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New Mac Mini Supports SDXC Specification for Memory Cards Up to 2 TB
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Not necessarily. You could reformat the cards using HFS+ and use it on any device that can read HFS+. The trouble is, that likely wouldn't include any device using the SDXC standard.
? Most people use thumb drives not CD Roms.
Also SD cards and thumb drives have been available in sizes much much larger then CD Roms.
No. Apple has an application called Aperture. Many DSLR cameras for professional users (for example the press) use SD cards to save the picture data. HD camcorders use also SD cards to save the video data.
You obviously do not know the SD card market. Cheap and fast SD cards with a capacity of 1 GB (a CD holds 0.7 GB or 700 MB) are now available for 3 to 5 years. The reasons why most people do not use these for the data exchange are that USB flash drives are much cheaper, more robust and nearly every computer has a USB port.
Ah, so that makes sense. Since macs are used extensively by video/audio people, it would make sense that apple would provide support for this new tech, even though it hasn't been thoroughly tested yet. Apple often waits till technology's tested before it makes the leap, unless it's really sure it's a good idea (USB).
exFAT supports needs an Mac OS X update. Once Mac OS X is updated, older Macs will support SDXC cards, too. The older Macs won't support the higher speed, though.
SDXC actually contains two new features:
exFAT → requires new software (file system driver)
faster bus speed → requires new hardware (card reader)
SDHC has no built-in limit at 32 GB. It's an arbitrary limit imposed by the choice of FAT32 as the file system (which is arbitrarily limited to 32 GB by Microsoft).
I'm pretty sure FAT32 is limited to 4GB files, which is why I had to reformat my external to HFS+ for video editing, since 10GB or larger files are now commonplace. On FAT32, any file larger than 4GB has to be broken up into two files or cannot be written to the file system. I don't know about such limitations on HFS+.
Most professionals use CF cards so they will still need a card reader, especially now that newer cameras don't support Mass Storage anymore for some idiotic reason. You can't connect your camera to your computer via USB anymore, unless you have some retarded application that has a lame interface to download your photos. No more drag and drop, and one more device to carry around, stupid card readers.
Apple supporting SD cards is great but CF cards are still industry standard unfortunately. This will change but not soon.
I would love it if the optical disk became obsolete and something else took over, but there's nothing "permanent" at the moment, so archiving old photos onto an SD card is a waste since the card could be reused. There should be a cheap, read-only version of the SD card, I have no idea how that would be possible, but it would be great.
The seldom used optical drive is on the back. All the useful stuff is on the front.
+1 That is is kind of "Think Different" Apple should be encouraging!
I was just having an "idle speculation moment" when the I wrote this. But since several people took the time to respond....
Apple is moving towards being a "greener" company. All those nearly blank discs are becoming garbage. Apple may be thinking of pushing people to using a reusable media. Plus.... writing to a CD is not 'minimalist'. Apple makes it easy, but there are several steps involved, and it is not as easy as just dragging and dropping files to another "drive".
Yes, except that I usually want my thumb drive back because the cost is not trivial. I did a little research, and the cost per GB of thumb drives vs SD cards in the lower capacity format is slightly higher for thumb drives. I would assume that is because a thumb drive is more substantial (metal plug, metal casing, constructed to stand up to some abuse.) The SD cards I could examine were less substantial. If a factory started churning out 1GB to 4GB SD cards, I think you could bring the cost way down.
Personally, I use Lightroom myself, since it ties into Photoshop so well, and yes - as a professional photographer I have come across the occasional shooter who uses SD cards as well
(he says tongue in cheek) . I was more thinking along the lines of why Apple is suddenly putting SD card readers into several models. They are usually driving new technologies (or ignoring them), not catching up. SD cards have been around for a while now. Why is Apple choosing now to start adding SD card readers. And, in the case of the Mini - on the back. Professional users are not going to use the SD card reader on the back of the Mini (for the most part), they are going to buy a USB SD card reader so that they can use their cards efficiently. At professional rates, saving a minute a card to feed the reader and unload will pay for the USB reader in about a day.
I don't think USB drives are necessarily cheaper in the small sizes, I did some price shopping - see above for why I think this is so. I agree that every computer has computer a USB port. But that has not stopped Apple before. One of the really big reasons why every computer has a USB port now is that when every computer had a floppy drive, Apple decided it was an old technology and did away with it - before there was an established alternative. USB drives and CD writers picked up the slack, in time.
I'm just wondering *why* Apple is choosing this time to introduce built in SD card readers.
The big flaw to my thinking (besides the fact that there is no compelling reason for it
) is that the Mini puts the SD card reader on the back. That is not user friendly. If you are using an Apple keyboard, you can plug your thumb drives into the very accessible USB ports on the keyboard. Or if you are using the Apple displays, you can use those not quite so convenient USB ports. (Apple may say that you can use your Mini with any keyboard and monitor, but obviously they want you to use their own).If Apple wanted to make life easy for photographers the SD card reader would have been on the side (front actually, but there was no way Apple was going to clutter up the front) or..... put it into the keyboard in place of a USB port.
So this is just speculation. Think about where Apple may be taking this in the next few months. Can an SDXC card slot be used like an ExpressCard/34 slot?
