 Welcome to my unboxing of the Seagate Backup Plus for Mac. It is time machine compatible and it is a backup for your digital life including, well, your time machine which is, I mean apparently apples are time machines. No, I'm just kidding. I know what time machine is. Basically it's just, you know, Apple's clever branding for, you know what, I don't have to prove I know what time machine is. I think you guys believe me, I know what time machine is. So yeah, it works with time machine. It also works with Facebook. So what's really cool about all of their backup plus drives is the software that's included with a backup plus drive not only backs up your computer but can also backup data that you have stored in the cloud. I mean remember Facebook is just cloud storage basically. I mean you take a bunch of photos, you upload them to Facebook and then you don't necessarily think about how safe they are. You know, what if Facebook didn't exist tomorrow and it took all your photos with it? Well, this way you can make sure that your Facebook photos and other social media sites can be backed up as well. I heard that they're going to be working on adding support for YouTube so I really hope they do that although it wouldn't necessarily work for me because I have a lot of stuff on YouTube. But if you just have like, you know, a couple pictures of your dog or like your baby that you wanted to show, you know, baby's grandma or whatever on a YouTube account, you want to make sure you have it backed up somewhere, this will work for you. Now it is compatible with Mac and PC, the only real difference between a Mac edition drive and a PC edition drive is the included cable. So let's have a look at what is included with our Mac edition drive. So we've got a quick start guide, plug the thing into the other thing and the first thing, Seagate limited warranty, that is a two-year warranty on this particular retail product. We've got in here all of our cables, so there's your power cable for the unit itself as well as a USB 2 cable and the Mac edition actually includes more cables, a Firewire 800 cable. So that is once again, more useful for Mac users than it is for PC users because not a lot of PCs use Firewire 800 because it is a slow redundant standard at this point in time with USB 3 just giving it the old, how do you do in terms of performance. So the dock down here is, oh this is kind of cool, why does it do that? Okay well it has two Firewire 800 ports, why does it do that? Oh can you daisy chain Firewire 800, that's kind of cool. So it has power in, Firewire as well as USB 2, so you can use it on a PC, performance will just kind of bite compared to using USB 3 or Firewire 800. So the drive is pretty bog standard, okay so you've got your ventilation at the top, it looks pretty slick, it has a soft touch feel, that's another difference between the Apple SKU and the PC SKU that we saw before. That one had more of a shiny finish to it whereas this one is more of a matte finish. In terms of ventilation, you've also got ventilation at the back so passive air flow is going to kind of come up through here, float up through the top, I mean drives run so cool these days especially Seagate's latest ones using the 1TB platter so this is a 2TB drive which means there's only 2 platters in there. It also has a fair bit of metal in the enclosure so it has some weight to it and this piece up here is actually metal so you don't have to worry too much about the heat just getting contained in there. Now what I love about Seagate's drives, now originally I was sort of, this was a bit of a head scratcher for me because they released this drive and the sales pitch as far as I could tell was like you buy a drive and then you like, it doesn't have an interface on it and you, like the interface, it's chipsets in the cable and you plug it in and then you have whatever interface you want. Now that it's sort of more mature and they have a lot more products as part of the ecosystem it totally makes sense to me now so instead of building expensive enclosures that have a bunch of different chipsets in them, Seagate builds a less expensive enclosure that has no logic in it whatsoever, it's just an enclosure with a SATA interface at the back. No problem. Then they actually put the logic that you need into a cable or a docking station or whatever else so the firewire chipset and the power is all done in here, not in here. This is just a drive that is nice and compatible and whatnot. So this is one of their last generation notebook, like portable drives. So that's USB 3. In fact, if this drive in here could be powered by this I could actually just do that because it's just, oh no I can't do that, they're not going to let me do that. Okay, well I thought maybe. But because this requires a drive that's low power enough to be powered by a USB port and it probably makes sense that they don't let me do that because it would just be bad. Try to draw too much power from the USB port and then no one would be happy. Okay, so this goes on here. Now not only this but you can actually take this drive and you can swap it onto a variety of other different docks, whether they're USB 3 at the back or whether you have the whole big Thunderbolt one so you can daisy chain a bunch of Thunderbolt external drives. And another thing that you can do with them is you can actually just keep one dock next to your computer, whether it's Thunderbolt or USB 3 or whatever else the case may be. I'd recommend something pretty high performance if you're going to use it to actually run applications or edit photos or video off of. But what's cool about it is you can actually just kind of leave it there and then you can use these drives more as like cassettes. So you go and you keep a bunch on your bookshelf, you label them with whatever data that happens to be on them, like my private video collection or whatever else the case may be. And then you just go and plug in whichever one you happen to need at a given time and you're good to go. And then when you're done, you unplug it and put it somewhere safe and then no big problems can occur. So I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Seagate Backup Plus for Mac. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.