That consumer-level Mac tower...

Dear Cupertino,

I don't like the Mac Pro. I know it's part of your clever marketing strategy to convince people to buy the Mac Pro when the iMac just doesn't cut the mustard, but really - the price is a little too steep. How about a headless Mac, not dissimilar to the Mac Mini, except make it like a Mac Pro Mini type setup - let us upgrade components on our consumer-level Mac tower.

This new consumer-level Mac tower - it'll be like a Mac Pro, but for the average consumer - for those that think the Mac Pro is the epitome of overkill for those that just want to fiddle around with the internals of their Mac, while keeping the stability and security of OSX - Mac users don't want to hack around just to get OSX to work on an illegitimate OSX box!

Dear Cupertino, we just want a consumer-level Mac tower with user-serviceable parts! Give us easy access to the CPU, RAM, HDDs, PCIe cards, and we'll be all set!

Why Apple haven't bothered to make one of these in the past has just been a complete mystery to me - surely they understand that computer users see the need to upgrade every couple of months if they want to stay at the forefront, and always have the "latest and greatest" technology around.

Heck, I'd even accept Apple-supplied hardware upgrade kits (which would essentially dictate what hardware I am, and am not, allowed to put into my machine - which would be fine by me as long as the hardware range was wide and varied) for this consumer-level Mac tower!

We'll even give you the base spec list - and from there, [Jonathan] Ive can think up an awesome design to go with it - completing the Apple package we all know and love.

Just don't name it the xMac - nothing else could be more stupid except maybe Mac Pro Mini... or Mini Mac Pro...

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

Original image credit: On a Mac

iChat Media

Dear Cupertino,

I love iChat, I really, really do.

I love how I can easily constantly stay in touch with my friends and family through audio, video, and text chat.

I love how I can easily share my screen with a friend on the other side of the globe who's having an issues with their Mac - that way, I can show them what they should see when they click on what button, or vice versa - they can show me what they see when they click on some button.

I especially love how I can give a friend a Keynote presentation through iChat Theatre - that way, my friend can tell me how to improve on my public speaking skills.

However, one of the features I'd love to be added to iChat is the Media tab. The Media tab would be my one-stop-shop for everything that I could interact with, say, photos that I wanted to send to a friend, or a picture that I'd like to set as my display picture.

From the Media tab, I'd have instantaneous access to everything I've ever sent to anyone, anything I've ever received (much like the file transfers list now), but also the options to send a new file, or share a new movie trailer.

The Media tab seems like another no-brainer - one of those features that should have been there in the first place, but isn't.

Thanks,
Dan Katz.

iPod Visualizer

Dear Cupertino,

I wish the iPod had a visualizer. If iTunes has it, and most other media players on the market have it, I see no reason why the iPod doesn't have it.

Even if it were something that we could look at and go 'ooh' and 'aah' while we're playing our music, even something as simple as constantly changing album art (ala the iTunes Artwork screen saver in Mac OS X) would suffice.

Thanks,
Dear Cupertino Reader.

Editorial note: I think I know why Apple hasn't added a visualizer to the iPod's growing list of features... Battery life is the main concern here. If you take a look at your CPU usage when you've got the iTunes visualizer turned on, you'll see that it does take up a decent amount of CPU time - something that impacts on how much battery life you have. Of course, in a portable device such as the iPod and even the iPhone, battery life is paramount - so features that unnecessarily eat CPU are cut out. I'm sure if you somehow manage to take a look inside the iPod OS, you'll see code that is as efficient as possible - all to save those magical clock cycles.

AppleTV Improvements

Dear Cupertino,

A software upgrade for the AppleTV wasn't enough - now we want a hardware refresh!

In the next revision of the AppleTV, I'd like to see:

1. An integrated OLED screen - so you can watch movies on the go, or just as a secondary screen showing diagnostics, statistics, and so on.
2. An integrated cable card - so we don't have to have other devices to plug into our TV, and then frantically switch between them when a show we like is airing - which brings me to my next point.
3. An SSD PVR/DVR - for the AppleTV to truly become a home entertainment system, it's got to have the capabilities of one. Streaming and playing local media just doesn't cut the mustard anymore. I want to be able to record TV for watching at a later time.
4. Integrated Blu-Ray/DVD player. Let's face it - HD-DVD is dead, and so Apple should be leading the crowd with support for Blu-Ray playback.
5. A full version of Safari for us couch-surfers. Want to look up a review of that movie that's just about to air? Jump on IMDB. Want to see what your website looks like your 50" plasma? Safari.
6. If we're going to be couch surfers, we need the controls to be able to be so. Include a bluetooth keyboard, and an iPod Nano-style remote, and we'll be laughing - or crying, depending on the movie...

