Last week Trent Reznor released a collection of instrumental tracks independently, in a surprise move even his fans couldn’t anticipate. The collection, called Ghosts I-IV, was done in a ten week period last fall, produced mostly by himself and a few of his friends. The album’s first 9 tracks can be downloaded on Bittorrent officially for free, while users can also choose to download just the music and a 40 page PDF for $5. If listeners really want a physical product, they can pay $10 for two CDs, $75 for a deluxe edition, or $300 for a limited edition with vinyl, CDs, and even a data DVD of all the multitracks.

Astoundingly, the download site was hit with so many requests that it had to be shutdown for several hours so it could handle all the traffic. Thankfully for some, the album was still available on Amazon, where this author was happily able to download 36 high quality tracks for the very low price of $5. Most people would see this as just an attempt to copy Radiohead and gain free publicity; however, by looking deeper into the way the idea was executed, it is clear that Trent Reznor takes it one step, if not three steps, into the future of the music industry.

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Often times, people request features for the iPhone. What about features found on the iPhone but not the Mac?

With the release of the iPhone firmware version 2.0, Apple has launched a set of enterprise features aimed at companies with mobile cell phones- support for Exchange servers, Cisco IPSec VPN and more. While this may be great for the iPhone, and help gain support from large companies and professionals alike- what about the Mac? If Apple supports these features for the iPhone, why can’t they give native support in OS X?

The initiative from Apple to open up the iPhone to developers and natively support a wide host of enterprise features is welcomed by all, as this is something Apple usually stays away from. In the past, Apple has typically made anyone wishing to use such enterprise features found in the iPhone firmware 2.0 relay on 3rd party developers such as Microsoft or Cisco. Why can’t Mail have Exchange support?! If Apple is going to continue to add features to the iPhone, will the Mac be left in the dark?

There is a long standing rumor that Leopard was delayed because of the June iPhone release date. This wouldn’t be the first time that Apple has neglected the Mac over the iPhone- but with good reason. The iPhone marks a new chapter of Apple, one that is showing a more mature Apple- and could become extremely successful over the coarse of the next few months. All I ask from Apple is- can we have all the iPhone features on the Mac?