Quote:
Originally Posted by
AppleInsider 
Citing an anonymous source within the Cupetino-based company's Asian supply chain, hit-or-miss macotakara.jp claims Apple with the help of its component suppliers is gearing up to introduce Macs that are "absolutely different from current products," possibly by the "end of this year."
What I think Apple
should produce is a displayless iMac with a few variations: it would use one or more MacBook Air-style SSD drives, use the MagSafe connector for power, and include batteries for uninterruptible power. At least two Thunderbolt ports. No optical drive, one Firewire port, a few USB ports, Ethernet, Bluetooth, WiFi. It should have options for high-end graphics processor support, and be a little larger than a Mac mini, with vertical orientation.
With Thunderbolt, internal drives are unnecessary, and the device could be designed so that processor daughter boards could be added and/or replaced. USB hubs would be easily added. And like the iMac, it should have at least 4 memory slots, which allows for up to 32 GB RAM. Obviously, only low powered fans would be required, so the device should stay very quiet, and require only a small amount of desktop real estate.
The key point to provide expansion capability is designing in multiple daughter boards for the CPUs. But without high power requirements. An Apple Thunderbolt Display is one example of an expansion dock already. A companion product would be a Thunderbolt dock for hard disk drives, optical drives, plus other ports. But it would be an
option, not part of the base Device.
This would
replace the Mac Pro into the future, based on Apple's penchant for using laptop style components. One of the processor boards could use ARM CPUs, for development or supporting a
future version of Mac OS X. Or maybe Mac OS XI.