Thanks,
Dear Cupertino Reader

(This post was submitted by a reader)

A New member of the team

Today Chandler and I added a new member to the Dear Cupertino Team.  Benny Ling!

Benny runs a blog over at www.freshbytes.com.au, so make sure you check out his posts over there.

Thanks Benny and Welcome!

Apple Anti-virus

Dear Cupertino,

With the increased marketshare comes increased risk, and even though nothing is proven to be "in the wild" yet, it doesn't mean it won't be someday soon. You guessed it: I want integrated, or at least Apple-supplied Anti-Virus either with the OS, or via AppleCare. (Really, everyone should be buying AppleCare anyway, so I see this as a natural fit.)

I think this would be great for a few reasons, but principal among would be that viruses exploit issues with OS, which, in my opinion, makes it the OS vendor's problem. If Apple released integrated anti-virus (and especially if they did it really well) it would send a message to other OS vendors that there is a responsible way to handle the weaknesses of their own products. It would also say to their customers, "We know, a lot of you bought Macs because you didn't want to worry about Viruses, and we're going to keep it that way."

Now, I know that people are going to complain that it'll be undercutting the newly burgeoning Mac Security industry, but here's how I see it:
Every time I use a windows PC I am disgusted by how completely their security software dominates the user experience, constantly asking if something is allowed to do something else, throwing up little alerts and flags, telling them they're at risk, or interrupting what you're doing to do scans, download updates, or tell you that your anti-virus subscription is running out. It's poorly integrated, clumsy, and I would estimate that a HUGE number of users don't even read the warnings, instead simply clicking whatever makes the message go away.

So why would Apple, a company who obviously spends a ton of time and money designing and improving the user experience, encourage some other company, to whom "user experience design" probably extends no further than making cute icons for their buttons, fuck it all up?

If anyone can do it right, it's Apple. They're already indexing our files on a regular basis with Spotlight, and cataloging changes with Time Machine, so it would seem simple to compare those files to a list of known threats, eliminate the offenders, and simultaneously remove them from Time Machine backups and restore any files and settings that got screwed up by the offender.

That's my wish: Dear Cupertino, please give us Apple Anti-Virus and shut those whiny Windows-Users up for good.

Thanks!

Jon Sandruck

iSights in the Monitors?

Dear Cupertino,

I know you guys are probably working on this, but since you stopped making the iSight as a standalone camera, the people with Mac Pro's have kinda been assed out!

iMacs have the cameras built in.

MacBooks do.

MacBook Pros do.

The Mac Pro people are kinda left out there hanging a bit without a camera to be able to talk to the rest of us!

So Apple, when you do your next monitor refresh and change your monitors from fluorescent to LCD, how about you throw an iSight in there too?

Thanks,

Joel

Posts

It's not that we haven't been posting because of lack of topics.  Chandler and I have been very very busy.

We are both security/network computer people at our day jobs and since this DNS vulnerability has come out, I know I have been working a hectic pace.

We'll get back to posting very very soon.

In the meantime be sure an enjoy the MobileMe status blog started by Apple.  Awesome!  

DearCupertino,

More Blogs.

Thanks.

The most advanced phone on the planet! Worst. Camera. Ever.

Dear Cupertino,

There has to be some sort of e-villainy going on here. 2.0MP? Really? No video? I mean, really?

Come on.

Come on.

It's really your fault. Your customers aren't the type that settle for anything but excellence and perfection. Why would we come to expect anything less than 110% from 1 Infinite Loop? We don't, that's why.

With that being said: What. The. Hell.

Your camera, sucks. 2.0MP in a world where we're seeing 5.0MP devices in the wild of which are doing video is completely unacceptable, especially for hardware graced with that half eaten biblical fruit. Let's stop kidding yourselves here, do what you know is right; for us.

I'd like to show you something that just might help out:

iPhone Camera done right!

Thanks!

