Liberty, Equality, and Upgradeable CPUs

[Swad]

Let’s face it – the Mac is an awesome machine. Somewhere along the line, however, Apple decided that it was SO awesome that upgrades weren’t that important. For many years, especially in Apple’s early history, expandability of hardware was a touchy issue for Mac users. As Andy Hertzfeld (and isn’t it every geek’s dream to have “hertz” in their last name?) notes in a folklore.org entry, Steve Jobs and other Macintosh pioneers thought that hardware upgradablity was “a bug instead of a feature.”

 

It was for this reason, among others, that Macs never quite caught on with the gaming/overclocking community as did PCs. Granted, there were many who overclocked their Apple computers or modded them to fit their needs, but the large group (like myself) who enjoyed swapping out cards and upgrading components were left out in the (liquid cooling system equipped) cold.

 

All of that may be changing with the new Macs. Maybe. We’ve seen several things in the past few days which point to a change of heart in Cupertino. One article tells the ease with which users are able to upgrade their ram (as opposed to previous iMacs), while another at Accelerate Your Mac tells of intrepid Japanese users who successfully upgraded their Core Duo CPUs.

 

I can tell that at this point you are underwhelmed, as well you should be. PC users have been upgrading processors for eons… or at least the past 15-20 years. The significance here is that Apple has, in the case of the RAM, gone out of its way to ensure that users can quickly and easily upgrade components. This is a seismic paradigm shift from previous Apple eras and causes us to wonder if Apple has had a change of heart with the move to Intel processors.

 

Will Apple take this opportunity to attract the mod/gaming/overclocking/leet crowd who are more than content to spend their Friday nights swapping out graphics cards (hey, who you lookin’ at?)? Let’s hope so.

 

Liberty for Mac components is a winning move for all users, since it means wider adoption and higher production of third-party products. Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be building my (imaginary) custom iMac at the Apple website… and hunting down a few upgrades to go along with it.

 

[Digg this Article]

[Haplo]

This is old news, mostly. Apple has, in the past, made it difficult (and impractical) to try to update your CPU, however, RAM has always been upgradable. Even the old 1998 Rev.B iMacs let you do that, but it wasn't till more recent boxes that we were able to use RAM faster than the prescibed type. Most newer G4s (and possibly older G4s as well) and all G5s are able to use any RAM of the correct type and pin (as long as it's the same base data rate and pin, but you couldn't, for example, use DDR2 in a DDR1 G5). If you wanted to, you could install 8GB of 1GHz DDR2 RAM (as I've seen around, I think OCZ makes it) in a newer G5, and people were installing 16GB with 2GB sticks before apple ever supported it directly.

[Swad]

True, but what's significant here is that it seems Apple has made it easy to customize, whereas in the past they were indifferent or outright hostile to the idea.

 

Now, it's easier to get a rocking setup, and I think we'll see more of the same with the Intel Power Macs.

[Haplo]

Chances are you won't want to upgrade the intel PowerMacs, since they'll be using top of the line conroes. There won't be any intel chips better than that to replace. Although yes, they have made RAM upgrades more intelligent (since the idiotic move to weld the 512MB RAM stick into the G5 iMacs). If they've learned anything, they'll follow the consistent path with RAM upgrading as they have with powermacs in the past.

[phor2zero]

cpu's aren't top of the line for very long. I usually attempt to purchase my new pc's when new sockets are released (my next will be amd's m2 socket) so I can upgrade cpu's annually. It's the easiest way to cost effectively keep my pc at the leading end of the curve. I can usually keep a motherboard functioning for 3 years, before I really HAVE to start over.

 

Mashugly is absolutely correct that the reason mac's are less than 5% of market share is the lack of customization abilities. I think the poor games market for macs is simply a reflection of their poor market share.

 

I have to admit, that as interesting as apples move to x86 is, it's really quite pointless to me.... they chose intel over amd (mistake imho) and it's STILL a proprietary machine. Apple STILL seems to be a "consumer electronic" device for grandma, rather than a really fun hobbyist toy the way the pc is.

 

to each their own of course..... it's simply the reason why I (and I'm sure many others) don't use mac's, despite our interest in their nice bsd based os.

[drcreek]

I'd have to disagree i got an old emac a bit back and had endless fun changing the hard drive! (broke down)

 

So much more fun than fiddling with my PC! it was liek a massive 3D puzzle!

[Haplo]

lol, I never said it was easy to change things in the old iMacs, I just said it was possible. But, as far as processor upgrades go, this just means that you can upgrade your iMac or powermac all you want, which indeed is something never before seen on the mac.

