Back in 2005, I reviewed the iCub, the first “digital lifestyle” product from French audiophile company Focal-JMlab. It was a unique product with excellent performance and great design. Its biggest drawback, for many people, was that it was too general in its focus: Rather than a dedicated iPod or computer speaker system, it was a subwoofer, an amplifier, and a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) [...]

Designed for the Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro, suitable for all laptops, rainDesign’s mStand helps you work comfortably and safely by raising your laptop to the same ergonomic height as an external display. mStand is made of a single solid piece of aluminum with matching MacBook Pro’s sand-blasted and silver anodized finish. Features: • Better ergonomics is achieved with higher [...]

With two laptop hard drives inside, the tiny LinkStation Mini fits almost anywhere. Network-attached storage, or NAS, is one of the dullest—but most underrated—upgrades we can think of. If you’ve got a couple Macs on a network, a single drive can hold documents and stream media without having to leave one Mac on all the time. But the Buffalo LinkStation Mini marries a strong foundation (a choice [...]

The FireKing MediaVault HD is targeted to businesses that are storing their files electronically. But it’s also a useful device for those of us who have a plethora of digital media—much of its “homemade”—who need to ensure its safely as much as possible. Pricing starts around US$750 for the 250GB version. Back-ups are great (and if you’re not backing up, you’re asking for trouble). But [...]

HP today launched a home server designed for use with both Windows and Mac computers. Based on the Microsoft Windows Home Server platform, the HP MediaSmart Server ex485/ex487 is a central repository for automatically backing up and accessing digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network.(1) The MediaSmart Server automatically organizes files across all PCs, [...]