ibrick (my idea)
what i think apple should come out with is ibricks, whats an ibrick you say? well imagin legos and how you can stack them. they would have processor bricks and hard drive bricks and motherboard bricks and much much more so you can essentualy build your own computers, like 4 proccesor brick added on to your imac with a bus brick or maybe two or three bus brick, and just like legos they would snap together and there would be just one main wire going into the computer itself. it so imagin it some pc friend of yours says he is faster so you add like 5 processor bricks and laugh your ass off... also you could build little houses and stuff like that out them 
Comments
Lego should come out with a Special Apple designer set.
Then we can all pretend we are Jonathan Ives and build the most awesome computers ever seen.
Amorya
The Jonathan project was proposed before the introduction of the Macintosh II. It was thought up independently by frogdesign and an Apple engineer. It was based on a backplane that looked like a bookshelf. Users could buy modules, which resembled books, and plug them into the shelf. Need a hard disk? Just plug in a hard-disk module. Need a more powerful CPU? Just plug it in. This was to be an expandable computer without slots. From an ID standard, it was unique; the computer would get larger as it got more powerful. In fact, it was intended to be a cross-platform standard. Its originators thought it would be a wonderful way to infiltrate MS-DOS users, allow them to run both MS-DOS and Mac software, see the superiority of the Mac, and convert.
Unfortunately, it was that last point that killed the project without any discussion by top management. Sculley felt that any comparison of the Mac and MS-DOS would leave DOS the winner. Apple's strategy was to become more proprietary and to lock in Mac users whenever possible. In other words, top management lacked faith in the Mac.
Jonathan's proponents were told that it would compete with the Macintosh II. They thought this was crazy because Jonathan was aimed at a different group of users and was based on a low design cost. They even put together a plan allowing Apple to license the hardware design to the entire industry and make some money on every module produced. This did not fit in with Apple's belief of going it alone, proprietary design, and providing and little interoperability with other personal computers.
With a simple, small, compact form factor you run into a brick wall when your electronics won't "fit" in the standard size brick. Heat dissipation is a prime concern. Current CPUs are very large and hot needing lots of cooling. So where do you put the fan in a small brick? What about a heat sink?
Again with a small size you limit how much "stuff" you can put in a module even with PLCs some workstation-level graphics card would barely fit in a G4's full size PCI slot (some of em take up two slots' woth of space).
Then you have the power supply which needs a fan or very good convection cooling, is it upgradable too? Lots of HDs need lots of watts to run (then there is the power requirements of all the modules you plug in).
See how complicated this gets very quickly and why no one ever did this? BTW: The Yellow Dog Briq doesn't count, its not a full scale extensible computer, just a mini CPU module.
Designing computers is not a matter of drawing a rectangular shape and having it made - its very very intricate and involves many disciplines and engineering groups to get a design together.
All that's needed is a standard connection scheme between every module, but I don't even want to begin thinking about how one goes about providing a complete set of power and data busses across pluggable connections without running into safety issues or just muck falling into it and, say, shorting out the processor module! :eek:
Apple in a VME configuration would be a Thousand times better than their Rackmountable Server idea. Especially now that they are running a BSD type OS that can run with multiple processors.
Actually, Sun's Enterprise-class systems use a centerplane design that lets users select various boards (CPU/memory boards, I/O boards, at one point disk boards) to trick out their boxen. The whole system works quite well; however, getting into the idea of "infinite expandability" is another matter entirely. You'd have to work out some sort of meta-bus to connect an arbitrary number of sub-buses, and at that point you're essentially looking at a cluster environment, since latency can't be guaranteed. That's a whole 'nother world there....
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With a simple, small, compact form factor you run into a brick wall when your electronics won't "fit" in the standard size brick. Heat dissipation is a prime concern. Current CPUs are very large and hot needing lots of cooling. So where do you put the fan in a small brick? What about a heat sink?
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If they can fit a G4+heatsink+fan in a powerbook, then they should be able to fit the equivalent in a similar height module. They could also allow for multi-size modules that take up 2-3x the height of a normal one.
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Again with a small size you limit how much "stuff" you can put in a module even with PLCs some workstation-level graphics card would barely fit in a G4's full size PCI slot (some of em take up two slots' woth of space).
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Special support could be added for "longer" modules.
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Then you have the power supply which needs a fan or very good convection cooling, is it upgradable too? Lots of HDs need lots of watts to run (then there is the power requirements of all the modules you plug in).
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Why couldnt they do what you suggest. some modules themselves are likely to have custom input/outputs.
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See how complicated this gets very quickly and why no one ever did this? BTW: The Yellow Dog Briq doesn't count, its not a full scale extensible computer, just a mini CPU module.
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It's different, but not overly complicated.
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Designing computers is not a matter of drawing a rectangular shape and having it made - its very very intricate and involves many disciplines and engineering groups to get a design together.</strong><hr></blockquote>
That's why we have standards. The difficulty is not so much technical, rather that Apple would have found it difficult to push their own standards over pc-centric ones.
Imagine a camera that could snap on it - use the iPod's harddrive, display and scroll wheel