[rmasci]

Apple has to decide if it wants to be a hardware or software vendor. Granted some people think that the Apple hardware is cool -- to me it's not upgradeable, underpowered, expensive. Not a good fit for what I am looking for in a PC -- for now I'll stick with Linux. I am not just talking about the new Intel based Macs, but the hardware Apple has churned out in the past four years. Mac OS X is one of the best OS period, however the hardware it runs on is luke warm at best. If Apple would shift it's thinking, and become a software vendor and open up OS X to run on somthing other than the hardware Apple offers, I think they would really sell more software... Sure there will be the pirates that will steal it -- Microsoft has that as well -- but overall they would come out ahead. Apple doesn't have to produce drivers for EVERYTHING out there, just give us the supported specs, and we'll build it. Dell has even said that if given the chance it would build a PC to run OS X.

 

Windows is far to entrenched, people want to run it not because it's an oustanding OS, but because its what they know, it's what they're used to, and even though it's not the best, they know that they can get the job done with it. That's important when your job depends on your computer working. What Apple needs to do to break into the market share owned by Wintel systems, is to make an OS people can try. Make a version of OS X that can shrink a Windows Partion to make room for an OS X partition, install along side, and dual boot with Windows. Take advantage of the work that's been done in Linux to read an NTFS partition so that users can read and write to their files on NTFS. Linux has all these things, they're open source, and something Apple should take advantage of. Maybe even create a freely downloadable 'Knoppix' like CD to let people try OS X without installing it.

 

Basically make it possible for those who don't want to give up Windows (yet) to try OS X. Much easier for people to make the switch when they have a safety net. In order to do this they have to decide if they're going to be a Hardware or Software company. In my opinion, they can be a successful Software company that also produces cool hardware. If they decide to do this the impression will always be that it works good on a generic PC but to really run OS X well, buy an Apple. I don't see Apple suffering hardware sales if they decided to focus primarily on Software instead of Hardware.

[dkelley]

just in general here... I wouldn't call apple hardware luke warm at best in the intel macs... how can the very latest cpus available using efi instead of bios and offering super high quality displays in the package be "luke warm at best" hardware? how can the first consumer machines available HAVING DUAL CORE CPUS be luke warm at best? how can an architecture support 667 speed ram be luke warm? I guess you're using 800 speed ram and your chipset can handle it? Hell, how many quad g4 systems out there have any competition at ALL in 3d rendering speed? seriously - give me test results. and that's OLD apple architecture... (ok ok, you could compare quads to servers since the architecture is more comparible, but the price isn't so I'd say the quad wins hands down against a dell poweredge). I know AMD invents some of the neatest chipsets around, but speedwise intel is always catching up within MONTHS so I don't think that's a terribly useful argument these days. Why on earth must you have the fastest linux-based computer available a few months before anyone using intel chipsets? For the games? (that's a joke - I know it's nice to have, but really it's not that important when the differences between your system and a fast core-duo imac are really small now).

 

If you found g4s to be luke warm, fair enough. if you found g5s to be luke warm when they came out, I might have to argue that point a bit (upon release g5s were incredibly competitive in performance per clock speed). But performance of the intel core duo chipset based macs is pretty well the fastest architecture you can buy in a home pc (as opposed to a dedicated workstation for 3d or whatever) right now without getting into servers etc.

 

Is the 20" core duo iMac the fastest computer in the world? noooooooo. is it faster than most of the pcs you can buy in consumer electronics stores right now? Quite possibly! (I'm speaking of hardware performance here, not rosetta and other temporary stuff that has nothing to do with the computer's performance down the road).

 

If you COULD install linux on a new iMac (using EFI), you'd be pretty blown away with it's performance. If your main complaint is that you can't upgrade the cpu and ram down the road then you're wrong now. HOWEVER, since you probably can't upgrade the mobo in an iMac (or in ANY laptop for that matter including the macbook pro), you'll have to buy a new machine in 3 or 4 years if you want to be bleeding edge all the time. That's perfectly acceptible - lots of people do that with pcs as well. It's not a limiting factor of macs now that they're releasing hardware which is as good as one can get for the money.... period.

 

ok ok, I'm done, just had to make sure that people reading this thread didn't get the feeling that the latest apple hardware is anything other than leading edge. It truly is great, there is very little competing with it currently (there are pcs using the same chipset but I'd be surprised to see more than one or two pcs out there (or custom boxes) that actually are FASTER than the latest core duo macs, based on hardware (bus, cpu, ram, chipset, gpu, etc).

