Twelve South has today announced a new height-adjustable stand for iMac called HiRise, which claims the be the first adjustable stand to offer a built-in storage bay — the perfect place to store your external hard drives, cables, discs, and even your wallet and keys.
When Apple launched iCloud last year, it killed off MobileMe and provided paid subscribers with 20GB of free iCloud storage when they migrated to the new service. Most of us have been using that storage to back up our iOS devices, but like most good things, it’s coming to an end. The company has now begun emailing previous MobileMe customers to inform them that their free storage will be no more come September 30.
External hard drives: super handy, but oh-so-slow, especially since Apple put a bullet in the back of FireWire’s head. Thankfully, Western Digital has once again come to the rescue with a neat new addition to its My Passport line of portable drives: The Edge.
These new versions not only look way more high-tech than the previous curvy plastic models, they also support MacBook-friendly USB 3.0.
Wowsers! Western Digital’s Thunderbolt My Book VelociRaptor Duo is all about the big numbers. 10,000 RPM platters, 2TB storage, 10Gb/s transfer (in both directions) and – if you daisy-chain it with other Thunderbolt drives – you can RAID things up to make them even faster.
Heck, even the price is impressive: $860. Ouch!
If you’re been waiting to get the new iPad from the refurbished section of Apple’s Online Store in an effort to save some cash, then today is your lucky day. The latest device, which is the first and only iPad to get a high-resolution Retina display, is now available with $50 off.
Apple is clearly working towards making solid-state storage a standard for its MacBook line, which means our notebook computers have never been speedier. The only problem is, the flash storage Apple uses is still pretty expensive, and so most of us have to settle for less of it when we’re buying a new MacBook.
That means we either need to come up with ways to decrease our data consumption, or add cheaper external storage for things like our iTunes libraries and torrent archives. If you’re going for the latter (the easier option) then you need the Nifty MiniDrive, an SD card specifically designed for MacBooks that you’ll hardly ever notice.
The Drobo Mini: Four drives of portable, redundant data awesomeness.
Who doesn’t love the Drobo? People who like to lose their data, that’s who. For the rest of us, today brings good news: New Thunderbolt-equipped Drobos, one for the desktop and one for taking on the road.
iFixit has described Apple’s new MacBook Pro as the “least repairable laptop” it has ever opened up, and subsequently gave the device a repair score of 1/10. However, just like the MacBook Air, you’ll be pleased to know that it is possible to upgrade the new MacBook Pro’s solid-state storage yourself.
There have been concerns about the fate of the Mac Pro ever since Apple killed off the Xserve a year and a half ago. Although Apple didn’t say the Mac Pro was on the chopping block, the company did let it go without an update for quite some time. Although the Mac Pro didn’t get featured in today’s WWDC keynote like the MacBook lineup, which includes the new MacBook Pro, it did receive a long-needed update.
The biggest reaction to the Mac Pro’s update today is a sense of relief by many creative professionals and Mac-focused IT departments. The update proves that Apple isn’t signing the death warrant for its most powerful and most expandable Mac. That makes the updated specs a symbol of Apple’s commitment to high-end and high-performance systems in addition to being a major product update.
Yesterday, Google launched the near-mythical Google Drive, a 5GB Dropbox alternative with some impressive features: OCR and searching of the text in even scanned documents, (searchable) image recognition in photos, and integration with most of Google’s other services.
But there’s something else hidden in Google Drive which may make you think twice about using all these wonderful new toys: The rather scary terms of service (TOS), which gives Google a license to use all of your stored documents and photos for pretty much whatever it likes.
This week's most...
Read our latest...
Cult of Mac is a daily news site that follows everything Apple. Our goal is to provide timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest reviews. Find out more about Cult of Mac.
Published in sunny San Francisco.
All times are in PDT (GMT-8).
![New iPad Hits Apple Online Store’s Refurbished Section With $50 Off [Deals]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Screen-Shot-2012-08-08-at-14.20.17.jpg "new-iPad-refurb")
![The Nifty MiniDrive Is An SD Card Designed To Go Unnoticed In Your MacBook [Kickstarter]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ccf441f70a8210e225f226c6e7cb986b_large.jpg "Nifty-MiniDrive")
