Need a Blu-ray burner or solid state drive for your Mac? MCE and OCZ are happy to oblige.
When it comes to laptops and desktops from Apple, you are typically stuck with whatever hardware comes in the original computer. Whether it's storage, RAM, or optical drives, upgrading a Mac can be a headache when compared to upgrading a PC. If you're a Mac owner and have been looking to upgrade, the last several days have seen a flurry of activity regarding Mac-specific hardware from several different companies.
OCZ, a brand known for PC memory, power supplies and solid state drives (SSDs), is now bringing a number of different Mac-specific SSD and RAM solutions to the market. For starters, OCZ has unveiled a "Mac Edition" Vertex SSD. Available in 30, 60, 120 and 250 GB flavors, the Mac Vertex drives boast read speeds of 220-240 MB/sec. and write speeds ranging from 125-170 MB/sec., with the smaller drives having the slower read and write speeds. These drives were tested in the labs over at Apple and are certified as such. A "guaranteed compatibility" list shows us that the drives are supposed to work flawlessly in any and all MacBooks and MacBook Pros released in mid-2007 or later. More specifically, if your Mac laptop shipped with OS X version 10.4.2 or later, you should be in the clear.
OCZ is also selling notebook RAM for Mac laptops. With DDR2-667 and DDR3-1066 speeds available, the memory is "Qualified by OCZ engineers in the Apple Development Center." both varieties are available in 2 GB and 4 GB kits, but there is no word on price just yet.
If you're rocking a Mac Pro desktop (or even an older Power Mac) and want to add a Blu-ray drive to your arsenal, MCE has unveiled its newest BD drive. At $400, the MCE burner boasts an 8x BD-R speed, 2x speed for re-writeable Blu-ray discs, and can write DVDs at 16x. While adding a Blu-ray burner to a Mac Pro setup would make for an impressive multimedia machine, Apple has yet to support Blu-ray players in its OS X software. Until that happens, the MCE drive can burn BD media, but it will not be able to play a Blu-ray movie on your Mac. That said, the burner will work with Adobe Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro and Roxio Toast 10.