Not surprisingly, our great crew of bloggers here on Mac DevCenter have plenty of thoughts and opinions on what they’d like to see unveiled at Macworld next week. Here’s our rundown, and we’d love to hear your wishes too — just add them in the comments section at the end. And if you’re going to be at the show next week, check out all of the O’Reilly activities and make sure to stop by the O’Reilly booth and say “hi”.
Erica Sadun
I want two-way HDTV iTV including digitizing video at the TV-end. And HDTV content at the iTunes store. I figure I can’t afford the iPhone, so give me something.
Jochen Wolters
I only have one thing on my MWSF wishlist: a machine that bridges the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro.
Dubbed the “Mac mini pro” or “Mac Pro mini” or — gasp! — the “Mac”, it’d be based on two Core 2 Duo processors housed in a freshly designed package with a form factor somewhat bigger than two Mac minis placed next to each other.
Inside that box there’d be room for two hard drives and an optical drive, and thanks to a single expansion slot, you could easily put in a high(er)-end graphics card if you so desire. Throw in five USB and three FireWire (think mLAN!) ports, and you’d have an awesome machine for pro-sumer audio and video production. Oh, and it’d be great for gamers, too!
Giles Turnbull
I’m pretty happy with all things hardware right now. The one thing I’m most looking forward to is the release of 10.5.
Bruce Stewart
I want the iTV. Apple did such a good job getting into the stereo portion of my living room with iTunes+Airport Express that my wish is that they can do an equally good job of improving my complicated TV and video existence.
Next, give me a thinner, lighter laptop and I’ll be chomping at the bit to upgrade, even though my current MacBook is less than a year old. (Not saying I’ll do it, but I’ll really want to.)
Something else that would make me very happy would be an updated iCal. A good calendar program is essential for business users and I regularly bang my head up against the wall at iCal’s clunkiness.
Oliver Breidenbach
You guys are aiming way too low… ;-)
1. a new Finder for Mac OS X that does away with the need for hierarchical folder structures and changes the way we work with computers forever
2. an ultrathin subnotebook with docking station and a new, high speed, low energy, high capacity disk drive, 12 hours battery life and 4 cores.
3. diplomatic immunity and immortality for Steve Jobs (and myself)
4). iWork pro which integrates Address Book, iCal, Mail, has a Getting Things Done engine and is server based with support for mobile clients
5. easy to use PKI which finally puts an end to Spam
6. iTunes store starts selling third party Mac apps, provides CRM tools and only charges 5% fee
7. Licensing deal with Dell for Mac OS X
I guess I am going to be very disappointed.
Giles Turnbull
Oliver’s right, I wasn’t being nearly ambitious enough.
So yes, I want the tiny super-slim super-light MacBook Pro as well. And the phone, that would be nice. It had better sync *all* my stuff *really well* though. And have a decent camera.
And new .Mac. A .Mac that people fall over themselves to sign up to. Includes bunch of webapps, a domain or two, and *speedier speeds* for everything. Now Steve is best buddies with Sergey and Larry, maybe there’s half a chance of that happening.
Todd Ogasawara
Here’s my wish list:
1. A 12″ LCD MacBook with hybrid flash drive-hard drive. 30GB SanDisk Flash Drive for booting, cache, temp files, etc. and a 80 to 120GB Hard Drive for everything else. My 12″ iBook is getting long in the tooth but still preferable to tote around compared to my MacBook.
2. The “True” video iPod (whatever that is). Bigger LCD screen.
3. The mythical iPhone (MacPhone? NewtonPhone? whatever) with two batteries: One for the iPod functions and one for the Phone
4. Mac OS X 10.5 with the Parallels Hypervisor built into Ring 0
5. A virtualization strategy for Mac OS X 10.5 so I can run Mac OS X virtual machines inside of Mac OS X for testing, etc.
6. Something in between the Mac mini and the iMac. The power of the iMac without the built-in LCD. BYODK like the mini but faster with fast hard drives (vs. notebook HD in the mini) and lots of RAM
7. Something to replace .Mac at a lower price ($4.95/month) with 10GB storage space (or more). Or keep .Mac but make it free (again).
Chris Adamson
An end to .Mac. It’s overpriced, it sucks, and it makes iLife suck.
Tom Bridge
1. Improved batteries for existing MBPs (2.5 hours? hah! In your dreams!)
2. Something from Apple to replace my Bastard TiVo from Comcast. iTV is a good start, but I need to pull from Broadcast as well as from the iTunes TV/Movie/Music store. Needs to have Component & HDMI, Optical out for my amp, and a remote that kicks more ass than Chuck Norris in a room full of Elvis Impersonators.
3.Something to make me put my Blackberry 8700c on Craig’s List. Needs to email, in a configurable fashion.
