OSX To Feature Portable User Accounts?

eldavojohn writes "A new patent filed by Apple is causing speculation that OSX is soon to receive a new feature. From the article: '[the patent states] that the user account may be stored alongside general data storage or "other functionality". All of which seems to suggest that at some time soon we may be able to load our user accounts onto an iPod, hard drive or USB keydrive and take them wherever we go.'"

Ultra portable

[BWJones]

So, ideally this would be part of a uber road warrior ultraportable solution rather than an addition to a USB drive or iPod. Since the demise of the 12in Powerbook G4, many of us have had to shlep around larger form factors (15in Powerbooks/Macbook Pros) that are a bit harder to deal with on planes, trains and such.

I would hope for a little tablet much like the Newton, but running a full version of OS X and given the costs of flash drives, this may in fact be possible at 32 to 64GBs in size which would make for a usable battery life as well. Travel is difficult enough and for really long flights (international ones), battery life simply does not cut it, even with the new MacBooks. And even if you did have a power outlet in your seat, they are incompatible with the current magnetic and oh so cool MacBook power systems.

Having something like this that one could back up photographs to, give talks from, check email and calendar and address books, read ebooks and mark up pdf documents, be able to link via Bluetooth to your cellular phone and such would all be possible in a small form factor that one would not necessarily want/need the ability to run big apps like Photoshop on.

And when the trip is over, you plug into your desktop at home and automagically have everything sync up.

Oh, please... oh, please... oh, please.... Come on Steve! You and I have talked about this going back..... what, years now! The technology is there, the market is there, all the pieces are in place.

or a DRM limitation

[doodlelogic]

Maybe for movies the studios are demanding only the paying user can view on their iPod - so movie downloads will be tied to a user account on each device.

Feature removed from 10.3

[bubba451]

This was actually once promised and even advertised as part of 10.3 "Panther" and then was inexplicably removed. Here was the marketing blurb:

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 you're "home," no matter where you happen to be. And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you've made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory.

Mac Rumors [macrumors.com] has some of the history.

They are waiting for the right time....

[d0n quix0te]

... to turn on a new business model. I am pretty sure that Apple is waiting for two things before they release this feature. First, next generation EFI based PCs and second for 8GB flash memory to come down in pricing.

This way, you could safely run OS X off the portable device (mini-hard drives in iPods are not meant to take repeated read/writes...). Apple will then make a business of selling a 'home to go' device that you can take with you and plug into any next gen PC. Voila! Instant access to all your Apps and files.

This way they can make up any lost sales of OS X/Mac by selling us a portable device.

-S

Re:Ultra portable

[mrchaotica]

I would hope for a little tablet much like the Newton, but running a full version of OS X and given the costs of flash drives, this may in fact be possible at 32 to 64GBs in size which would make for a usable battery life as well.

I would hope for a 10-12" (~2lb) convertible tablet, much like a cross between the Thinkpad X-series and the old Sharp Actius MM-10 (it had a dock!).

But most importantly, I want well-supported syncing between systems. I've got two Macs now (an iBook and an iMac), and it's absurd that iSync is useless for them. In fact, syncing anything with iSync fails to work properly: I can't use either my iPod or my Palm PDA conveniently because although it syncs events, the categories, locations, and notes are lost!

Re:Impressive

[hypnagogue]

You may want to consider that the problem is more subtle than that.

Just because you have your home directory on an iPod connected to a foreign Mac doesn't mean that you can authenticate and log in. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could have, in your home directory, credentials signed by a trustee that you could use to log in to any system, with your access limited to writing to public areas or your own home directory. Furthermore, encrypt that image on the iPod so that it can't be accessed unless you authenticate successfully. I'm not sure what the scope of the invention is, since I refuse to read patents or patent applications, but it might be a great solution to a tough problem. It also has implications for DRM licensing schemes -- licenses that apply to the user, not the computer.

I know sarcasm is like breathing after a few years on slashdot, but this might actually be an interesting invention. We'll have to wait and see.

Re:Prior art?

[lmpeters]

I think the idea here is that the home directory is mirrored on the internal hard disk AND an external device of some kind. Then again, I think InterMezzo [inter-mezzo.org] has prior art on that. So this may seem like a novel idea for your average PC user, but it's not novel enough to warrant a patent.

Of course, it's not like the USPTO hasn't ever issued a patent on something that should never have been patentable...

In the 90's

[LennyDotCom]

I used to have an external SCSI HD that I booted from on my mac. Back then I could plug it in to any Mac and boot to my Desktop with all my software I thought that was so awsome. Someone had a boot problen or what ever I just plugged in my HD booted then fixed it.

I life was so easy then

Re:Impressive

[GCsoftware]

Interestingly enough, this is almost identical to the system I implemented for using USB flash drives as authentication tokens as my MSc thesis. I might put up the PDF of the project up if people are interested.

