It’s taken a little while, but there are three new Thunderbolt devices appearing on the market. Sonnet Technologies will have an Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter which lets you connect older devices to your newer Mac. Blackmagic Technologies has their UltraStudio 3D which provides portable video capture and playback for professional editors. And LaCie will have a Little Big Disk, an external storage device with either hard drives or solid-state drives in a built-in RAID 0 configuration.

Ah, the march of technology: Firewire 400 has lost its spot as the de facto way of transferring video to the Mac, replaced by USB 2, hard-disk based camcorders, and Firewire 800. But the original Firewire was so popular, speedy, and reliable that the devices which use it still have a lot of life in them. So the simple solution for someone who owns a Mac (or any computer, really) with only an 800 port is to buy a cable converter such as the Sonnet Firewire 400 to 800 adapter.