For the most part, we at AtAT aren't huge fans of Jesse Berst's AnchorDesk over at ZDNet; it's usually very Wintel-crowd-centric, and the hot air factor can be high. But we do tune in every once in a while to see what's up, just for balance's sake, and so we were intrigued to see his prognostications about all the cool new features that'll be making their way into PCs next year-- amazing, jaw-dropping features that he claims will make all PC owners drool all over themselves and race to the store, credit cards in hand. The funny thing is, his list of features for "next year's computer" sounds pretty familiar for some reason.

Let's break it down, here... According to Jesse, one big feature most PCs will have in a year is instant-on, so users won't have to wait around to boot. Our iMac wakes from sleep in eight seconds-- and most of that is waiting for the screen to warm up. Since we never shut it down, to us, that's "instant-on." Jesse also predicts the PC of the future will have a "closed case: no more messing with cards. All peripherals will plug into a USB port." Hmmm, where have we seen that before? And the iMac, of course, also has his "no more beige blocks" feature in spades. In fact, the iMac only lacks one of his four "next year's PC" traits: a flat-screen LCD display instead of a CRT.

So how 'bout that? According to Jesse Berst, for the most part, the computer PC users will want next year is the computer Apple released last year. Apparently Apple wasn't kidding when they threw around all that marketing hoopla about "next year's computer right now," except that maybe it should have been "three-quarters of the computer from two years in the future right now." Isn't it nice to be ahead of the curve? Don't expect Apple to get any credit from Jesse, though; unsurprisingly, he makes only a passing reference to the iMac itself, as he describes Intel's forthcoming Aztec-pyramid-looking thing. Some things never change.