Dear Apple: Build This Device

Apple has a knack for making easy-to-use products. It’s true, it’s irrefutable, and it’s the reason I’m asking them to bestow upon us what I consider to be the holy grail of the modern age: a home media server.

Ok, maybe that’s a touch dramatic. But the idea of a server in the home–for media or otherwise–is sounding better every day.

My idea for this product–which, in my own mind, I’ve dubbed the MacBox–came to me while I was trying to figure out exactly how to create an efficient, automated backup system for all of the computers in my house. During the process, I decided to take a look at all of the data I keep on my computer to look for patterns in the way it’s all arranged. I found that everything could be split into two distinct categories, represented here:

~/Archive is a folder I use instead of ~/Documents to keep my documents in.

As you can see, my media is eating up a substantial amount of drive space. And it never changes. It only exists for retrieval purposes (listening, watching, backing up, etc.). To me, these are the primary earmarks of data that should be housed on a server. When I realized this, my media suddenly became baggage. Do I really want to lug all of this around with me on my laptop everywhere I go?

I know I’m not the only one with this problem. And things only get worse when your house has more than one computer, each with its own digital baggage. My iPhoto library has photos in it that my wife’s doesn’t and vice versa. Syncing the two libraries is tedious and doesn’t eliminate the main problem; we’re still left with two libraries.

So, what’s the solution to all of this?

Obligatory half-assed Photoshop mock-up

I imagine the MacBox as being about the size and dimensions of two Mac Minis side-by-side. It’s a wi-fi access point, it has a huge hard drive, it can be hooked up to your TV, and it speaks to .Mac a la Back To My Mac. Here’s how it works.

1. You turn on the MacBox and configure the wi-fi access point.
2. The MacBox asks if the machine you’re using is a “home” machine–a machine that you own.
• If it is, you’re prompted to sync your iTunes and iPhoto libraries to the MacBox.
3. After syncing (via iTunes), you’re asked if you want to keep a local copy of your media or delete it in favor of using the MacBox’s library.
4. Each machine in your house goes through a similar process. The MacBox resolves duplicates as they’re added so that you have one unified library of movies, music and photos.

In addition to serving media to iTunes and iPhoto on each machine in your house, the MacBox could also let you rent or purchase movies (and do just about anything else that’s possible with the Apple TV) and perform wireless backups via Time Machine.

This leaves a few questions, though.

How will I sync my iPod/iPhone?

The new version of iTunes will understand that your media is stored on the network and will treat the networked version of your iTunes library as if it were a normal, local library. To the user, syncing will be no different.

What if I’m not at home? How do I listen to my music?

Since the MacBox is a wi-fi access point, it has a constant connection to the Internet. If the device uses something akin to Leopard’s new Back To My Mac feature, you can have access to your music from anywhere (so long as you have an Internet connection).

What if I add new music to the library on my computer?

Simple; just log on to your wireless network and launch iTunes. iTunes will report to the MacBox that new content has been added on your machine, and the two will sync up. Your new content will end up on the MacBox.

What if I run out of space or the hard drive dies?

Apple did something really smart with the MacBook. They made the hard drive incredibly easy to replace. I would imagine that, for a device like the MacBox, a similarly easy and perhaps Drobo-like drive system would be necessary. Remove a faceplate, eject the old drive, insert a new one.

The Drobo shows us its drives. Push one to pop it out, even if the Drobo is up and running.

What if I want to back up the stuff stored on the MacBox?

Here’s where it might get a little far-fetched. I would imagine that Apple would contract with either Google or Amazon to provide massive online storage to customers. For a monthly fee, your data would automatically be backed up to one of these services, which would be rebranded as a .Mac feature. Backups would be automated and transparent.

The MacBox presents a few other ramifications as well. Imagine an iPhone or an iPod Touch that could find your music library via wi-fi and stream content back to you. The eight gigs available on the iPhone suddenly becomes a non-issue.

Additionally, machines like the MacBook Air become more useful to a larger number of people. I’ll use myself as an example. For me, the 80 gigs in the MacBook Air is a paltry sum. My current MacBook has a 250 gigabyte drive in it, and only 70 of those gigabytes are empty. But looking at the numbers in the chart presented at the beginning of this article, it’s conceivable that–without the 130 gigs of media baggage I carry with me–I would only need about 40 to 50 gigs of hard drive space.

The MacBox is, without a doubt, a complicated device. But like so many wonderful innovations brought to us by Apple, it relies on technology that already exists and is being used in one form or another in other products. iPhoto and iTunes already recognize duplicate files based on meta data. The Apple TV and Time Capsule already exist as separate devices. And Back To My Mac is already an existing service.

The company has done well with convergence devices in the past primarily because Apple’s engineers understand that seamless integration with existing hardware and software trumps everything else. If any company can make this device–and make it work so well that normal folk can operate it–it’s Apple.

So, Steve, what are you guys waiting for?