Earlier this month, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs was asked about the possibility of an “XServe Mini” to bring Leopard Server-style services to consumers at an affordable price. AppleInsider reported that “Jobs seemed like he wanted to say something, but then punctuated the awkward silence with the typical refrain of not being able to say anything.” Why did Jobs hesitate? Perhaps because he had just such a product in mind.For what it’s worth – here’s what MacPredictions thinks that it might be (all speculation, as usual, no inside sources).
As consumers are buying more and more content from the iTunes Store, storage is becoming an increasing issue. Put simply, sooner or later your Mac or PC will run out of disk space. And this problem is only going to get worse as consumers increasingly switch to HD content. A home server is the obvious solution, but there are some problems to address:
- It needs to be easy to setup and administrate
- It needs to be extendable – consumers storage requirements will continue to grow
- It needs to be resilient
- It needs to be affordable
The solution that MacPredictions envisages combines several products:
- AirPort Wireless Base Station
- Apple TV
- Time Capsule
The final component would be a new software tool – iTunes Server, that would automatically sync content purchased from iTunes onto the server, and it would serve iTunes content seamlessly to all authorised clients on the network, as if the content was stored locally. It would enable the user to set rules to determine which content is synced to which clients, and it may even provide the ability to remotely manage Macs – so for example, parents could set the parental controls for their kid’s Mac.
The server would offer some RAID options, with the ability to dynamically add addition capacity to a single logical volume, with a neat hardware enclosure design enabling drives to be stacked in a tower configuration, without any hassle with cables.
