Macworld at CES: More standout gear

08.01.2011

Mac-focused accessory vendor Moshi was showing a slew of new products. One that caught my eye was an updated version of the , my current favorite MacBook screen protector and anti-glare cover. The new model uses reusable silicone adhesive, letting you remove and apply it the cover as many times as you like. We also liked the company’s $25 , which lets you connect—directly, without requiring any adapters—any recent Mac with a Mini DisplayPort video output to any iMac that supports video via its Mini DisplayPort jack. And as a fan of both the 11-inch MacBook Air and Moshi's , I was happy to see that the company is releasing a version of the ClearGuard made specifically for the 11-inch Air's keyboard.

One of the better speaker systems we’ve tested, for computers or iPods, is Focal’s . was showing off its next computer-focused product, the XS Book, a $299 high-end speaker system designed for desktop use. Available in March, the XS Book features relatively large (for ) left-and-right speakers with 20 Watts of power per channel and an internal power supply—no bulky power brick here. Thanks the larger enclosures, the Focal XS Book should be able to provide much better low-end performance than most 2.0 computer-speaker systems. The demo system we saw was iMac-matching aluminum and black, but Focal told us the XS Book will be available in a number of different finishes.

, maker of crowd-influenced gadgets and gear, was showing off a number of the company’s unique products. Among my favorites was the $13 , a weighted base with five rubber-coated loops that keeps up to four cables from falling behind your desk when not connected. I also liked the $25 , an 8GB thumb drive that splits that storage between two slide-out 4GB chips—one on each end. Quirky advertises the Split Stick as a way to keep your work and home documents separate, but Mac users may prefer to keep one end formatted for Windows and format the other using HFS+ for better compatibility when transferring files between Macs.