Cheers
We need to keep our perspective here. Just because the spec supports cards with sizes up to 2TB, it does not mean that such cards are anywhere near to be released. It's just future-proofing. Yes, sizes of memory-cards will keep on increasing, but we will not get terabyte-cards overnight. Maybe in 5-7years or so.
Same thing happened with hard-drives. We got specs that supported hard-drives that were nowhere near to be released. Of course we then got news specs, with support for bigger drives, but even then those bigger drives were not anywhere close to be released.
Not really. We today have 64GB cards At the very high end, overwhelming majority of cards are in the 2-8GB range). Let's say that doubles next year to 128GB. Then to 256GB, then to 512GB and finally to 1TB. That would be four years, quite close to 5 years he speculated. And I don't think that the increases will be quite that fast.
Ram in the iPhone/ipad and is not particularly important to anyone but developers. It is what it is. It is not useful to compare RAM in an iPhone to RAM in an EVO (for example).
The Tech Spec says SD Slot, I am not sure why it needs to go into any detail in the marketing material. This is a case where it would clearly confuse customers, most of whom just want to know if there SD card will work in the system. It is easy enough to find every minute hardware detail on an OSX system, anyone who needs to know can find out easy enough.
Apple is not hiding anything, they are just presenting a meaningful message.
I think the amount of power the keyboard can supply depends on what it's plugged into. My Cinema Display powers the keyboard pretty adequately for stuff like that, wonder how a g4 cube would do!
Yes, but, the mac mini is designed as a desktop, since it needs an external monitor. Although, I'm fairly certain, that, as people posted above, this card reader was put in there for apple's video editing customers, since apple does make a nice business in that industry.
Although, the poster's comments still stand, particularly as the mini no longer has a security slot!
My first post after a long time of lurking so go easy.......
Are people overestimating Apple's motives? Could it perhaps not be a masterplan but just that the new motherboard, etc they are using just happens to have this component so it's been included?
That could explain why it's hidden around the back. If being placed on the back is deliberate it could just be for aesthetics sake as ports on the front will look messy.
Are people overestimating Apple's motives? Could it perhaps not be a masterplan but just that the new motherboard, etc they are using just happens to have this component so it's been included?
That could explain why it's hidden around the back. If being placed on the back is deliberate it could just be for aesthetics sake as ports on the front will look messy.
Short-sightedness
I really don't get why people who come up with specs don't think ahead. When SD came out it has a 2GB limit. So they updated it, SDHC for a 32GB limit. Now they had to update it again, SDXC for a 2TB limit. They should have just designed the format to scale in the FIRST place.
For example: CompactFlash came out in like 1994 and has scaled all the way up to like 137GB, when the first cards were under 1MB.
I really don't get why people who come up with specs don't think ahead. When SD came out it has a 2GB limit. So they updated it, SDHC for a 32GB limit. Now they had to update it again, SDXC for a 2TB limit. They should have just designed the format to scale in the FIRST place.
For example: CompactFlash came out in like 1994 and has scaled all the way up to like 137GB, when the first cards were under 1MB.
With regard to booting:
I think a lot of people in here are also looking over the fact that the card reader is on the USB bus. Meaning the speeds you'd be limited to would be that of USB 2.0. Internal 5400rpm boot drive would still be faster.
I think a lot of people in here are also looking over the fact that the card reader is on the USB bus. Meaning the speeds you'd be limited to would be that of USB 2.0. Internal 5400rpm boot drive would still be faster.
Where did you get that info from?
I do not think it's on the USB bus. Evidence: while the card reader does not show up in USB tree in System Profiler whatsoever - even though other internal peripherals, namely Bluetooth controller & Infrared receiver do! - System Profiler provides two very interesting lines for the "card reader":
"Link width: 1x
Maximum speed*: 2.5 GT/s"
This strongly suggests the card reader being connected via PCIe. So the speed may, in practical terms, not be limited by the bus at all. Time - and faster SD cards - should eventually tell how fast it can go.
* or something alike. I cannot look it up right now as my currently booted OS doesn't recognize it at all.
Entirely possible. If you look at this picture of the new Mini's logic board from iFixIt's teardown, it looks like the logic board is just wide enough at the front (right side of the board) of the housing to have accommodated the SD card slot. But it looks like it would have been at the expense of either growing the housing so an inserted card sat flush with it, or having the card stick out significantly (and asymmetrically) from the rounded corner.
Fair point. It could have been a cost-driven design decision to keep the cost of the driver silicon down, similar to those that drove the design of the original USB 1.0 specification.
The card reader doesn't show up on the Mini's USB device tree in System Profiler, hence is not a USB device. The USB device tree lists every device that is currently enumerated on the bus.
Correct. Looking at the BCM57765 block diagram, the SD card data is accessed via the PCI Express bus. The SMBus is several orders of magnitude too slow to handle 2.5GT/s, and is likely used for controlling the driver IC.
Wow, hadn't even thought about that... That would be so nice.
Very good idea!!! The only problem is speed, Apple SD readers are quite fast but only some high end SD reach good speeds.
"This time" being last summer, when they started including them in MacBooks?
They don't really need a reason besides pretty much every consumer camera using SD media these days.
