Apple slashes price on Thunderbolt cable, releases additional shorter model

Apple has reduced the price of its 2.0 m Thunderbolt cable from $49 to $39. The Thunderbolt cable, which can be used for data transfers and for display attachment purposes, was originally released in mid-2011.

With Thunderbolt, you get superfast data transfer speeds and huge expansion capabilities. It features two 10-Gbps data channels per port, which means data transfer is up to twice as fast as USB 3 and up to 12 times faster than FireWire 800. Use the Apple Thunderbolt Cable to connect your Thunderbolt-equipped peripherals to your iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air. The cable can also be used for target disk mode between two Mac computers that support Thunderbolt, or to use an iMac as a display for a MacBook Pro equipped with Thunderbolt.

To go along with the price cut, Apple has also released a shorter variant of the Thunderbolt cable. The new $29 version carries a length of 0.5 m. Both cables are in stock on the Apple online store.

Apple releases new MacBook Air EFI update

Apple has just released an EFI firmware update for the mid-2012 MacBook Air. The firmware update fixes an issue with colors on external HDMI displays, a problem with Windows that can stop the computer from booting properly, and an issue with Thunderbolt devices causing the computer to freeze. Older models of the MacBook Air are not affected by these issues.

The update is available from Apple's support page or through Software Update on affected Macs.

Get a List of Preferred Wi-Fi Networks from the Command Line

Retrieving a list of preferred wireless networks can be helpful when troubleshooting wi-fi problems. The following trick will do just that, and it's similar to a tip we covered recently which showed how to see a list of previously connected wi-fi networks using either System Preferences or a lengthy command line string, but as far as the command line goes the following command is much shorter and cleaner, and doesn't require the use of sed and regex to clean up the output. Though similar, it's important to note there may be some differences in the output of the commands too, as this trick provides a list specifically of the preferred networks, whereas the aforementioned article discussed retrieving networks that the Mac has simply connected to, whether they are preferred or not. Which information is going to be the most useful to you will likely vary on your use case.

For a MacBook Air with only a Wi-Fi NIC, the command would be as follows:

networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en0

Meanwhile, iMacs, Mac Mini's, Mac Pro's, and some MacBook Pro's with dual Wi-Fi and Ethernet capabilities might use the following instead:

networksetup -listpreferredwirelessnetworks en1

The command is the same, the only difference is the interface used at the end of the command (en0 vs en1), which is sometimes different on different Macs, particularly those with wifi and ethernet capabilities.

For those who are less comfortable with the Terminal and want a simpler GUI approach, the aforementioned article's Network Preferences method remains less technical.

This nice little tip comes as a commenter response on MacWorld to coverage of our original method.