The Mac Mini is a very nice piece of engineering. It’s a diminutive computer that takes up very little space, looks nice, and is very quiet. The only problem? It is limited by its size. It uses laptop hard drives which means you pay a premium for a small hard drive. Additionally, Apple stuck to its odd clip system to keep the case together. Four tiny screws on the bottom of the machine would have been nice for user upgrades.

While I think the form-factor is great, perhaps another Mac should exist. It already existed – and as you can tell by the title of this article – the PowerMac Cube should return. I guess with the new naming convention it would be the Mac Pro Cube or iMac Cube or Mac Cube. The cube was a user-serviceable machine. Maybe a larger form factor – maybe the size of two Mac Minis stacked on top of each other would be the right size. The motherboard could reside in the lower part of the new Cube. The hard drive could be mounted below the slot loading DVD burner. Use your imagination for the rest of the engineering. With a larger size comes full sized desktop hard drives that reach 750GB these days.

This poises the new Mac as a true media center. While I’m coming up with ideas, maybe with the purchase of your new Mac you get special software that allows you to LEGALLY rip your DVDs for your convenience. Apple must pay a royalty for their DVD player application. They could probably wrangle a deal with the movie studios and come up with an authorized DVD-Ripping application. Now that I think about it, a Hollywood-sanctioned DVD ripping application would allow the MPAA to track who is pirating and who is not (with P2P) by using a signature. But, I digress.

The Mac Cube could be a media center with a TV Tuner. Alternatively, the cube shape may look odd with video components. So perhaps a throwback to the pizza-box style desktop computers would benefit Apple. I had read this idea on someone else’s blog (I’d give them credit if I remembered where). That blog discussed the idea of the upcoming Mac Pro in the standard desktop form-factor in a move to differentiate the Apple product in a world of towers.

Since the Cube may not be the right shape, the component style format may work. If Apple felt wishy-washy they could go with a similar idea as the XBox 360 and have a machine that could lay on its side or as a tower and look snazzy.

In short, Apple needs to come out with a new mac that is a headless iMac. A mac in between the Mac Mini and the Power Mac or Mac Pro that can use standard desktop parts and allows users to easy access to upgrade their Mac. It could be in cube form or pizza-box with a TV Tuner with an official DVD-Ripping software. What should we call this mythical Mac? Let’s just call it Macintosh. Just “Mac.”