Pricing: My Book vs. My Book Mac

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Right now the online price for an 8 TB My Book is $209. The price for My Book Mac is $249.

Why the difference?

Am I wrong in thinking the drives are identical in re hardware? If not, how o they differ? Couldn’t I just buy the less expensive drive and reformat it?

2

Where is this price shown? WD has no control over what sellers price their products for. Suggest you look both these products up at the WS Store here at WDC.com. If there is a price difference it could be one is a newer model than the other. Also, anything “mac” usually costs more. The mac versions of drives are set up for macs, and if I had a mac I would get the mac model. There is more to this issue than “formatting for a mac”. There is mac-specific software on the mac version.

3

Thanks for giving me some new angles to consider, Mike.

Here’s where I got the prices:

My Book

My Book Mac

You’re right about Mac prices being a bit higher sometimes, but not this much higher. For example, the pricing on Passports is the same:

I notice the non-Mac version is identified as “New,” and the appearance of the case is different. I might be comparing apples to oranges.

—wayne

4

Nice that you looked at this differently. I know WD has introduced new models of ther My Books recently, and new models often mean new prices.

5

I don’t see what more issues there would be apart from formatting for Macs. I own several Macs (and PCs) and My Passports/My Books. The drives just need to be formatted for Macs (with HFS) or, even better, with ExFAT so that they can be accessed on both platforms. The software itself can be downloaded from WD’s site. There is nothing Mac-specific on the drives themselves that couldn’t be found elsewhere (both WD Drive utilities and WD Security for Mac can be downloaded from the WD site).

Point being, if the “Mac” version is more expensive there is really no reason why it should be bought as it has no benefits over the regular version whatsoever (unless the user doesn’t know how to format the drive for HFS/ExFAT).

6

My Book which is labelled as “New” (bearing the new design) is formatted as ExFAT out of the box, which means it can be used on both Windows PCs and Macs without reformatting. In any case, if you buy any other “non-Mac” drive you will simply have to format is as HFS or ExFAT (ExFAT is preferred if you would like to be able to access the drive both on PCs and Macs) and download the WD software for Macs and you’ll be good to go.