I've got a Mac Mini (M1, 8GB) which is fine for most of my day-to-day work, but the annoying thing is the lack of connectivity and expansion.
When you work with external video decks, HD or 4K cameras, MIDI synthesizers, storage drives, networking hubs and audio interfaces, not to mention common things like ports to charge your wireless mouse, or hook up printers and webcams, you run out of ports quickly, and you end up spending money on expensive Thunderbolt hub / docks.
And it leads me to ask: Why aren't all those ports and expansion slots on my computer?
By the late 1980s through the mid-90s, home computers tried to compete by adding more expansion ports for multimedia creativity - the Atari ST had MIDI ports, the Mac added line-level audio inputs and outputs, The Amiga pioneered video inputs, and of course the standardization of the PC in general meant lots of options for internal drives.
With USB and then Thunderbolt, and with the move to the compact cylinder Mac Pro in 2013, all expansion became external, but this design decision backfired so hard that Apple had to do an apology tour, leading to the return of the tower form factor in 2019.
Now, I don't really want to have a tower. I like a desktop machine for easy access to ports and to keep cable runs short. I don't particularly need to install any PCIe expansion cards. What I really need is something flat and unobtrusive but that has all the connectivity and expansion I need built-in.
So this is my Bad Photoshop™ Concept® of the "Mac Studio XL," basically the Mac Studio but 4x as wide, the long boi of desktop machines, with an array of ports and I/O that obviate the need to have lots of external boxes and cards.
Dual 100 gigabit Ethernet
4x USB 3 (type A) for legacy USB stuff
8x Thunderbolt / USB-C ports (can handle up to 8K on a single connection, in place of an HDMI port)
Dual Ultra High Speed HDMI ports that can handle up to 8K per port
HDMI video capture port (8K?)
Optical audio I/O that supports the ADAT standard for 8 channels of digital audio
Line-level stereo audio I/O
MIDI in, out, thru ports - tied tightly to the core operating system for precise timing
Slots to insert M.2 SSDs, a bit like the old slide-in drive trays on old tower Macs
This would need a fair bit of extra processing power and PCIe lanes to make this all possible, so in this fantasy a future M-series processor has the hardware onboard to make it work, as well as a system-on-a-chip with a lot more RAM.
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