Here's my relatively modest wish-list, not that I'll be buying a new desktop for a long time. I suspect that software won't make full use of the hardware I've got for 3-6 years, unless Snow Leopard is everything I want it to be and more. But I digress!
Hardware:
1. eSATA ports. I think it's about time we had these. Two would be plenty.
2. Firewire 3200 ports. Now would be a good time to deploy this, if they're ready to go on it.
3. Graphics cards that are no more than half a year old. For example, 4870s right now. Failing that, revision of the Nvidia drivers. Please? These guys are not performing as well as they ought to be on anything pro-app oriented. Also, I guess use of Displayport, since that's the way they appear to be going. I feel like straight Displayport instead of mini may work out well if, say, the upcoming 30" display uses regular displayport.
4. Use SATA on the optical drives instead of pATA. Now that the industry is over pATA, apple can get over it as well. May as well make it standard.
5. More USB ports or memory card readers built-in. I guess this is just greedy on my part because I run out of ports frequently and somehow, various hubs tend to work less than perfectly. Would be nice to just tap memory cards straight off of the motherboard with Apple aesthetics.
6. More efficient power supply unit. I hear this one wastes a fair bit of juice, and is somewhat less than completely cutting edge in its construction.
7. More 3.5" HDD bays is impractical, but...what about the addition of 2.5" bays? They could be used for say, Velociraptor boot drives or solid-state boot drives. Not a likely design choice, but maybe some design wizard could figure something out.
Software:
1. Better video card drivers. Please. Core image in particular. Seriously, guys, the pros could use some love here.
2. Software support for Blu-ray. Heaven knows we've already got a lot of what's needed; all that needs to be done to finish is a DVD player style app for movie playback and support in DVD Studio Pro.
3. Better support for multi-channel audio output through the optical connection. This can be had, after a fashion, with some apps, but it's just not there in say, iTunes. I know there's not a lot of demand for it, but it'd be nice. It'd be nice to monitor surround output from FCP/Soundtrack/DVDSP through that connection without needing a full-on mixing board. I'm just a one-man video shop, but I'm enabled to do so many things through bundled software that I'd enjoy using my hardware to its fullest extent.
4. Snow Leopard looks like it's going to work some serious mojo with existing software, but if it's technically feasible, there's one trick I'd love to see entertained: loading entire applications and projects into physical RAM. My 10 gigs could be used to fit, say, my 4 GB photoshop files (once that goes 64-bit!) straight into memory and be operated upon at lightning speed. By the same token, if I moved an HDV project that encompassed less than 45 minutes of footage, operating it all in memory would be blindingly fast by comparison. Now, I'm no bithead so that may all be nonsense, but it's a nifty idea to toss around.
5. ZFS support, native and boot support. Yes. Eliminate redundancy/reliability problems and use onboard bays to accumulate a large storage pool. I like.
Random others:
-Power button back on keyboards? I kind of liked that.
I could ask for more HDD bays or more PCIe slots - and definitely make use of them - but I think it's an unreasonable request unless we want our Mac Pros monstrously large. It's already quite heavy for a tower, and adding more space for that sort of thing would only make it heavier.
Hardware:
1. eSATA ports. I think it's about time we had these. Two would be plenty.
2. Firewire 3200 ports. Now would be a good time to deploy this, if they're ready to go on it.
3. Graphics cards that are no more than half a year old. For example, 4870s right now. Failing that, revision of the Nvidia drivers. Please? These guys are not performing as well as they ought to be on anything pro-app oriented. Also, I guess use of Displayport, since that's the way they appear to be going. I feel like straight Displayport instead of mini may work out well if, say, the upcoming 30" display uses regular displayport.
4. Use SATA on the optical drives instead of pATA. Now that the industry is over pATA, apple can get over it as well. May as well make it standard.
5. More USB ports or memory card readers built-in. I guess this is just greedy on my part because I run out of ports frequently and somehow, various hubs tend to work less than perfectly. Would be nice to just tap memory cards straight off of the motherboard with Apple aesthetics.
6. More efficient power supply unit. I hear this one wastes a fair bit of juice, and is somewhat less than completely cutting edge in its construction.
7. More 3.5" HDD bays is impractical, but...what about the addition of 2.5" bays? They could be used for say, Velociraptor boot drives or solid-state boot drives. Not a likely design choice, but maybe some design wizard could figure something out.
Software:
1. Better video card drivers. Please. Core image in particular. Seriously, guys, the pros could use some love here.
2. Software support for Blu-ray. Heaven knows we've already got a lot of what's needed; all that needs to be done to finish is a DVD player style app for movie playback and support in DVD Studio Pro.
3. Better support for multi-channel audio output through the optical connection. This can be had, after a fashion, with some apps, but it's just not there in say, iTunes. I know there's not a lot of demand for it, but it'd be nice. It'd be nice to monitor surround output from FCP/Soundtrack/DVDSP through that connection without needing a full-on mixing board. I'm just a one-man video shop, but I'm enabled to do so many things through bundled software that I'd enjoy using my hardware to its fullest extent.
4. Snow Leopard looks like it's going to work some serious mojo with existing software, but if it's technically feasible, there's one trick I'd love to see entertained: loading entire applications and projects into physical RAM. My 10 gigs could be used to fit, say, my 4 GB photoshop files (once that goes 64-bit!) straight into memory and be operated upon at lightning speed. By the same token, if I moved an HDV project that encompassed less than 45 minutes of footage, operating it all in memory would be blindingly fast by comparison. Now, I'm no bithead so that may all be nonsense, but it's a nifty idea to toss around.
5. ZFS support, native and boot support. Yes. Eliminate redundancy/reliability problems and use onboard bays to accumulate a large storage pool. I like.
Random others:
-Power button back on keyboards? I kind of liked that.
I could ask for more HDD bays or more PCIe slots - and definitely make use of them - but I think it's an unreasonable request unless we want our Mac Pros monstrously large. It's already quite heavy for a tower, and adding more space for that sort of thing would only make it heavier.
