Apple Special Event--Some Unnoted Apple Upgrades

Yesterday, we posted that the Mac mini Core 2 Duo upgrades (CPU, RAM and Drive) that were not announced by Apple at Tuesday's Special Event nor in a press release. But, thanks to Night Owl Gene Steinberg's article, we now notice that there were at least two more unnoted upgrades released by Apple at the same time.

The first is that the AirPort Extreme "n" Base Station now sports gigabit ethernet LAN ports rather than just 10/100Mb ports. This is extremely (excuse the pun) useful to a relatively small set of us, i.e. pros who copy large numbers of very large files among computers over a wired ethernet local area network. This basically may save them from having to buy a gigabit LAN switch as Gene pointed out.

The second is the $999 Mac Pro/Xserve RAID card. According to Apple,

For the ultimate in data protection and enhanced performance, add the optional Mac Pro RAID card to your system. With 256MB of RAID cache, a 72-hour cache protecting battery and hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 0+1, the Mac Pro RAID card delivers sequential read performance up to 304MB/s in RAID 0 and up to 199MB/s in RAID 5 – without the need for any external drive enclosures, power bricks, or cables.

Have you spotted any other upgrades? Let us know with the "Tips" link above. [Bill Fox]