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Mini's slot, Time Machine, MobileMe

Saturday, 19 June 2010

New Mac mini speed-tested, and proves to have SDXC card slot: The redesigned Mac mini is the first Mac with an SDXC card slot. Visiting the slot in Disk Utility with an SD card inside shows an "Apple SDXC Reader" and thus that it has more room than other Macs limited to SDHC. The slot gives headroom for cards from 64GB through to 2TB in size and uses faster transfer speeds of up to 104MB per second on most of the still-early readers.
The update hints that other Macs will get SDXC in the next round of updates. The iMac is currently the oldest model in Apple's lineup with an SD card slot and may be next, but the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros are eligible once they grow old enough to merit updates, says Electronista.
And though the biggest changes may be external, there are a few under-the-hood improvements that helped boost the system’s performance in Macworld's Speedmark 6 test suite.

How to back up and restore with Time Machine: Backing up a computer is like flossing teeth or mowing the lawn – something you know you should do but usually don’t. Apple has gone to great lengths to make Time Machine, the backup program included with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, easy and fun to use. Those aren’t terms which you typically hear applied to backup programs, and these efforts are to be commended.
Cult of Mac has posted a handy how-to as a reminder. (That's their graphic – I liked it.)

Apple has revamped MobileMe online mail for everyone: Following a short public beta of a new webmail system and a period of maintenance last night Apple has rolled out a new look MobileMe with a number of new features.
It now has widescreen and compact views, rules to keep your email organised everywhere, single-click archiving, a formatting toolbar, improved performance and security and more.