Two small hardware updates are game changers for Macbook Air and Mac mini

Apple massively upgraded two of its best hardware products today, the Macbook Air and the Mac mini. There are loads of changes and improvements. But only two are real game changers to me:

1. The addition of a Thunderbolt port on MacBook Airs means you finally will be able¹ to connect external hard drives and get good performance. Until now, the Airs’ combo of small on-board hard drives and only super-slow USB 2.0 ports for external drives was a killer. Consider me in the market.

2. Offering a Mac mini with a real video card option, the AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory. Until now, you could only get the minis with horrific integrated graphics chips that shared the system’s RAM, meaning what might otherwise be the perfect gaming computer (especially with the HDMI port for connecting to your giant screen TV) was useless for high-end games.

Note:
¹That is, when some Thunderbolt-capable external drives hit the market, which is expected real soon now.