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Return of 'Home on iPod'?

Monday December 1, 2003 5:13 pm PST by Arnold Kim
Appleinsider claims that the 'Home on iPod' will return in an upcoming incarnation of Mac OS X 10.3.



Most of the information about the Home on iPod feature comes from Apple itself, when it left the description up on one of the Panther information pages.



    Home away from home


    Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther's Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory files, folders, apps on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go. When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and youre home, no matter where you happen to be. And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes youve made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory.



The feature is not available under Panther as described, and this description was quickly removed from Apple's site after Panther's release. A cached copy of Apple's page is still available here.

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millhouse
107 months ago
this sounds like an awsome feature as i currently use my iPod to cart our chapel presentations onto my friends panther equipped powerbook. i wonder if it would let you choose which folders from your home dir would go with you, and if fonts and all that good stuff could go, since i only have a 10gb iPod i cant fit my home folder on that considering 3.62 gigs are taken by music alone.
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Mudbug
107 months ago
I agree with millhouse - this is definitely a cool thing. Wasn't there rumored to be another panther build to come out soon (i.e. 10.3.2) - if so, do any of the developers have it yet, and could they, um, hint at a yea or nay without breaking an NDA.
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evolu
107 months ago
i use 2 macs @my office and at 1@home - been hoping this feature would come around soon... would work well on my 30 Gig ;)
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obeygiant
107 months ago
I think this is great feature. If think about what computers will be like in the future, they will infiltrate into every facet of our lives. So in order to interact with the environment we'll have to "log in" everywhere we go (house,car,office, store). This iPod feature along with the multi-user feature in osx seems to be moving away from the personal computer paradigm toward an 'everywhere computer'.
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millhouse
107 months ago
good point, i think this mobility thing will be great, and will make the mac more friendly towards life, the fact that i can be at home working, sync some folders on my iPod, then go to a friends house, plug in and im right where i left off is great, no longer do i have to copy this file and that and make sure i copy it back to my home computer.
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jero
107 months ago
man that sounds like a sweet feature, for sure.
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stoid
107 months ago
yes!!

I can now "own" a PowerMac G5!! Just jack into a dual 2 at the Apple Store or CompUSA and BANG!! WoooHOOO!
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MrMacMan
107 months ago
Hm... that would be a little hard for me... becaue I have like 50 GB of data in like One Folder...

But I guess to store Documents or pictures that would be great.

:D

Cool.
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MattG
107 months ago

Originally posted by stoid
yes!!

I can now "own" a PowerMac G5!! Just jack into a dual 2 at the Apple Store or CompUSA and BANG!! WoooHOOO!

:) If only it were that easy.
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yoman
107 months ago
This can work with any firewire drive. True it wouldn't be as fun as moving your ipod around but a hard drive is easier to carry around then a desktop.

Also in 3-4 revisions of the ipod its capacity could be in the 80-120GB range so this would be quite feasable for future ipods.
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