rickshangle.com

the mac rumors site i read is quite silent as to whether apple has anything special planned product-wise for their 30th birthday, which is tomorrow.

although an intel iBook is inevitable (and welcome), i dunno… not very ground-breaking or fun.

30 years, it should be something revolutionary.

how about a $200 price-reduction in this thing so that someone may actually buy one? while saving $200 is technically fun, i’m still not feeling it.

should be something revolutionary… Video iPod and HD feature movies on iTMS are just evolutions at this point.

How about actually adding 5.1 audio capability to Quicktime Player? Certainly rational and long-overdue… but still lacking the revolutionary element.

Wait… I know. I know.

### the Mac mini stack, or iStack mini

An expandable version of the Mac mini, that can be seamlessly scaled by adding additionally mini “nodes” via a high-bandwidth integrated backplane.

This architecture will replace what we currently know as the PowerMac. It’s called the iStack.

Nodes, which all feature CPU and RAM in addition to core I/O (USB/Firewire), are optionally-configured to provide additional video, storage capacity and ancillary I/O (digital audio).

So, for about $1300 a bucks a node, or so, after the time you’ve bought like four nodes and stacked them together, you have:

1. 4x Core Duo CPUs (8 cores total)
2. 8GB of RAM
3. 8x firewire busses / 8x USB 2.0 ports
4. 4x 200GB hard drives that can be striped (via hardware) with RAID 5 (yeah… they’ll have to get bigger hard drives in there somehow…)
5. some digital I/O capability for music and whatever
6. 2 or 3 monitor ports…

… in the slightly goofy form factor of four minis stacked on top each other.

I’d buy this. It’s clearly the way.

radically crude artist’s conception

v2, still crude artist’s conception

rds