A shout-out to Mr Cringley about his latest idea.

Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

Last year I tried something with booting OSX off of my iPod for a few days of sporadic use (30 minutes to 1 hour a day for 2 weeks). I blogged it here. Let me tell you. The experience sucks. Jobs would never want a prospective Apple customers first Apple experience to be a sub-par one. Jobs knows that the iPod is the perfect gateway mac because it represents the best of minimalist Apple hardware and software design. But booting off of an iPod is an absolutely horrible experience. It's slow, it's high-latency. Let me be more specific. Booting is horridly slow. Logging in is slow. Browsing webpages is acceptable. Doing something like trying to load a 200k email inbox on there is pitiful. Any disk-io intensive task is horrible. This is not the first apple-computer experience that Steve wants potential customers having.