USB-C
Surely you don't need a whole new drive to connect to a USB-C port, just a new cable right?
LaCie has an external drive that can hook up to Apple’s single-port MacBook. The anorexic MacBook announced yesterday has only one USB-C port that is used to feed it power and transfer data, with no possibility of connecting other USB devices – or any HDMI, or Thunderbolt devices at all. Seagate’s LaCie external storage biz …
I looked and they seem very hard to find at the moment. But then the new MacBook is "coming soon" and I hope cables would be "coming soon" as well.
So this hard drive is really nonsense. Coming from LaCie, it is bound to cost excessive money. I'd rather have a drive that I can connect to any computer with the right cable. A cable with one connector on one side and two on the other side would probably be useful.
In the end, the most likely users are those who never plug in anything except a charger into their laptop. On the other hand, there are things that would be useful for the person who _either_ carries the laptop around with nothing plugged in, _or_ puts it on their desk with lots of things connected. Having a single cable on the desk that I plug into the MacBook and that gives me power, a monitor, and USB devices, that would be useful. (Apple already sells power+monitor+1 USB port, but it's expensive). And since this is not Mac only and USB-C will be in wide use soon, there is money to be made.
I'd suggest a box with a 3TB hard drive, cable connecting to power, cable connecting to monitor, connector for Ethernet, some USB ports, and _one_ USB-C cable where you plug in your laptop. At a reasonable price. We can all dream.
If it had a built-in hub we might be talking. As it is you still have to daily chain Apple's USB splitters off the side. Of course each USB splitter comes with a display adaptor too. What, you thought it was going to be cheap?
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter
LaCie have probably the WORST customer service it has ever been my displeasure to try to navigate. I have a 2-BIG network RAID drive that's gathering dust because I can't get these feckers to respond to emails, calls, faxes or carrier pigeons (ok, maybe I didn't try carrier pigeon).
This post has been deleted by its author
I assume this thing is powered over USB, because we might as well run this into the ground as hard as possible, which means whenever you use this external HD on the new 'book you're running it and your laptop off the laptop battery.
Basically every new accessory people make for the new MacBook is actually going to be a highly ironic piece of performance art making fun of Apple's baffling design decision re: The Uniport, and maybe they can get government cultural subsidies for their efforts.
Every directly attached block device is Time Machine compatible. Apple puts one of its arbitrary obstacles in the way only of network-attached storage. Not sure if it works with NTFS-formatted devices though; maybe they're just trying to communicate that the drive is HFS formatted out of the box? You know, very poorly.
Network attached storage must guarantee to survive a crash in the middle of a time machine backup without any negative side effects. If your Mac gets unplugged in the middle of it, or if your NAS gets unplugged, or if you have a bloody BT router that kills WiFi whenever it feels like it. That's not easy to guarantee, and it doesn't help you with sales because your buyers won't know whether the NAS is rubbish or not until long after they bought it. (And it needs to support hard linked directories).
Used a NAS for backups at work (don't know the make, I didn't set it up), and every few weeks it told me that something was wrong with my backup and a full backup was needed. That's not exactly how it is supposed to work, and I thought my chances to recover from a hard drive crash were not too good.