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Apple Deleting Discussions About FireWire-Less MacBooks in Forums
Posted by Matt Buchanan at 2:00 AM on October 18, 2008
If you're seriously considering a MacBook over a MacBook Pro, one of the major sniggles is the fact that it no longer has FireWire, an omission seemingly designed to stratify the more-alike-than-ever models. So, it's natural users would take to the Apple forums to talk it out (or, let's be real, bitch). But Apple isn't having any of that apparently: MacFixIt is reporting that Apple is yanking threads from its forums that talk about the lack of FireWire on the new MacBooks. Of course, there's the possibility that these threads just contain complaints and not actual discussion questions, and that's the reason they were deleted.
The IEEE has approved the new FireWire 2008 specification, which will include the S1600 and S3200 standards, running at 1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps each. The new IEEE 1394 flavours will use the 
We put up with too many cables. There are at least four different kinds of USB plugs, two kinds of FireWire and like a million different ways to connect something to TV or monitor. Modern gadget life can be kind of retarded in this way. Why not one kind of cable, or just a couple? I don't know. But until everyone gets on the same appendage-to-hole scheme, in the meantime, you can use this: an illustrated guide to pretty much every kind of cable you will see in current gadgets and what it's used for (unless, you know, Sony springs a new one on us overnight, which is honestly possible).
The original 
The Mercury-On-The-Go from OWC is a somewhat tempting three-way connectible 500GB portable HDD. Component-wise there are no surprises, under the hood is a 2.5" 5400 RPM Hitachi Travelstar 5K500 with an 8MB cache. With Firewire 400/800 and USB 2.0 you get three-way connectivity and bus power.
This 62-in-1 USB hub can read just about any memory card you can throw at it, and maybe some that don't even exist. Seriously, I had no idea that there were even this many formats out there. It also features an internal 3.5" connect bay, USB, Firewire and SATA slots, and audio in / out. And the best part is that it only costs $US39.99 —which seems a little too good to be true. [
Come with us into the world of fantasy, where there's just one kind of plug and its associated cable that will work for every electronic device. What we would like to see is one cable that carries audio, video and power to or from whatever device you need to use. It needs to be small, it needs to have tremendous bandwidth (perhaps using fibre optics), and it needs to be smart enough not to ruin anything you plug it into. It sure would beat the alphabet soup we have to deal with now.
We've posted our share of 
Toshiba has unleashed two killer HD DVD players/recorders in Japan, the RD-A600 and the RD-A300. Both of them record to HD DVD-R and DVD media, but the A600 takes it one step further with its built-in 600GB hard drive. Each model comes with two tuners, HDMI, and FireWire (iLINK) ports. The A600 is going for about $1,600 while the A300 hits the $1,200 price point, which is more than 
It seemed like just yesterday when we pointed out OWC's 1TB Dual Drive RAID Array. But that was back on July 26, 2005, when that sucker cost $979.99, and now here's a 2TB RAID array for $1099 - just a few bucks more, but nearly two years later, too. 
