No, I'm not making fun of users, but I have a question that just hit me while I was reading something about Bluetooth.<br><br>With Airport and Bluetooth, I'm wondering if some day we may the advent of dumb terminals. That is, you buy a megamac for your home. This one has a giant harddrive, an amazingly zippy Superdrive, the works. It's the server, as it were.<br><br>Then- presuming you're a parent with some kids- you buy them dumb iMacs or iBooks. These babies can roam the house, and they have tons of ram but not so much hard drive space and no burning what so ever, only CD/DVD playback. In other words they wireless borrow everything from the main server.<br><br>I know this exists in the PC world, but should it exist here? Does Airport/Bluetooth make it a good idea, or only all the dumber?<br><br>:-)<br><br>Personally, my first reaction is ICCCK! Right? Ewwwww. A Mac with less features! No thanks. But then I think, yeah, but what if the money saved on a duplicated burner or big drive was put into a better processor? A nicer screen?<br><br>Imagine a nice long Powerbook with a breathtaking screen (better resolution) but a dummy drive that plays CDs/DVDs and that's about it? You can take it to airport enabled cafes and libararies, but sorry, no internal modem.<br><br>It probably wouldn't shave so much off the price, but I hope it makes you wonder. <br><br>Everybody has a heart. Except some people.. BD

Not only is it a real possibility, but in time, the idea of fully integrated residential mainframes to serve personal portable workstations, kitchen appliances, car navigation systems, robotic lawncare systems, etc. is already in the works. Will they be platform-centric? Who knows.<br><br>BTW, I got all this from my neighbor, George Jetson. <br><br>

I want voice controlled computers... that actually work somewhere other than the stage demos! <br><br>[color:red]semicolon dash parenthesis</font color=red>

Raid the Star Trek prop room. <br><br>

how about wearable Macs! or what I would like is a swapable hard drive for my brain. Imagine, I'm at out all day slaving on a Windows box (well not really I am posting away at work right now), just before I leave I swap out my Windows brain and put in my Mac brain.<br><br>When I get home, I'm all mac all the time and loving every minute of it!<br><br>all kidding aside, you can pretty well blame microsoft for the peer to peer relationship with computers. but looks like client server computer relationships are on their way back in.<br><br>hey we are doing client server right now. the client is the browser and the server is some where, well out there.<br><br>[color:red]live free or die</font color=red>

I think we had these tpes of boxes in the past, but they were wired... and they were made by NeXT.<br><br>yes, I think we're headed that way in the future, if not in the home, definitely in the corporate world...<br><br>We have a Java Application at work that I use the J2EE capabilities of Mac OS X to run... just open IE, type in a URL and bam... the application launches, and runs within the J2EE runtime environment (whatever that is) ... all the data and processing takes place and resides (not in that order) on the server that hosts the stuff....<br><br>Something like that...<br><br>we're definitely moving that way... and in fact, I think we're doing it without an OS based system too.<br><br>

Sounds like a great idea. Why not get rid of the CD drive too?<br><br>So, strip out hard drive/CDrom. With all of that heavy spinning removed you could shave the battery down.<br><br>Crank up the memory and the processor. Keyboard and beautiful screen is all you see. Play the movie from the server. You would end up with a big screen titanium which weighs 1.5 lbs<br><br>I would buy one.<br><br>Paul Morrison ... truth should never get in the way of a good story