Chris Stone
1. Xserve RAID with (big) SATA drives and redundant failover RAID controllers.
2. Laptops with flash-based storage.
3. A demo of a new Finder for Leopord based on Core Animation.
4. Demo of extensive ZFS support in Leopard.
5. An iWork suite with spreadsheet application that can allow us to replace Office for at least 1/2 of the corporate users who currently require Office.
6. Mac Mini with same HDMI plug-ability promised by the iTV.
7. Lossless audio from the iTunes Store (but cut the price of the AAC tracks instead of raising the price for the lossless.)
Jeremiah Foster
I want an all-in-one tablet. This tablet is built by Apple with their
trademark high-quality industrial design. It is touch screen with a
a keyboard that folds out origami-style from the back.
It runs OS X natively but has two virtual instances of Linux and Windows
so all apps just run.
Oh yeah, it can print choclate over the internet.
I would like the end of the brushed metal interface, a Finder that doesn't suck that much. Sorry I'm a mac head, but the windows explorer still beats the Finder (at least it was before vista). I would like an alternative to the bulkiest thing I've even seen on the mac..: The Dock. Come on, Apple is much more capable than the Dock. Quick Silver anyone ?
"Inside that box there'd be room for two hard drives and an optical drive, and thanks to a single expansion slot, you could easily put in a high(er)-end graphics card if you so desire. Throw in five USB and three FireWire (think mLAN!) ports, and you'd have an awesome machine for pro-sumer audio and video production. Oh, and it'd be great for gamers, too!"
I would order this one minute after its release, as long as a decent graphics card was an option; an X1600 at the least. The Mac Pro is overkill for what I need, but two internal drives would be nice and I already have a monitor that works quite well.
Buy Parallels and make this superb app part of the os.
1. Mac Pro: Dual Intel Kentfields.
2. Ultra portable laptop: think Fujitsu P-series
1. Mac OS X/iWork/iLife support for non-.Mac domains!!!! Go ahead and default everything to .Mac but let me publish someplace else like iCal does.
2. ZFS as the default file system.
3. An iTV (or what ever it will be called) that actually belongs in the living room, not as an extension of the computer room.
4. A better Pages application.
5. A spreadsheet.
iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone.
And Mac minis getting Core Duo 2.
I'm hoping for a smaller form factor iSight camera. I know most are thinking of display integration, but I'm hoping for something a bit different for those without a budget for the Apple displays.
An improved Finder, SIP support for iChat, native GTK+ and the option to specify a partition for virtual memory. Oh, and a vastly improved QT 7, because it now runs like a dog on my 800MHz G4. (PS Check out the results to a similar Leopard-only poll over on AppleMatters:
http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/leopard-what-we-know-what-we-can-expect/
These suggestions are great, especially the ultrathin mac. Apple next step should be to produce a solid state computer, no drives. Go back to the original toolkit in ROM. Removable solid state mass storage. Perhaps this could be the hybrid notebook/tablet.
What we don't need is Parallels in the OS. This is bloat. What we do need is the MS Windows API cloned. The WINE/Cygwin solution saves us $300 on an OS that we may not even have the licensing rights to use under a VM.
All I want is a 12" Mac Book Pro under 2 kgs. I still think nothing on the Apple line-up beats my 2 year old Powerbook G4 12" for portability and style.
Sorry about this but wish-list items for oreilly blogs:
1. Don't put as your rss summary the entire article. It is a *summary* after all. Sheesh.
2. Keep up the good content though.
i aggree with everything chris stone said. im less inthuzed about 6 and i would kind of like xfs or zfs support in tiger, but thats asking to much at this point. Would it have killed them to add ext3 support to tiger, just to mount? could anyone port ext3 or 4 or even 2 to mac please?
nehemiah: Ext2/3 for OS X, with Preferences Panel integrated management tool:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx
I am using it since 2004, works perfect, and has the obligatory command line tools ('fsck_ext2' etc.) as well.
Here's my wish list:
1. iTV with an updated version of iTunes allowing me to rip my DVDs (and I'm ready to accept some DRM protections if it makes the majors happy)
2. iPhone so I can achieve a seamless integration with the iSync (assuming it has PDA functionalities)
3. iTablet with 10+ hours of battery time and remote control SW to orchestrate the video and audio broadcast from the main Mac while surfing the web and checking email
A real (Mac os x) PDA so I can get rid of the crap Widows PDA for ever, (a iPDA if you will..) :-)
Fully reworked and improved Finder (because lets face it, it can not get worse..
A better Applescript environment with the libraries for the iApps made complete.
Cheaper, better .Mac
Apple NOT to License to Dell for Mac OS X.
.Ooh and World Peace. :-)