Apple's last MacWorld is coming up. Instead of a Steve-note it'll be a Phil-note. Good. The poor man deserves more exposure, irrespective of Steve's health or whether or not Steve can be bothered to attend the show.
Anyway, there are a couple of rumours out there to comment on:
Firstly, Apple is supposedly developing a
Home Media Server. This is nothing new. Apple was talking about being the digital hub years ago. However, no specific product for this ever appeared. The Mac itself became the hub and it wasn't until the release of Time Capsule that Apple tried a "headless" device in this area.
I already
blogged about a device like the one now being discussed about a year go. If it gets released it will use a combination of a Time Capsule-like device and Back To My Mac-style firewall circumvention to work. Note that Back To My Mac requires a MobileMe account, so expect further tie-ins there...
Secondly, the
'Large Screen iPod Touch Device'. This makes a lot of sense. All Apple's patents make it clear that both the software and the hardware of a device like the iPhone is meant to be modular. The iPod Touch is the trivial example of this. Remove the 3G radio and bingo, new device! That may seem obvious, but it isn't necessarily. Even small hardware changes can lead to large differences in software on many other platforms. Apple however frequently invests in fundamental technologies that can help it across the board.
One simple example (which I'm surprised to say isn't being widely discussed!) is exactly that of a larger screen iPod device. Suppose for a second it would be twice the size in each direction. That would make it about the size of half a piece of A4 or legal paper, with 4 times the resolution of an iPhone. Great!
Ship it with iWorks Touch, a mobile version of iWorks. Neat! Now what about other software...well we've got an app-store full of it. Except those apps are written for a much smaller screen. No problem. Remember the
resolution independent user-interface? People have been wondering where that went. It is there in the development tools, but it isn't enabled for the end-user. The iPhone/Touch version of Leopard includes this too. This means that any correctly written iPhone app will run in 4x the resolution on this new, bigger device. And not by simply doubling all the pixels, resulting in ugly pixels everywhere. No, correctly scaled and beautifully drawn. No problem. And if the developer wanted to specifically support the device he could keep certain parts of the interface smaller (compared to the size of the screen) and gain more screenspace to display or manipulate data in.
Bottom line, a device like that (if it exists), if shipped with a couple of productivity apps from Apple and all of the current app-store apps would give it all the boost it would need.
My list of Apple apps that should ship with a device like this:
- iWorks: Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Cut down of course. But with ability to read and write the files produced by their desktop counterparts. And Word/Excel/Powerpoint of course.
- Remote desktop: Together with Back To My Mac this would be great.
- File-sharing support built in. Built on top of this Home Media Server concept. Should keep the amount of built-in storage needed to a minimum. 64Gb max.
Come MacWorld we might see the Home Media Server. I doubt we'll see the new tablet.
Expected updated iMacs too. Don't expect them to change much externally though.
