Needham & Company analyst Charles Wolf, predicts that Apple will sell nearly 13 million Macs this year. With those figures in mind, you have to wonder if that number would increase still more if Apple released a Mac with some really bang-up features rather than incremental improvements.

As Wolf points out, Apple sells Macs for nearly twice the price of Windows boxes, yet the sales keep growing faster than the rest of the industry. Of course, we're not figuring in return-on-investment, but that's a topic for another day.

So what's in store for the Mac? Well, obviously there's USB 3.0. It's just a matter of time until we see that. I'll be surprised if the iMac doesn't get an HDMI port a la the latest Mac mini. I still think Apple is making a mistake if it doesn't offer Blu-ray playback on some Macs, at least as a build-to-order option. And, to me, adding a built-in tuner to the living room-friendly iMac seems logical.

Also, as Arik Hesseldahl at Bloomberg Businessweek points out, according to patent filings, future Macs may boast such features as embedded projectors that turn any nearby wall into a display for PowerPoint presentations or the latest movie downloaded from iTunes.

I'll continue these thoughts tomorrow. What would you like to see in a Mac? Write me at dsellers@macsimumnews.com

-- Dennis Sellers