezvous this past weekend. She's a 15 inch Core Duo with 2GB of RAM. Although she'll occasionally get as hot as a toaster oven (leaving red marks on my lap at times) and mooed like a cow when we first met, she's been a consistent workhorse for me. But her hard ...

TUAW Tip: Swap out your laptop's hard disk for a spiffy new SSD

by Robert Palmer (Apr 14th, 2009)

If you're looking for a significant performance boost for your middle-aged laptop, replacing your aging hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD) could give your computer a new lease on life. Solid-state disks (pictured, bottom) differ from traditional hard disks (top) in that they're not constructed ...

Goodbye, FireWire 400

by Mike Schramm (Mar 4th, 2009)

As Macworld notes, this is it for the ol' Firewire 400. With the introduction of the new Mac mini the other day and the refresh of the Mac Pro and iMac lines, the old version of Firewire is left only on the white MacBook. It's evolution at its finest, and our good friend Nilay Patel over at ...

Sonnet FireWire dongle gives your MacBook Pro the gift of FW400

by Cory Bohon (Nov 26th, 2008)

When Steve Jobs announced the new MacBook Pros, Apple received a lot of criticism for excluding a FireWire 400 port, despite the addition of FireWire 800. While most people were sitting around and griping, one company actually did something to reconcile the situation. Sonnet has created a dongle ...

Migration DVD and CD Sharing update available

by Dave Caolo (Oct 16th, 2008)

Apple has released Migration and DVD/CD Sharing Update 1.1. While Software Update states that the update is recommended for all users, the support page lists the MacBook (13-inch, Aluminum, Late 2008) and MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2008) as the affected machines. According to Apple, this update ...

FireWire feedback from readers and Apple

by Christina Warren (Oct 16th, 2008)

Yesterday's discussion post about the exclusion of FireWire from the newest MacBooks generated a tremendous amount of reader feedback and discussion. We decided to take an unscientific straw Twitter poll which generated a large response, underscoring that for the Mac community, FireWire is a big ...

Farewell FireWire?

by Christina Warren (Oct 15th, 2008)

During the meta-liveblog yesterday, I was in full-out Apple fangirl mode. I won't lie; after the MacBook specs and design were revealed, I was already contemplating putting my current BlackBook (that I bought in August '07) on eBay or Craig's List, hoping that the RAM and hard drive upgrades and ...

Western Digital My Passport Studio Portable Drives for Mac

by Steven Sande (May 21st, 2008)

Are you looking for a tiny portable hard drive for doing Time Machine backups on the road? I do a lot of traveling with my MacBook Air and don't often get a chance to back it up to the 1 TB monster at home. Although there are several other diminutive hard drives on the market, when I saw the My ...