Louis Harboe

Personal Domain, let's get full about it

Dear Cupertino,

I love MobileMe. I love how it pushes everything between my Mac, my PC and my iPhone. I love how the me.com website look and feels. But I don't use it. At least not my mail.
Why? Well, as many fellow geeks, I own a personal domain and have me and my family's mail-addresses there. And there is no easy way to use it with MobileMe. I can forward my mail to MobileMe, but I can't send it from MobileMe's servers. I can set up a different account and send it from my ISP's SMTP-servers. That, besides from being clumsy, won't work when I am, for example, visiting a friend using another ISP.
Why doesn't Apple allow this? I can point (using CNAME) my domain name to me.com and use MobileMe to host my website. Why can't I point my MX record, or maybe just forward my mails and use a SPF record in a TXT string? Come on Apple...

Christoffer Möller

More iPhone Please?

Dear Cupertino,

We had a bit of a rant awhile ago about Syncing To-Do's and what not.  While Omnifocus pretty much takes care of that, there is one more issue that does need addressing.  Notes.

Seriously.  You have this great Note interface in Mail.app, and you also have this great Notes app on the iPhone.  They walk alike they talk alike, they even have the same Marker font.

Hows about we chuck some kind of magic syncing action between the two devices?  Notes!

Now, I refuse to believe that you would let something slide like that, so I assume that you have something up your sleeve.  I asked for OTA Calendar syncing, Mail push, and Contact syncing awhile back, and you built MobileMe, which is a complete overhaul of the .mac system in order to be able to accomodate these features.  So I refuse to believe that you would let To-Do's and Notes not sync.  So what do you have up your sleeve?

Thanks!

Joel + 4 other Dear Cupertino Readers

Bluetooth Headphones

Dear Cupertino, 

I love the apple earbuds but, sometimes I want to destroy them because of the stupid wire that gets in the way! (especially when mowing the lawn). So why couldn't you create bluetooth headphones using basically the iPhone bluetooth headset? It shouldn't be that hard, just take out the microphone and label them L and R and you have great wireless headphones.

Thanks!  

Tyler

Editorial Note:  I don't really like the idea of wireless headphones.  I already have my jawbone that I have to charge, my iPhone that I have to charge.  What else?  I don't need more devices that I have to plug in on a daily basis.  I could see the novelty in it, but I'll just sling my earphones around the back of my head for now.  But I can see what the author is trying to do here, and this is a request that I have received alot since I have started the blog.  By the way, I am receiving suggestions all the time.  I just haven't had a lot of time recently to put them up.  So, I apologize.  Will get more articles up. 

iChat improvements

Dear Cupertino,

I love iChat.  I love its integration with Address Book, I love its integration with Mail, I love the fact that iChat has an AV component.

Couple suggestions however?

1)  One contact window.  I personally have three jabber accounts (one being Gmail), one AIM account, and a Me.com account.  This takes up almost my whole screen in lateral space.  How about one contact window?  I mean, Chax figured out how to do it, take some intel from Chax, and some intel from Adium on how to combine contacts, and you've got it!

2)  Yahoo IM?  I am probably guessing that you have a contract with AOL to only provide support for Jabber + AIM.  But if that's not true, then let's get Yahoo on board?  Yes, I understand their protocol isn't standards based like AIM or Jabber and I'm not going to expect to you to integrate with MSN.

3)  Allow for some resizing of the contact list.  I have hundreds of people in my contact list, and that's only on my company's internal server!  Let alone all of the contacts I have through AIM and GTalk!

That's all, just a couple thoughts.  Thanks!

Joel 

Me.com licensing

Dear Cupertino,

Check this out, here's a thought, instead of charging one fee for every piece of software, how about, for those people who are MobileMe customers, allow us to buy software per account?

Meaning that I can not only buy Apple Software and download it through my MobileMe account, but it's also licensed that way.  So I can have a certain piece of software on every computer that belongs to my MobileMe account?  So I can buy a MobileMe licensed version of iLife, and not 10 different copies.  Or iWork maybe?

All I'm saying is that, why do I need to make a trip to the store, and make you waste all kinds of packaging, paper, trees, gas, time, etc..  When I can just download an app straight from Apple.com, and then deploy it to all of 'my computers'?

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino Reader

Bluetooth is for more than headsets?!

Dear Cupertino,

We have the iPhone, we have the Aluminum Keyboard; can they be friends?

I mean, they both talk the same language. I'm sure they have a lot of catching up to do. Let's put them in a room together and see what happens, hell, we'll throw a bottle of cheap scotch in there too.