 

cheers

[Haplo]

That's a possibility, however something may have transpired under the table between apple and microsoft to prevent this from happening (at least for several years yet). I wouldn't say that apple's hardware is lukewarm, however, as the quad 2.5GHz G5 will still beat out any x86 box, it's just that the iMacs are a mix of lower end and higher end componants that make them more expensive than a low end box would be. They got rid of the eMac (which imo was a mistake) so really they just don't have a true low-end box.

 

While I agree that some compromise should be made to allow OSX to be installed on other boxes and Windows to be installed on intel-macs, I'm too preoccupied right now to think out a reasonable and good solution to a superior mac hardware configuration. One thing is certain, though. If Apple decides to sell their OS for non-mac systems, it's going to be more expensive. They really focus on hardware (macs, ipods) for profit and their other software (aperature, final cut pro) rather than their OS to make money. In order for them to really make any money with an open-ended OS, they'd need to sell it at a higher price (like WinXP, $200 ish.) rather than the $100ish it sells for now. If they did that, however, they could lose support with OS upgrades that mac users buy, unless of course they give a $100 discount to people who have proof of having bought apple hardware.

[Metrogirl]

I think that unless the user demographic changes drastically, the majority of Mac purchasers will be leaving their machines exactly as they bought them. I can't see those designers, musicians and artists giving a toss about what's under the hood as long as they can switch on, create, print. It's sort of always been like that in the Mac world; their priorities are rather different from ours! OK, we're geeks of sorts or we wouldn't be here. I do believe we are in the minority...

[bjr1028]

True, but what's significant here is that it seems Apple has made it easy to customize, whereas in the past they were indifferent or outright hostile to the idea.

 

Now, it's easier to get a rocking setup, and I think we'll see more of the same with the Intel Power Macs.

 

Not so much, Apple makes it really difficult to access to the CPU socket and the drives for that matter. The new iMac also uses expensive notebook memory. As for the socket, I don't think intel really gave them a choice.

[Haplo]

That's a miserable lie. The majority of people who buy PowerMacs are either rich or graphics designers, and they need the obscene amount of RAM that you can stick in them in order to quickly edit large graphics files, and movie editing and encoding takes even more. I'd like to see a PC with 16GB of RAM. That just doesn't happen.

[Swad]

Not so much, Apple makes it really difficult to access to the CPU socket and the drives for that matter. The new iMac also uses expensive notebook memory. As for the socket, I don't think intel really gave them a choice.

 

True. It's still not easy for the other components, but I think the fact that it can be upgraded with stock parts means that it's newsworthy.

 

That's a miserable lie. The majority of people who buy PowerMacs are either rich or graphics designers, and they need the obscene amount of RAM that you can stick in them in order to quickly edit large graphics files, and movie editing and encoding takes even more. I'd like to see a PC with 16GB of RAM. That just doesn't happen.

 

What's a miserable lie? It must be so miserable I didn't even realize it was a lie!

[myzar]

That's a possibility, however something may have transpired under the table between apple and microsoft to prevent this from happening (at least for several years yet). I wouldn't say that apple's hardware is lukewarm, however, as the quad 2.5GHz G5 will still beat out any x86 box, it's just that the iMacs are a mix of lower end and higher end componants that make them more expensive than a low end box would be. They got rid of the eMac (which imo was a mistake) so really they just don't have a true low-end box.

 

uh a quad opteron box will just trounce it, not just beat it but just annhilate it

[George Elliott]

Not all MAC's were hard to updgrade. I've got an old powerbook 1400CS and a far as upgrading it goes its really easy, at least for the CPU and memory, just slide the speaker grill to one side and lift out then undo 4 screws holding down the heatsink and remove that. It takes about 4-5 mins to add more memory and about another minute to swap the processor for something better (although not much better by today's standards). The harddrive is a little more involved (more screws to remove) but for a laptop its not bad.

[Metrogirl]

That's a miserable lie. The majority of people who buy PowerMacs are either rich or graphics designers, and they need the obscene amount of RAM that you can stick in them in order to quickly edit large graphics files, and movie editing and encoding takes even more. I'd like to see a PC with 16GB of RAM. That just doesn't happen.

