The best Mac hardware revealed this week wasn't made by Apple

By Chris Burns/Updated: July 5, 2020 10:30 pm EST

This week was light on the hardware reveals at Apple's WWDC 2020, due in a big way to our global pandemic and the fact that the conference was entirely virtual. Granted, there was a rather enticing developer desktop testing kit revealed by Apple to make way for the future of Apple-made silicon in future Macs, but what about consumer products? Since Apple's hardware reveals this week were light, there's a clear winner for most interesting new hardware for Apple product users. That is the OWC Envoy Express, the first-ever Thunderbolt 3 Certified Bus-powered Portable Storage Enclosure.

This enclosure uses any 2280 M.2 NVMe SSD available today (and in the future). With this system, users can connect with an (included) 10.2-inch Thunderbolt 3 cable. The case itself is "shorter than a ballpoint pen" and weighs approximately 3.3-ounces with a drive inside.

The OWC Envoy Express includes a 2 year OWC Limited Warranty, and includes a "back of laptop screen slide mount for safe, out-of-the-way use." That's the product you see in the head image in this article. That sits at the back of your laptop screen and runs quietly – no fan necessary, light enough to not weigh your entire machine back on its head.

UPDATE: This mount system works with a "super-strong, removable adhesive gel and a lightweight yet durable plastic holder."

This piece of hardware is demonstrated using a MacBook because it's not nearly as easy to create products such as these FOR Apple products that work with such finesse. The product DOES work with Windows PCs too. Per OWC, this drive is "built to support super-fast sustained data transfer rates up to 1553MB/s ... often faster than a machine's internal drive performance."

If you're going to switch back and forth, you'll want OWC's own MacDrive software – that'll be sold separately. Otherwise you'll run your drive with this enclosure on your machine of choice without need for additional software support.

If you're also looking for an SSD to put IN the enclosure, there's an OWC Aura P12 SSD available with speeds up to 3400MB/s. THe enclosure includes a kit with tools needed for "easy drive installation."

The enclosure itself will cost approximately $80, but is available from OWC right now for a pre-order price of $68 USD. There's a page for the enclosure over at MacSales.com (that's the official OWC site) right this minute.