Imagine the possibilities of taking your keyboard/iPhone on a short trip and having an amazing amount of functionality within two pieces of equipment. Given the eventual enterprise applications built within 2.0 and the endless possibilities of the App Store; keyboard control of your iPhone is just, plain, sexy.

Sexy.

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino Reader.

Back to my Mac, from my iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

What would be really cool would be if it was possible to use your iPhone or iPod Touch to access all the files on your Mac, like a "Back to My Mac" style service. However, you would just be able to browse the Finder and access files, not so much VNC kind of app.  That would be so useful if you forgot something at home.  Combine that with OTA Bonjour network printing and compatibilty with Wi-Fi projectors, and you'd be set.

Thanks!

Will

The biggest little iPod in the world

Dear Cupertino,

It's time, it's time for the 16GB nano.

The biggest workhorse in your arsenal, the nano does so much more. It does much more than play the music it holds. Given the color options, the size, the switch to SSD's, and now the inclusion of video -- let's kick it up a notch.

Make the 4GB and the 17'' iMac best friends in heaven, explain to the 8GB why his older brother had to "move on", and let's get a leaner, meaner, more capable nano to take his place on stage. Can anyone really see a downside to this? Can you visualize the glory? I know I can.

Imagine going into your iPod. Navigating arguably the easiest and most refreshing UI out there. Selecting option after option so effortlessly, almost as if you, the customer, have been asked what you want. What happens when you get to the part about capacity? Oh, what's that?! Yes, that's 16GB of pure power. I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to put a full lossy collection of ELP on there. Don't forget to pick up a set of Ety ER4-P's to really let those vocals shine!

Thanks!

Chandler & Christian

PS, thanks for welcome Joel, great to be here.

Some more administrative stuff

Two quick things, 

First, I added another blogger to write with me!  Friend of mine by the name of Chandler Bassett. He's a fellow Mac guy as well,  he'll be writing articles and taking feedback.

I'm also interested in adding maybe one or two other bloggers as well, to get alot of different points of view.  Kind of a Gizmodo/Engadget style of writing?  If you are interested, please feel free to email me here.

Second, In all the moving around that took place with the domains..  The rss feed moved as well.  So I put the RSS feed over on Feedburner for syndication.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DearCupertino is the address.  Please subscribe there with your favorite reader.

Digg and Digg Buttons

First off, as you can see, I added Digg buttons to all the articles.  That way, you can digg up your favorite story or submission.

Second off, someone kindly submitted the whole blog to Digg already.  Click here to go Digg it up!  Thanks!

iTablet

Dear Cupertino,

I've received about 20 emails on this subject, so let me consolidate them all into one post, plus add a little color commentary about it as well.

The rumored iTablet.  Apple taking the iPhone technology and making it bigger.  Touchscreen notebook.  iPhone being a bit bigger so that someone can use it as a book reader.

There are so many topics that this was written in about, however, I feel they all cover one thing.  Just basically a bigger form factor iPhone, or a touchscreen laptop.  I think is an interesting idea for a couple reasons, one I'll touch on here, which is basically UI, the other I'll post about later in a totally different topic..

The tablets that are out there, with MSFT Windows on it, have not have the tablet technology implemented correctly.  All the tablet is, it a computer with a pen as a mouse.  This is not a tablet.  By definition yes, but it doesn't feel like a great computing experience.  

An example of what I mean by this, take cut and paste for instance.  Or say you want to save, the picture on this post off.  Right now with present tablet tech, you'd have to put the pen where you want it, line it up, hold the cursor down, and select the text, just like a mouse, then Click on the Edit menu, click copy, click where you want it, then click paste.  Yuk.

In my opinion, if I want to copy an image, or a piece of text, or a section of a webpage (much like the technology Apple has to implement a webclip for dashboard), I should take the pen, draw a circle around the piece i want to select, click the pen and drag it off.  Done.  That's the way it should be implemented.  Little things like that.  It should be intuitive.  I have used tablets, and I don't think they have the tech correct yet.  I don't think the writing tech is where it's at yet.

Now, a company out there called Axiotron has developed a piece of tech called the "Modbook".  Which as they say is a Macbook, which some extra software and hardware.  It's getting there, but I don't know if this is "it" yet.  Plus, the price point is too high for a normal user.

Please, if you have more comments about your ideas for the iTablet, please leave them in the comments.

Thanks!

Joel + about 20 others.