How cool would it be if you could carry a card the size of a quarter that had a full operating system on it? Oh wait, you CAN now.

Apple, in a tech support document, states that the new SD card slots on the MacBook Pro line of laptops will support full fledged OS booting. In fact, they even recommend that you keep a bootable copy of OS X on an SD card, presumably 16GB or 32GB, to troubleshoot your computer when it dies. However, there are a vast amount of possibilities for booting off an SD card.

First, because Apple claims that the SD card slot will support 240 Mbit/s, it will be much faster to boot off of an SD card versus a DVD or CD when installing operating systems. Second, the SD card is always re-writeable, which means it is more flexible than a DVD or CD. OS installs, then, as well as any other program that you need to boot into, will become much easier to manage and use. Furthermore, because SDHC cards can go up to 32GB (currently, perhaps they will grow larger), which is enough to store an entire operating system, files, and settings, you can potentially use the SD card as a portable bootable system that you take between different macs. Unfortunately, Windows tends to fail when booting from external media, since the OS starts and stops the drivers for the media itself, which leads to problems, but this could work for Linux currently, and future versions of Windows may offer solutions as well. The only problem is, losing an SD card is far easier than losing a laptop.