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Tuesday June 9, 2009
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 Somewhat lost in the many WWDC announcements made Monday was an interesting point: at Apple, at least, the SD card format has won.
Most of the new MacBooks have replaced an ExpessCard slot with an SD card slot, which was designed as a slot to bring in photos from digital cameras. (Given that the iPhone lacks a memory card slot, I think it's fair to say that the SD slot serves way to bring content in to the MacBook, rather than send it out.)
Why do the new MacBooks have an SD card slot, instread of a five-in-one card reader, like other notebooks and desktops? Because "SD is really ubiquitous," Todd Benjamin, director of portables for Apple, said during an interview on Monday at Apple's developer conference in San Francisco.
Consider all of the various small-form-factor card formats there are, or were: CompactFlash, the various Memory Stick flavors, SmartMedia, miniSD, microSD, xD.
It's not clear whether the new MacBook card slot supports the SDHC format, as well as SD. If it doesn't, it surely will in the next revision, with a roadmap toward the terabyte SDXC standard. As you can see, there certainly are quite enough different dorm factors within the SD format alone. It's also unlikely that the smaller SD form factors will go away as the external storage formats for cell phones.
Still, Apple essentially killled off the floppy; it's probably time that it helped consolidate the industry on a single flash card format for desktops, as well.
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June 9, 2009 6:05 PM
Apple killed the floppy? Nice Try! Inexpensive, large capacity USB thumb drives killed the floppy.
June 9, 2009 10:54 PM
I don't know Larry - Apple pulled floppy drives off of Macs long before USB Flash drives were cheap at all.
When Apple decided no one needed floppy drives anymore, blank CDs were still the way to go, and if you didn't have the money for a CD writer you were still plugging in ZIP and JAZ drives!
June 10, 2009 5:32 PM
I know that Apple was the first to pull the floppy from their computers, but to give them credit for killing it would be like saying that they killed the two button mouse. Only if you exclusively used Apple products.
Your point about CD burners and Zip drives is well taken; at the time Apple pulled the floppy, there was no clear, easy to use, inexpensive alternative.
Meanwhile, the other 90% of personal computer users continued to use the floppy, and Imation and Maxell continued to churn out trillions of them, until the convenience, low cost, and high capacity of USB drives ultimately made the floppy worthless.