 

I wasn't sure what was supposed to be a miserable lie either... Maybe my observation that traditional Mac users might leave their machines as they bought them? I think my comment was accurate in that Apple offer the pros a bunch of configs, the pro user chooses, pays and then uses till the machine falls apart. I know this, I've worked in a repro house where the designers ordered machines by specifying what they wanted to do. The Apple reseller ran a configurator, the machine was built, delivered and then just used. I never saw one upgraded after the event. I'm not even sure they appreciated they *could* be upgraded. Believe me, those graphics designers wouldn't recognise a DIMM if it was stuck up their noses. Unless they were paid to photo-composite one onto a page

[UncleP]

I definately believe Apple should offer OS X to non-apple x86 consumers and sell it for a premium at arround the same price as Windows XP Pro. For the actual Apple hardware machines, sell upgrade packages that can only run on Apple hardware. Of course this would be cracked but at least offer some legality for those who trully want to run OS X. To get right down to the point which Apple knows, it is OS X that people want. If they release a open-hardware version I believe they fear loss of hardware sales. I don't believe that would be so at all because an Apple user will most of the time always be an Apple user. If they build a more stable machine that proves that it is superior to clone machines out there, I will buy Apple.Honestly those who believe that the PC and x86 architecture is superior are sorely mistaken, the only things that keeps the PC on top is price/availability. VCR vs. Betamax kind of logic. I speculate that Apple will have a chip made by intel for the pro workstations that is not x86 core and the x86 boxes will be for the low end market. We shall see.

 

As far as the whole thing about upgrading Mac's. I have plenty of old Mac's that were cpu/memory/video upgradable MAC IICX for example. I don't think homework has been done on this article, although I can agree that upgrading a mac usually cost almost as much as buying a newer model.

 

If Apple wishes to survive and make substantial profits another five years, they need to do two things.

 

1.) Decide on delivering affordable/quality products comparable to PC market including upgradability

 

2.) Decide on making a split to two separate entities software/hardware and sell OS X to open-hardware (No possible Anti-trust lawsuit)

 

Peace

[stephane36]

Those recent years, Apple made upgrading the RAM pretty easy in most of its products (from first G3 Powermacs to last Powerbooks and even in several compact from factors (G3 with slot-loading optical drives have a easily accessed door to access the RAM).

 

And well before PCs, Powermacs were a breeze to access their internals thanks to their side door. In the PM G5 you can change RAM or hard drives in 2 minutes and changing the optical drive/fans/airport card is really easy.

 

The problem is less the physical access than Apple policy to lock the Mac components efficiency for a determined revision to make product updates easier to market : firmware limiting the Superdrives speed, 3rd party optical drives unrecognized by iLife, restricted graphic card OEM offerings, proprietary ports (Airport, ADC) etc. Now, that the upgrade path will be easy to market thanks to steady evolution of INTEL processors speed there is no need to artificially limit the products life span by locking their components...

[Doug the Impaler]

The article talking about the lack of ease of upgrading memory in previous iMacs is full of it. From the original Bondi all the way through the iMac G5, upgrading memory is cake. The same is true for hard drives. You want something not meant to be opened up, take a look at the eMac. That thing's f'ing scary...no other Mac has you expose a CRT like that, though I've been inside mine twice...once to install an Airport antenna (since mine was an education model originally, it didn't have one) and again to put in a 250 GB hard drive. That's frightening.

 

iBooks and PowerBooks have always been designed to allow memory upgrades as well. up through G3 PowerBooks, hard drive swaps were easy. Only with white iBooks and aluminum PowerBooks is hard drive swapping a chore.

 

And PowerMacs have always been easy to get into. Same go for most of their 68k bretheren.

[dkelley]

I have a concern - this is sort of off topic but I don't know where to post it (mods, please move it to the appropriate place or delete it, just give someone a chance to respond first...)

 

I was just in the local future shop in vancouver canada, checking out the core duo imacs (they have the whole family there, g4 laptop, g5 imac 20", 17" core duo and 20" core duos (20" core duos are boxed though but in stock). I was playing with the 17" core duo and it kept locking up, then after a minute it would unfreeze. I've NEVER seen a mac do that, and I run a hackintosh and a real mac at home and don't have that sort of problem (both of mine have intel cpus). anyone have any idea what's wrong with the demo model at the store? It really scares me that pc users will try this thing and find it behaving like {censored} and start some anti-osx flame war all over again, and also it just disturbs me since I own one of the same macs at home and am worried that it might happen to me. I checked activity monitor, no problems (almost no activity), spotlight indexing shouldn't do that from my experience...

 

it happened particularly when minimizing and restoring windows - once out of ever few times the animation would suddenly freeze, mid transition, sitting there. then it would finally continue as if nothing had happened, but often a minute went by. meanwhile the mouse pointer moved ok and the finder kept running ok, but the app involved would be totally dead until the unfreeze.

