Dear Steve,

One of the things I really admire is your willingness to spurn a technology that you consider “a piece of [human excrement]” long before the rest of the market does, thereby hastening its demise and making life a little more pleasant (albeit more expensive) for your chosen people. Might I humbly suggest that the optical drive is such a technology. It makes strange noises, warps notebook bodies, uses power, and takes up space. I’m guessing it’s probably one of the most unreliable components in a modern laptop, too.

Please give us a new line of laptops with quad core CPU and decent GPU options and no optical drive. The resulting laptops could be smaller and lighter, or use the space saved for more batteries and/or a second 2.5″ hard drive. Or some combination of the above. Please make SD card slots standard across Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch product lines ASAP (as well as any new product lines…) and start offering Apple software on SD media.

It’s too late to wish for any changes to your tablet, but please do not ignore stylus users.

Please make the iPhone sync wirelessly. I hate having to attach it to my Mac with a cable, and the logical place to leave it docked and recharging is on my nightstand, where it can serve as a much smarter kind of alarm clock (one that knows not to sound on weekends, for instance).

Please provide a unified mailbox on the iPhone or allow third-party mail clients. I know that you have peons to handle your email for you and that all your mail goes into one mailbox, but a lot of us aren’t so lucky.

I’m going to assume that you’re not going to confuse the press by feeding the 10.7 hype machine, but just in case I hope that 10.7 will not be released until at least mid-2011 or that you’re going to release it as a free upgrade by surprise right away to unify some unknown product and Mac OS.

Most of all, I hope you’re feeling well and taking good care of yourself because, frankly, the world is a better place with you in it.

All the best,

Tonio

Post Script

I wouldn’t dare ask for any tablet you announce to be inexpensive ($500, say), because everyone knows Apple will not be able to deliver enough of such a product to meet demand for some time to come, and it would be plain silly not to make insane profits the way Apple always has in such situations. The alternative is watching asshats buy the new machines speculatively and auction them on eBay (which will happen anyway). Should Apple forego profits for the benefit of eBay speculators? I assume the price will settle down to a “comfortably expensive” level after manufacturing catches up with demand, as it did with the iPhone and Macbook Air (OK, the Macbook Air is still uncomfortably expensive).

I do hope that Tablet either can tether to an iPhone or has its own 3G/4G receiver (ideally we could just transfer our iPhone SIM cards over and use a Bluetooth earpiece) but I’m going to guess that any such option will turn out to be annoyingly expensive for the same reasons outlined in the previous paragraph.

I haven’t wished for some things I assume you’ve got covered, like iWork 2010, iLife 2010, an iMovie that has the usability advantages of the new iMovie and the features missed from iMovie HD, an update to Aperture, a true replacement for Shake (even if it’s a major update to Motion), and that the rumored Tablet, if it is announced, will emphasize creative uses, such as editing photos and movies, drawing and painting, bluetooth keyboard support, and so on.

And finally, here’s a “left-field” wish. Take a look at Blender and see if you can “do a Webkit” on it and turn the Mac OS into a serious player in the 3d market. Blender and Luxrender would be awesome showcases for OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch. And Blender is lightweight enough to run really well on a Tablet or even the iPhone.