Re:Feature removed from 10.3

[NatasRevol]

At the time, according to some, the real problem was the hard drive of the iPod it isn't/wasn't designed to be used as a real HD, running for hours continuously. Hence the cache and spin up/spin down. Yeah, it saves on battery life, but it also saves the HD life.

But I still put OS X, drive utils & my home dir there. Very nice if you have accounts on your work & home mac. And my iPod is still going 4 yrs later, so I guess it wasn't too hard, or I got lucky.

Re:So Apple patents automounting home directories

[joe_bruin]

It would be fairly simple to create a PAM module and daemon that, when detecting a USB device with certain information on it (say a passwd file), could mount that disk in /home/thatuser (overriding file permissions so that all items are owned by that user and nodev, nosuid), and allow that user to log in. It would not take any more modifications than that to make any Linux or BSD system be capable of doing roaming profiles on a removable drive. Quick, someone implement it!

Re:In the 90's

[TheRaven64]

Why just the home directory? Why not put an entire OS install in a VM and carry that around with you? I saw a demo last year by a guy from IBM doing that. He kept his OS and local files on a Xen image on a USB flash drive. It would resume state when he plugged it into a machine and if there was an Internet connection it could even establish a VPN connection back home and mount a remote share. When he suspended the VM, he didn't just take his documents with him, he took his entire machine state.

Re:In the 90's

[eclectic4]

"I used to have an external SCSI HD that I booted from on my mac. Back then I could plug it in to any Mac and boot to my Desktop with all my software I thought that was so awsome. Someone had a boot problen or what ever I just plugged in my HD booted then fixed it. I life was so easy then"
 
I don't understand this statement, or why it was modded up. Go out and buy a 100 GB Firelite (or any external FW drive, FireLites can just fit in your pocket and are bus powered meaning no external power whatsoever, just a FW cord), clone your entire Mac to it, and boot it on any other Mac by holding down the option key on boot and selecting it. The Mac will find any mounted volumes with a blessed OS installed on it and you can boot from whichever one you choose. Been able to to this for years. I have a Firelite with three partitions on it, one is simply a clone of my home Mac that I can boot to and run and diagnostics, directory fixer-uppers, etc.., on the now mounted internal drive. I can copy files, whatever I want, and the other two partitions on my Firelite are images of Tiger and Panther install DVD's that I can use for installs (or archive and installs). Can fix almost all software issues on a Mac with a thing that I can easily fit in my front pocket. No CD's, DVD's, laptops, etc...

Re:The Patent

[ellem]

Ugh I hate these nonsense emails.

So much crap in this one I don't even know how much the V14gr4 is...

Re:In the 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

Handy indeed. A year-and-change ago, one of my friends had purchased a G3 iceBook. Of course, its video eventually went bad (Apple has an REP out for that specific issue, even), and without video, she couldn't get her data off of it. I booted her laptop into target disk mode, then booted my PowerBook's hardware using her drive over FireWire. Turned on her remote desktop sharing and FireWire networking, rebooted both machines, then used ARD (plus other tools I had on my machine) to verify the problem for Apple and to get her data off. Everything over one cable. The whole process took maybe an hour, including burning CDs of all of her personal data.

I know, I could have just left my PowerBook running her drive and done most of the stuff that way, but she only wanted specific things and I wanted to show off. ;-) Plus, I was able to do other things on my machine using my software while I waited for her iBook to finish various tasks.

Re:Hmm...doesnt windows have this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many user migration tools and locally generated scripts in the corporate world support "user migration" that is not associated with roaming profiles. Our IT department moves and replaces machines all of the time for users and with one click to backup the users settings from the original machine, and one click to restore the settings to the new machine, the user has all of their printers, backgrounds, sounds, font sizes and themes, fax settings, MS Office toolbars and custom dictionaries, Outlook settings including signatures, layouts, toolbars, desktop and start menus including icons and shortcuts, all of the files and settings in "My Documents", favorites, cookies and much more. The user sees NO difference between the old machine and the new one and this process takes less then a few minutes (time depends on how much they have in My Documents which for some people is several GB). We even used this concept with some further automation throughout our entire organization when going from 2000 to XP. Three IT people could convert about 100 computers a night (One to backup and restore user data, one to wipe out 2000 and push out and install XP, and one to walk around and verify).
During daily operations.. If a user has a "computer" issue, we can have them a freshly imaged machine with all of their apps (through the imaging process and software pushing tools and pre built packages) and settings (through our migration tools and scripts) at their desk in less then 15 minutes and they can get back to work immediately. The troubleshooting on the broken machine if needed or required, is done by the IT department back in the cube farm and the user is not bothered again.

There are many tools and ways to automate Windows deployment, software installs and user configurations, whether you know about them or use them is up to your comfort and knowledge level.

On a side note, I am no Windows fanboy, I just get paid to know it and administer it. I only have one Windows machine at home, the other four are various distros of Linux including my kids computers.