Enough iPhone, iPod News. I Want A Mac In My Hand.

We’re not too good at the Apple fanboy routine at Mac360. Yes, we like Apple and Mac and all the new toys, but enough of the iPod and iPhone news already.

What we really want is a hand held Mac. Where is it? Why is Apple dancing around the obvious. Don’t you really want a Mac that’s about the size of an iPhone?

Apple’s blatant market and product segmentation strategy came to light yesterday with the announcement of a whole new line of iPods. Most technomedia pundits and prognosticators got what was expected. But not enough to prevent AAPL from dropping like a Round Rock in Texas.

New colors for the iPod shuffle. A fat iPod nano to accommodate a larger screen for videos. A huge hard drive in the iPod classic. And iPhone’s multi-touch screen in a flash-based iPod touch.

What’s not to like? The obvious. I want a Mac in my hand. Enough of this dilly dallying around with crippled spin offs of what’s cool but not-quite-ready-for-prime time. iPod touch, I’m talking about you.

What makes the iPhone such a winner, despite a steep price tag, is ease of use and balance of utility. The touch screen makes navigation easy. There’s Wi-Fi, therefore Mail and Safari. The other pieces just fit the way Apple makes them fit.

The iPhone plays music and videos, surfs the net, collects email, takes pictures, syncs automatically and fits in my hand and my pocket. Oh, it does phone calls, too. Again, what’s not to like?

It’s not a Mac, and that’s my biggest gripe. After tasting the iPhone, and looking at the somewhat crippled iPod touch, now, more than ever, I want a Mac in my pocket.

How hard would it be to take that 160 gigabyte iPod hard drive and shove it into a slightly larger iPhone case, and make it a Mac with touch screen technology? Add a port for keyboard and mouse, one more for an external screen, and life is good.

OS X Leopard could and should but won’t sync a Home directory and Applications directory from your Mac to a hand held Mac. Even Lee Majors would buy one. We have the technology. We can make Mac better. We can add an iSight camera and iChat and Skype and VoIP. We can be set free.

I suspect that the real problem here is multi-fold. Would Apple’s engineers and software developers love to have a full fledged Mac in their pocket? Yes. Can they design and build a hand held Mac and is that in the works already? A thousand times yes.

So, where is it? Apple makes money by selling us toys we like. How many Mac and PC users have more than one iPod? How many of us who are regular Apple fan boy toy buyers have a Mac, another Mac, two iPods, an iPhone, other toys and software, and are still drooling for more? Plenty.

If Apple made a Mac that fit in our pocket it would need to be the same price as an iPod, iPhone, and MacBook combined. It would be cool but wouldn’t sell at such an outrageous price. Wait, the iPhone sold at an outrageous price.

I like the iPod and iTunes ecosystem. The iPhone is ultra cool, highly usable, and now price competitive. All this is well and good, but what I really want is a Mac in my pocket, instead of new but crippled toys every six months.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

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Off Topic #23 - Mac OS X Leopard is now at version 10.5.2 which we’re proclaiming the best yet, though we expect version 10.5.3 soon. If you haven’t upgraded yet, don’t forget that Leopard is on sale at the Mac360 Store, and so are the latest Leopard books. If you plan to order Leopard or a Leopard tips book from Amazon, please consider using the Mac360 Store to place your order (it’s really Amazon). Click Here to look at the latest Leopard books.