Will the PC be replaced by the Apple iStack?

Is the PC dying? You’d be forgiven for thinking it, what with the largest PC maker bowing out, and raving iPad-toting Jobsians pointing at the vast sales of smartphones, tablets, and other post-PC devices.

Image credit : extremetech

It doesn’t really matter if the desktop PC is dying, however, if there is nothing to replace it. Tablets and smartphones might be nibbling at the PC’s heels, but they certainly won’t replace them any time soon. Likewise, MacBook Pros and Ultrabooks are certainly forging towards desktop-like processing power in a mobile form factor, but heat displacement issues and lack of upgradability mean that they will never truly usurp desktop PCs.

In spite of all this, though, it’s impossible to deny that the desktop tower has run its course. Their gargantuan footprint, their oversized power supplies, their excessive number of expansion slots and drive bays — the truth is, almost every household could now make do with a desktop PC the size of the Mac Mini, as long as it has plenty of external connectivity. If it wasn’t for the power users, in fact — if graphic designers, video editors, and gamers weren’t so darn needy — then the big beige box would’ve vanished years ago.

What if Steve Jobs could craft a magical device that fulfills the needs and desires of Apple zealots and earnest power users alike, though?

There is a rumor going around that Apple will introduce an entirely new product line before the end of the year, you see. Combine this rumor with the fact that Apple’s monstrous (41-pound!) aging aluminium cheese grater, the Mac Pro, is unwieldy, incredibly expensive, and hasn’t yet been updated to Intel Core i processors, and you have the possibility that Apple’s new product might actually replace the Mac Pro.

Now… what if the replacement is a new, modular Mac system. A stackable system, using the Mac Mini form factor, and sewn together with Thunderbolt — or perhaps, in a year or two, with the much higher-bandwidth-but-shorter-distance fiber optic Light Peak interconnect.

You can see Jobs now, bouncing around a polished obsidian keynote stage, in an ebony cashmere sweater, and holding aloft a glistening white box that he heralds as the centerpiece of the onrushing post-PC world. It would be called the Mac Desktop, and it would combine to form [the] iStack.

This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. If you’re a normal home user who just wants to word process, listen to music, and watch TV, buy one Mac Desktop; you get all the power of your MacBook Pro or Air, but for half the price and in a tidier form factor that you can hide away in a cupboard somewhere. If you’re a gamer, just buy two. If you need some serious processing power for compilation, rendering, or audiovisual editing, strap four Mac Desktops together and make a bonafide iStack. Thunderbolt (a glorified PCIe bus) and Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) interface would make short work of connecting them all together, too.

It gets better: if you’re worried about graphics capabilities, don’t forget that the new iMac is basically a Mac Mini and Thunderbolt Display strapped together. It isn’t equipped with a top-level graphics card at the moment — an AMD Radeon HD 6970M — but that isn’t to say that it couldn’t be outfitted with something gamerific. Connecting your stack of MacTops to your iMac is just a matter of running a Thunderbolt cable — and again, the stack can be kept in a cupboard because Thunderbolt allows you to connect every peripheral to the iMac.

Image cerdit :extremetech

But why stop there? The Apple Time Capsule has a similar form factor to the Mac Mini; let’s put one of those in the iStack. And an Apple TV box, while you’re at it. Before you know it, you have a single, pearly stack that’s capable of doing just about anything. As a matter of course, your iPhone and iPad could communicate with the whole caboodle via wi-fi. Imagine if a future version of iOS let you use your mobile device as a wireless display…

Finally, underpinning it all is Apple’s new iCloud service. You will zap a QR code on a poster with your smartphone, and the movie or album will automatically download to your iStack at home. The photos and videos that you shoot will be automatically backed up the iCloud, but also your iStack Time Capsule at home. You will be able to play a game on the way to work, and then pick up from where you left off on your Apple TV.

In short, iStack will be everything that today’s PC wants to be.


Source :extremetech
View the original article