Teramac Dreams

WWDC is fast approaching, and now that the new MacBook Pros have been released, I fully expect new iMac hardware to be shown next week. This makes me happy because I've been wanting an iMac for a long time now. I was hoping for a release in January, but that didn't happen. Now, with the delay of Leopard, I still might not buy new hardware until it is released, but still, let's see the new iMac!

So what do I want to see? Honestly, not much. My biggest wish is hard drive capacity. Perhaps I'm an odd dude, but I want prosumer like specs, but I don't want a low end Mac Pro. I want an iMac with a TB of disk space. They are real close now. You can get 750GB as a BTO. The biggest restriction is the iMac's single hard drive.

To get past that single hard drive limitation, let's go big. Let's go 30" big. The iMac currently tops out at 24" and that's the one I've had my eye on. However, if they made a 30" version and filled it will giant hard drives, I might be tempted. I don't want external drives. They are ugly. They take up space. They require more wires and more power supplies. No thanks. I don't want a server in my closet. They're usually loud (even in a closet), burn electricity, and I don't have any outlets in my closets so you have the ugly wires again.

Since we're dreaming, I'll get real crazy and ask for 3 hard drives in my iMac. 2 of them will be high performance drives in a RAID 1 configuration for performance and data reliability. This will hold the OS, applications, and documents. The 3rd will just be that big lump that stores all of my media (music, movies, pictures). If we're shooting for that TB, we can do dual 250 gigers teamed with the single 750 drive. As long as you have room to cram those drives in, this is all quite doable.

So what else do I want? LED backlighting seems to be all the rage. I'm not real picky on video cards. Case redesign? Maybe a tweak or two. I really think the iMac is close to perfection in the case design. Multi-touch display. No thanks. I don't think the world is ready for that on a screen just yet. As a standalone pad, yes, I want one, but think of how people sit in front of the computer screens. The screens aren't usually within comfortable reach. You'd have to design new office chairs and desks to easily do multi-touch on your display. Either that or mount it high on a wall and stand-up.

The countdown continues.