 

any thoughts? any experience with this? I run osx 10.4.3 on a hack at home and 10.4.4 on a 20" at home 24/7 with no power downs and have no problems. Major usage machines too, where the store machine had no extra stuff on it except a couple of downloads and a few pics from the cam from customers playing with photobooth (yes, I added my pic as well... ;-)

[Templeton Peck]

Historically, most Macs have been easy to upgrade. My 16 year old Color Classic was far easier to upgrade than any PC at the time. push down on two tabs and slide out the entire motherboard, that's it! And it's completely free of wires and cables because it plugs into a slot inside the computer. Pure genious. My 10 year old Power Mac 7300 was also extremely easy to upgrade, again, even easier than any PC at the time. Push two tabs and remove the case. The drives are on a swing arm. Swing it out, and you have complete access to the motherboard. You didn't even have to unplug the computer. Wanna upgrade the CPU? Pull it out, and pop in another one (it's on a card). Ram? No problem. PCI Cards? Same deal. Speaking of the CPU, Apple actually pressed the upgradable CPU as a selling point. Right on the box, it says that the CPU is upgradable to future PowerPC processors.

 

I'll admit that Apple did have some hard-to-access designs like the 8500, but even that would've seemed "normal" to PC users at the time. As mentioned, another poor design was the original (rev A-D) iMac - upgrading anything in that machine required almost completely disassembling it, but everything was upgradable, even the CPU, Hard Drive, and RAM. Users could even upgrade the graphics on the earlier models through the modified PCI slot (different pinout). However, the very next iMac design addressed the accessibility issue by allowing users to upgrade the RAM via a small access door on the bottom (no need to open the computer).

[UncleP]

The article talking about the lack of ease of upgrading memory in previous iMacs is full of it. From the original Bondi all the way through the iMac G5, upgrading memory is cake. The same is true for hard drives. You want something not meant to be opened up, take a look at the eMac. That thing's f'ing scary...no other Mac has you expose a CRT like that, though I've been inside mine twice...once to install an Airport antenna (since mine was an education model originally, it didn't have one) and again to put in a 250 GB hard drive. That's frightening.

 

iBooks and PowerBooks have always been designed to allow memory upgrades as well. up through G3 PowerBooks, hard drive swaps were easy. Only with white iBooks and aluminum PowerBooks is hard drive swapping a chore.

 

And PowerMacs have always been easy to get into. Same go for most of their 68k bretheren.

Well I would have to point out the Macintosh 128K to the Classic II were pretty scary to get into with exposed crt and had a very clear warning on the label of shock risk. But for the hardcore that like to tweak etc they are cool still to run. These little guys were powerhouses for their time and a PC did not even come close. Mac and Amiga were the owners of graphics in the late 80's and early to mid 90's.

 

Peace

[regularg0nz0]

I'd say we're looking at a turning point in upgradability. True, lots of older macs were easy to upgrade. Easy when the upgrade busses were proprietary because there'd be only one or two companies making the upgrades (as a side note, how many of those companies went belly-up fir supporting us?), and slightly easier when Apple started adopting standards like PCI and AGP.

 

The problem at the time, and I'd say the biggest headache, was that the middleware (BIOS) wasn't written with these busses in mind. They were all stapled on as an afterthought, and left most of the compatability up to the OS than to the hardware.

 

USB was a pretty good step in the right direction, and actually ended up being more compatible on Macs than on Windows, because the standards for lots of types of devices were pre-defined. Generic keyboard/joypad/mouse/do-jobber? You'd have about about a 75% chance that MacOS and OS-X could handle at least it's most basic of functions. (and... sadly about a 95% chance that Windows couldn't use it at all without a driver.)

 

So, now, with EFI acting as at least a partial (and greatly improved, totally upgradable) HCL, I think you are going to see alot more upgradability in Macs. Adopting and adhering to standards is the key, and I think that even in the Windows market, that lesson has been learned. I mean, there are only really two consumer grade video-driver sets for Windows these days. Nvidia and ATI. Compare that to 10 years ago, when each of 5 current chipsets from 10 differnt companies had different drivers, and you'd often have to find the specific release that your OEM used.

 

Now, I'm not saying that everything is a perfect world, and I know that as soon as some hardware makers find that they get a 3-month competitive advantage out of "stretching" the EFI standards, some will take the quick money, but for the most part, I think the intel chips and EFI are going to pretty much level the playing-field for all-but the chintziest off-the-boat-from Taiwan upgrades.

 

And isn't that a win-win?

[Caslon]

A little off topic. Does anyone have an answer as to why Apple will not let the Apple store sell the iMac 20'' core duo with 256 video? They have them in the back but were instructed not to sell them. This is in San Diego.

 

The nix on the sales came from Apple corporate. Just wandering if there is an issue with the Mac or something simple. Don't want to buy until I know for sure.