Any successful company needs to focus and expand the areas where there are profits.

Through the last years we saw that Apple is focusing on iOS based devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, AppleTV) where profit comes not only from selling the iOS devices but comes from the iTunes contents (music, video, apps and books).

But, what about Mac, the Apple Computers? What is the future?

Apple trying to do some improvements in this area too, but let’s face it the profits are not like the iOS devices! Still the unique thing in apple products is the eco-system that covers all our needs from desktops and laptops to handhelds devices (iOS devices), apple need to keep the Computers because they are part of this eco-system!

So here comes the new idea, the Apple’s Mac App Store, it is a brilliant way for the developers, users and not less for apple as well to gain some benefits.

For developer, it is an easy way to publish and sell applications without the need to invest much time and money in marketing, small companies will be happy to compete and sell their products in this way, same as in App Store for iOS devices.

For users, they will find it easy to search and download apps for their Mac Computers as well as rating and other functions like checking apps by Apple against malicious apps, again same as the App Store for iOS devices

For Apple, simply more profits.

But is that all what the users need?

No, not really everything, allot of people still need some sort of a central storage (not the Time Capsule) to archive photos, videos, music, and other files, and here we are talking about home users.
a lot of people (like me) has allot of files (family video, photos and music collections) the current system’s disks simply are not enough, also I would love to access and work with my files from my 3 Mac Computers plus my wife’s MacBook
and really we both suffer from having duplicated photos in different formats like raw and jpg files

And honestly apple does not have solution for this issue, Mac Pro is an expensive machine to be used as a file server for home user and there is no proper software to help organise the files and access them on the server!

Just a thought about how it may work

• Similar to Windows Home Server.
• Users can use it as a central Time Machine storage.
• A new way to serve music and video in the house
  something like an iTunes Server, where people can use it to archive the purchased music and videos in addition to the user’s personal ripped CDs where you can have 2 options:
  • Listen to music with streaming similar to what we have now an iTunes to iTunes streaming function and AirPlay
  • Cache the files to your laptop for offline playing and here I thing in 2 options:
    • Copy the files
    • Convert file and copy based on a pre-setting to have a small file size locally of a the original lossless file on the server
• Unified database settings for Aperture and iPhoto and it will work:
  • Settings made with iPhoto can be used and accessed by Aperture with no problems.
  • Settings made with Aperture will be not all changeable by iPhoto, but all the settings that iPhoto has can modify the equivalent Aperture’s settings only, keeping other Aperture’s settings inaccessible by iPhoto.
• Photo Server using the Unified database settings (the point above):
  • Users work on photos locally then they get an option to push it and save it on the server.
  • All authenticated users will have access to the photos and change the photos settings (you can always change someone else’s settings).
  • Possibility to lock photos from changing the settings (any new changes will be saved to a new version).
  • Possibility to cache photos on your local machine for an offline editing. If in the mean while someone did edit the photo on the server when you connect to the server you will backup your edited photo as a new version and not over write.

There is for sure many other ideas by other users and apple staff, it is just the question on when Apple can have it implemented!