Makin' A List, Checkin' It Twice

Dear Santa Jobs,

It seems like all the other good little boys and girls here at DMN got to write a list to the Santa of their choice, so I chose you. I just wanted you to know that I have been extra, EXTRA good this year, after being really, REALLY bad for the last three years. I got sick of the other Santa, Santa Gates, promising to give me the super-good presents I wanted, but never leaving me more than a lump of coal. And Santa Gates always tried to convince me that he actually left me something good, but I knew it was just a lump of coal. Plus, he was never satisfied with just taking the couple of cookies I left for him. He would try to get into the cupboard and take all the rest of my food, along with my plates and dishes and silverware, all the while claiming that I was getting valuable innovations from him by his doing so. So I had to go back to you, Santa Jobs, for this year. You're a pretty good Santa, 'cuz you've given us lots of good loot. One time, you gave us a profitable company again. Other times, you gave us iMacs, G4 PowerBooks, OS X, decent video cards, and other neat stuff. You even gave us some early presents this year with the announcement of Final Cut Pro 3 for OS X and showing us DVD Studio Pro running on OS X. Those are all good presents, but the one thing about good presents are that we always want better ones next time.

Even though X-Mas (not to be confused with Stephen Schlecher's soon-to-be-trademarked "OS X-Mas") comes more than once a year (there's usually one in January, another in July, and several other scattered across the calendar), I'm giving you my list all at once. Hopefully, you'll get to all of these at one of the upcoming X-Mases since I've been so super duper good.

G5s. Even though you (and now AMD) swear up and down that megahertz doesn't matter (giggle giggle), isn't it about time we shut up all the Intel supporters by narrowing that dang old speed gap a bit? Dual (or even quad) Son-of-Quicksilver enclosures sporting the long-rumored blazin' fast G5's running OS X would be mighty nice under the tree, but we may even be happy with gigahertz+ G4 chips if your elves at Motorola can finally swing it.

A G4, flat-panel iMac. With or without a SuperDrive, this would be a mighty tasty gift. The professional-grade towers are all fine and dandy, but it seems like the bottom line gets a good swift kick in the butt whenever the iMacs get refreshed. We're all anxious to see what finally comes out of Santa's workshop after seeing all those dollars invested in flat-panel technology. And can we have a model for under a grand, please?

Retire OS 9, A.S.A.F.P. I know I'll get some flack for requesting this gift, probably amongst all the good little girls and boys in the publishing profession, but there's a boatload peace and goodwill towards OS X floating around these days. Take advantage of it, and put the old 9.x dog down.

A 20 Gigabyte iPod. Even though I might have earned myself a lump of Cupertino coal by disputing your words that the iPod is an actual "breakthrough," I still think it's a pretty damn desirable piece of hardware, even though it costs about twice what it should. Let's make it worth everyone's while by dropping a MUCH bigger hard drive into it, pretty please Santa?

Enhanced open/save dialogs in OS X. Thank you for making OS X's open and save boxes at least somewhat interactive through drag and drop and favorites, but can you please add something akin to the Terminal's tab command to complete the names of files in that directory? Give us some intelligent way of snagging the names of files that are already there, instead of all the redundant typing that can sometimes come up. Being able to do rudimentary Finder management from said dialog boxes (like creating, deleting and moving files and folders) would be a big help too.

With apologies to folks like Thursby, who make excellent Mac/PC networking products like DAVE, it might make sense to beef up OS X's native Windows networking capabilities. Some, if not a lot, of your most bestest little girls and boys are stuck with their solitary Macs in the middle of a sea of Windows. Why not finish the job you started when you added rudimentary support for SMB in OS X? Full Windows network support right out of the box would make Macs a much easier pill to swallow for the decidedly anti-Mac corporate IT crowd. Would it really be that hard to be able to browse a SMB network from the Connect to Server dialog box? Then you could build the open-source Samba right into the OS, the way you did with the Apache web server, so Windows boxes could see Mac OS machines too. If that's too much, acquiring Thursby and integrating DAVE into OS X (or offering a discount bundling option with new Macs) might be something to think about.

Make a(nother) deal with the Devil. Yes, I know you loosed your corporate lawyers on Microsoft's corporate lawyers over this whole MS-donating-computers-instead-of-cash-to-schools thing, but that shouldn't stop you from striking a deal to bundle Office as an option with new Macs. This is, of course, another move which would make Macs a little more welcome in corporate IT departments. If Office, which is required gear in most corporations, isn't such a colossal expense on top of the price of the Mac, maybe more corporate purchase approval-type folks won't wrinkle their little red noses when the word "Mac" is mentioned. And NO, AppleWorks is not really a viable option in these environments.

Give us commodity hardware. If you won't port OS X to Athlon, then at least try give us some more choices about what's in the belly of our Macs. OS X is a power user's dream OS, and said power users are probably accustomed to having the ability to put commodity hardware in their boxes. This is probably more of a job for some of Santa's little helpers like Nvidia, but surely it's not out of Santa's power to put some more pressure on manufacturers to write OS X-compatible drivers for their off-the-shelf products. Even better, write some yourself! If Microsoft can, surely you can as well, and probably do a better job at it than they do. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to walk into my local computer superstore, pick out a GeForce 3 Titanium AGP card, and install it in my Mac (and have it work). Since I have more items on the list, I won't even get into why I can't just buy the latest Apple motherboard and CPU as a set and install it with the enclosure, SuperDrive, RAM, and various PCI cards I don't need to buy more than once.

Bigger portable screens and resolutions. Surely the aforementioned investment in LCD manufacturing can reap some benefits when it comes to this particular request. While we're at it, could you please bump the iBook display up to the 16 MB Radeon currently in the TiBooks, and give the Ti users either a Radeon or GeForce2Go with 32 MB (or more) of video RAM?

VGA-compatible Studio Displays. Is it really too much to ask for you to go to the workshop and come up with an Apple-branded converter that splits the proprietary ADC cable into VGA and USB signals so PowerBook, older Mac, and, dare I say, even non-Mac owners can have one of the sharpest LCD displays made to date sitting on their desktops? Keeping the Studio Displays Mac-only is probably not driving new Mac sales like I think you hope it is. It's more likely driving sales of competitor displays.

Santa, please indulge me a little longer with these last few quick ones:

1) Put the Power button back on the Pro keyboard, and please give me one good reason why it was ever ditched in the first place.

2) Put the eject button back on the Quicksilver drive enclosure (or whatever its eventual replacement is), and at the risk of sounding redundant, please give me one good reason why it was ever ditched in the first place.

3) Isn't it about time for an Apple-branded two-button mouse to ship with new Macs? If single-button mice are still all good little girls and boys need, why is it that no third-party manufacturer still makes one? C'mon, Santa. Let it go.

Santa Jobs, can I please have all the things on my list? I'm guessing the answer to that question is no, because there are only a couple of these that I think you actually are willing to push down our chimneys. Oh well. At least I have stuff to put on my list at all this year. Santa Gates didn't really have anything I wanted anyway.

Filed under: Opinion on December 10th, 2001

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