After a short will they/won’t they moment last week, Apple has finally made the Thumderbolt to FireWire adapter officially official. Despite last week’s hesitations, you can now buy the adapter for – you guessed it – $29.
Thunderbolt is pretty neat, or will be at least. Even if nobody ever starts making Thunderbolt accessories in bulk, then these adapters will still make it useful. Instead of being saddled with just a few USB ports like I am on my first-gen aluminum MacBook (before they were all called “Pros”), I could pick and choose the ports I need. And as plugging in a peripheral means, well, plugging something in, adding a dongle twixt port and plug isn’t really a big deal.
In fact, this is better than your regular notebook FireWire port, supporting FireWire 800 (I’m currently booting my iMac off an external FireWire 800 drive as the internal drive is mostly hosed, so it’s plenty fast enough for most things), at up to 7 Watts.
What are you waiting for? If you have a FW HD, and a modern-day MacBook, the off you go to the store.
Source: Apple Store
