I feel that with the “death” of the XServe Server and the uncertain future of Mac OS X Server OS, Apple should delve into offering hosted services to pull in entities who are now scattered among numerous other services such as Google Apps for Domains, commercial hosting, and numerous other third party hosted or self hosted apps, which require a lot of maintenance, multiple accounts, billing, etc.  Many of my IT associates who have switched to Apple laptops and desktops have commented to me that they hate still having to use non-apple apps to complete their daily business.

For example, the MobileMe interface already is an attractive and functional interface for email, contacts, calendar, iDisk, Photos and location services.  How much harder would it be to allow a company to signup and fully attach their own domain to the MobileMe framework.  Perhaps even create a separate enhanced version of MobileMe in their [Apple's] newest “cloud” datacenter in North Carolina and, over time, have an ‘a la carte’ offering of additional new services that users need/request.  Maybe even allow developers to write custom Apps that can be cleanly integrated into the web interface and a matching app for the iOS device(s).

Keep the price reasonable, no more than $1-2/mo per user, which would be very attractive for small businesses, special pricing for larger corporations and perhaps discounts when Apple devices are purchased and attached to an account.  Perhaps 1 year for free when any iOS device is purchased to draw users in.

The advantages of this would be numerous, it would give small businesses and organizations a unified and complete “Apple Branded Experience” on their Mac PCs, iPhones, iPads, etc.  Almost everyone I know has a Mac device of some kind and many would prefer to use their own domain.  Apple does offer the capability of attaching a domain to your MobileMe webspace, but that does not extend to customization of the other services.

Also, with minor modifications to the existing MobileMe framework, it would bring a whole new potential residual revenue stream that millions of users could utilize.  It may also spur additional companies and users to buy Apple hardware knowing that all these services are so well intergrated. Adding similar features as Google Apps for Domains and improving upon them would make it a very attractive alternative.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do use and am VERY happy with Google Apps for Domains, but it would be nice to have some competition from another major player to keep things interesting.  Google does accomplish a lot of what I’ve stated in this email, but it’s not as “pretty”, well integrated and cost effective for those with many needs.

Perhaps Apple could even purchase a VoIP company and add that to their portfolio of services.  With an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and an old Mac Mini, it would be nice to get deep integration of all my communications needs while not being forced onto the @me.com domain.

I guess only time will tell how far Apple is willing to ascend into the cloud.

Here’s why:

AT&T as the only carrier
AT&T SUCKS!  Need I say more?  Those Verizon commercials about AT&T are all 100% correct.  AT&T’s 3G coverage is sad, Verizon’s is amazing.  Until AT&T is gone, the only version I’ll ever get is the WiFi only and use my MiFi 2200 on Verizon for data on the move.

No front-facing camera
ALL of Apple’s computers and monitors come with webcams these days, even the iPhone has a camera in the back.  Why did they not do this? AT&T probably had some say in it, because they SUCK so badly, and wouldn’t be able to handle video conference over 3G.

No Multitasking
They touted this device as something “better” than a netbook, yet it cannot even multitask like a netbook.  ANY netbook is better than this device for this one simple feature.  This feature is “crucial” for a multi-function device like this for it to have any kind of usability outside of basic apps.

The iPhone’ish Operating System
I would’ve preferred something more of a hybrid between the iPhone OS and Mac OS X, I know that would’ve probably required more power and therefore shortened the battery life, but add only 1-2mm thickness and a lot more battery could fit in if shaped correctly.  Having a “fuller” OS probably would’ve solved the multitasking issue and would allow people to run more apps therefore making it that much more of a “usable” device.  Even with this robustness, it would most likely NOT cut into the Laptop market since it doesn’t have a mouse and sometimes you just need a mouse.

No Removable Memory Options
Apple should have simply created 2 versions, a WiFi Only and a WiFi+3G, have some onboard memory, maybe 16 or 32GB, then allow us to expand with it SD cards.  SD Cards are getting bigger all the time and would allow much greater flexibility for expansion.   Of course that would cut into Apple’s profit margins when they want everyone to buy the 128GB version coming out next year.

More Codecs
As much of a “media company” as Apple is, they still need to support the needs of the public as a whole.  Everyone, or at least most, has DiVX AVI or MKV movies that they’ve downloaded or gotten from friends.  It would be really nice if these videos could be natively viewed on this device.

Overall, complaints aside, it is still a nice device.  For the price, it’s still, in my opinion, a much better value than the Amazon Kindle line.  The Kindle is too “plain jane” and black and white while the iPad is the Kindle’s hot younger sister that still has some growing up to do.

I will watch the iPad over the next year or so and if they do make some of these improvements, especially the carrier, multitasking and front-facing camera, I’ll buy 2-3 for me, the kids, and around the house.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well, last night, my Western Digital MyBook 500gb drive went kablooey right in the middle of watching a movie off of it.  This drive was hooked to my Mac file storage machine and was idle most of the time, so I was curious as to why it would die all of a sudden.  I felt the drive and it was quite warm to the touch, and my office is quite warm to boot, so I am going to attribute this problem to heat. It was also on the bottom of the stack of 2 other WD MyBook 500gb drives.

Everytime I tried restarting the bad drive, it reported itself as a 1.6TB partition and was not able to be read.  I tried a few misc utilities on it, but none could read or recover anything.  This drive ONCE was a part of a three drive RAID-0 (stripped) and I think somehow it went back to thinking it was since the partition name was “disk3″. Weird…

I ran across one called Nucleus Kernel Macintosh for HFS & HFS+ (Mac) formats, and thought I’d give it a try.  It was able to immediately and quickly scan the drive and I could see all the files that were “lost”… I called up a buddy of mine who is a BIG mac guru and he happened to have a full copy of it, so he brought it over and it is recovering now.  (The demo version cannot recover much)

It should be finished sometime tomorrow and I’ll be sure to make duplicates in the future.  I should have learned my lesson by now.

I may end up getting a true RAID SAN/NAS device that has total failover in case of single drive failure.  There’s no feeling worse than thinking you lost years of work due to a stupid hard drive crapping out on you.

Today, Steve Jobs announced at an Apple Event that the iPhone will, by summertime, get a full version update to 2.x… The 2.0 update will provide ActivSync Microsoft Exchange capabilities including full PUSH email, calendar and contact syncing… The new 2.0 will also provide the framework for the next level of iPhone/Touch apps. Click the image above to see more.

This is very exciting news and is going to usher in the next stage of smartphone domination by the Apple iPhone.

My next main hope is at the release date, Apple will release an 3G iPhone as well as additional improvements, perhaps even a slightly larger screened enhanced phone/PDA more geared towards Fanboy/Power Users that will be more multimedia oriented and perhaps even be able to stream video and interface with the movie element of iTunes, but I’m just dreaming here.

I still think a tablet type Mac that is small, very portable, priced competitively and powerful enough to provide a desktop level experience would be really cool. Then add a docking station that can hook it up to a mouse/monitor/keyboard. If I could have something like this that could be everything for me, I would get one in a heartbeat. PC, Cellphone, VoIP phone, PDA, mobile computing platform, etc.

The Axiotron Mac OSX unofficial Mac Tablet is good, but still a bit larger and more expensive than what I describe above.

Apple has filed patents for something of this sort (the docking station concept), perhaps someday it will leave the vaporware stage.