I'll be the first to admit that I probably focus on screen resolution a smidge more than the average computer user. So I'm incredibly disappointed that after finally adopting a 15.4" display on the 15" MacBook Pro, Apple is not offering different resolution options. What's most surprising about this move is that the current 15" MacBook Pro has a lower resolution than 15" PowerBook. Apple should really take better advantage of the 15.4" screen size and offer resolution options on the MacBook Pro.

I've often wondered how much it costs to send an e-mail. Of course it's not so easy to measure, sure given a specific company or institution you can add up annual equipment costs and salaries, and divide that by the number of e-mails sent in a year and get a rough estimate. But at what point does energy and rent factor in to the equation? If you live in a major city such as New York, square footage isn't cheap. I've often thought that some enterprising company could offer huge cost savings on hosted e-mail by locating e-mail servers in a remote area and powering the server farm with wind turbines. Now that Google is slowly venturing into hosted e-mail, there's finally a pretty good candidate to try something like this.

Recently many companies have started making compact, user friendly photo printers which make it easy to print photos from a digital camera, or memory card. However, printing photos is only one part of the transition to digital photograph. Many families still have shoeboxes full of old photos, which if they haven’t taken themselves may have been handed down by grandparents or relatives. So the next need among consumers will be digitizing existing photographs, preferably as quickly and easily as they are used to printing the pictures shot yesterday on a digital camera.

Just in case you two haven't met, Bose meet Roku, Roku meet Bose. Roku, in addition to making their own sweet network music players, also licenses their "Wifi Media Module" to OEMs. Bose should seriously consider using this technology in a "Bose WaveRadio Wifi". Particularly since the iPod Hi-fi from Apple has been a big let down.

The midwest is already an incredibly underserved region for IKEA with only five stores (two outside of Chicago, two in Texas, and one in Minnesota). St. Louis is the perfect location for a new IKEA, to see why keep reading.

Subscription Model for iTunes Video Store
More Sketch Comedy on iTunes
Browse by Album Art in iTunes
Transfer iTunes Purchased Music from iPod
iTunes Lossless Downloads
iTunes Needs Tags not Genres

As much as the iTunes “Multi-Pass” and “Season Pass” for videos are great new purchasing options, a true subscription model for videos may still be preferable. Sure purchasing 16 episodes of the Daily show for $10 instead of $32 is great, but who really wants to own every episode of a daily TV show (even if it is as awesome as the Daily Show)? iTunes should offer a monthly subscription plan for videos, similar to the other music stores’ subscription model for music.

Apple is definitely on to something with selling Saturday Night Live sketches on iTunes. They should quickly expand to selling sketches of other beloved and short lived sketch comedy, such as The Ben Stiller Show, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, and, of course, The State. iTunes and the iPod could be the best thing to happen to sketch comedy since Lorne Michales.

Album artwork has been largely peripheral to the experience of using iTunes, and it's time for this to change. Simply being able to browse artists and albums by CD covers would begin to restore what has long been a big part of enjoying music and artists, and is still largely lacking in digital music.

This is a simple one, iTunes purchased music should be able to be transferred from an iPod. If I accidentally delete a song file, or my hard drive crashes I should be able to restore any iTunes purchased music back to my computer from my iPod, that just seems fair.

The current generation of iPods maxes at 60GB, and a 100GB iPod by year's end seems more than likely. With such high capacity hard drives, song file size is quickly becoming an afterthought to most consumers. After all, who's really counting after 10,000 songs. So I'm surprised that Apple still hasn't become the first mainstream digital music store to offer lossless downloads, especially given their recent product announcements and the growing popularity of Apple Lossless format.

As much as I enjoy using iTunes, I'm perpetually frustrated by how to organize my music with it. To be fair, I have similar problems when I arrange CDs on a shelf or in one of those 200 CD nylon cases. My preference for browsing through music is looking at set of albums with some thematic connection. Currently the best way to do that in iTunes is by browsing by "genre." However, with so much new music crossing genres or existing squarely between two or three genres, this rarely works well (the whole notion of a music "genre" is a bit of an anachronism if you ask me). For instance you can have a genre for soundtracks and jazz and Latin, but that doesn't help at all when you come to the "Buena Vista Social Club", a soundtrack for a film about Cuban jazz. What would make much more sense is if multiple tags (or labels) could be applied to each song instead of just a single "genre."

So in an attempt to get a whole bunch of ideas out at once about iTunes, I'm announcing this to be "iTunes Week" here at theyshouldothat. Check back all this week for new ideas all about iTunes.

It seems that Google has expanded the Search History feature to include Bookmarks. I wish I knew exactly when this happened, but typical Google they rolled this out totally silently. Currently the way you add items to your Bookmarks is by "starring" items in your Search History. Then after you star a URL you can "label" it just like in GMail. Bookmarks can also be added from Google's Personalized Homepage, but if you do it this way you don't have the option of labeling it. However, you can't add a new bookmark directly from Google search results, which really seems like the most obvious way to add bookmarks, or just importing them from your web browser or from...

Like most people I was a bit disappointed by the iPop Hi-Fi. I still can't understand why Apple bothered to make a dockable speaker system, which is objectively just like all the other dockable speaker systems. It just doesn't seem worth their time. I'm also incredibly suprised and confused that they did not build "AirTunes" into the iPod Hi-Fi. Being able to stream music from iTunes to the iPod Hi-Fi is not only an obvious feature, but it would have clearly distinguished the iPod Hi-Fi from all the other high end dockable speaker systems.