My next wish from Apple

Last year I asked Santa for an Apple-built Blackberry/Treo. The iPhone is soon to be and I’m withholding judgement for a while (so they can shake the bugs out and see if there’s a huge developer upswell).

The next thing I want is a super-portable MacBook. The Palm Foleo has been getting a lot of chatter around work, but I know that I need a full laptop when I’m on the road. With flash-based hard drive replacements and LED-backlit or OLED screens it seems we’re close to a major shift in the way laptops are constructed…its now possible to build a laptop with zero moving parts (if they can get the cooling right).

I’m looking for something very solid, quite light, smaller than the 13″ Macbook probably (but not too small), standard built-in features and ports, but likely no DVD drive (external maybe?). Excellent battery life is a must, and I’m not even concerned about raw processing speed if we need to keep things cool. Ideally I could imagine a dock…or better yet a wireless “docking” option.

So a fully-featured Mac sub-notebook, more rugged, better battery life, and ultimately portable. You could definitely demand a premium from business road-warriors, but if you make it rugged enough and cheap enough I could see parents buying these by the boatload for their backpack wearing high school and college students.

Steve, are you listening?