No, just lack knowledge on my part. I had not realised Airs don't have these things. Although a USB to Ethernet or USB to FW Adapter can be bought for $10 to $15, so in a way, my question still stands.
The other part of the answer is speed.
- USB2.0 supports a max of 480 Mbps, and I don't understand the next part (so if I'm wrong please correct me for my own knowledge), but something about USB means its inefficient compared to things like FireWire or ThunderBolt or even USB3.0, so you would never sustain 480 Mbps
- Gigabit ethernet is 1000 Mbps, so an adapter of USB2->Gigabit ethernet means you would not get full Gigabit ethernet speeds, in fact you'd get less than half of Gigabit ethernet speeds. And since it's inefficient USB2.0, you'd probably get more like 100 Mbps (again if I'm wrong, please let me know.)
- FireWire 800 is 800 Mbps, so a USB->FW adapter would give you, at best, half of the speed of FW800 due to USB2.0 limitations. There is definitely a limitation thing to USB2, because if you take a USB2 drive and a FW800 drive, the FW800 drive feels infinitely faster than a slow ass USB2 drive.
- ThunderBolt supports 10,000 Mbps (or do you say 20,000 Mbps because it has multiple channels?), which is obviously humongous. So a TB->Gigabit adapter will give you the full 1000 Mbps gigabit ethernet speed, anda TB-> FW800 adapter will give you the full 800 Mbps FW800 speed.
Basically USB2.0 adapters don't allow FW800 and Gigabit to operate at their full speeds. Thunderbolt kicks the **** out of USB2, see the attached image.
Just look at the new Thunderbolt Display, it has a whole lot of ports on the back of it (USB, FW800, and Gigabit ethernet, I believe), and it can fully saturate those ports, and also provide output to a beautiful huge display without a hickup. TB is just incredibly fast.
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Just to point out, that's what's so cool about Thunderbolt, the massive speed and bandwidth. If you remember old school computers, where you put in cards and **** in the big box (you still can wtih mac pro), the thunderbolt port can allow you to attach boxes with cards in it, and it works exactly as if they were put into your computer old-school style. So you can literally have a thin-ass MacBook Air, and hook it up via thunderbolt to a box and have like a professional video editing card, or a professional sound card, or a box that supports a massive RAID card, or whatever.
We are seeing some incredible TB **** coming out:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/
- The expansion box in that link is pretty damn cool
- The Mac mini xMac thing in that link is incredible too, you can take a Mac mini and make it capable of basically humongous server tasks, adding a stacked ethernet card, eSATA cards, etc.
