Hello. I didn't see any mention of the survey on this neck of the woods, and thought maybe some of you hadn't seen it. Check
here for the survey and see what all the hubbub is. I think somebody mentioned on the LE Mac thread about it that they feel it's a survey designed to see how much interest there would be in the Stick version.
To fill everyone in who hasn't done the survey (you should) they are proposing three 'imaginary' new LE products. The Mbox Tiny, the Mbox Stick and the Mbox Hidden. Tiny would be a smaller version of the Mbox Mini (if that's possible), Stick would be a USB like hardware dongle and Hidden would be a hardware free version of Pro Tools LE. I agree that Digidesign is considering or has done something like the Stick and they are designing this survey to find out how much or what kind of interest there is in something like this (a no brainer in my opinion).
If you think about it, the Tiny version is kind of like a Mini which they already have and the Hidden version would go against everything they have done since day one, which is tie their software to hardware. When they tried Pro Tools Free and limited it to 8 tracks, it was promptly hacked and it's the reason why they never offered it again. The Hidden version would be hacked quickly again, so I don't seriously think they will ever do this.
So the Stick version seems to be the most logical choice of what they would/could/will do. Which by the way, as we all know it is something that has been asked of Digidesign for a very long time. I and others have always suggested something similar to the
Indigo line from Echo Audio. A PCMCIA card that would give a stereo I/O or just output if they so desired.
It seems to me this imaginary proposed Stick version is something like the Indigo and they already have it on the drawing board, if not already in the works.