Liberty, Equality, and Upgradeable CPUs

[Swad]

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!

 

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.

 

All very good points, and thanks for letting us know your experiences with the old Macs. Since I *ahem* wasn't around, I can only go with what I've read and seen with the older Macs... but it's input like this that make our forum a good one.

[jb_gmd]

It’s a fact of life when you have a company that deals in proprietary hardware they are going to do things their own way. Plenty of companies have their own way of doing things. Have you ever opened up an old HP or Compaq? Or dare I say it an old IBM? They all had their own little tricks to upgrading. The fact is that unless you build your own PC where you get to choose components etc. 9 out of 10 times you are going to run into issues with upgrading.

The fact that the new Imacs use notebook ram is probably because they use the new core duo chipset which is so far mostly made for notebooks.

[Haplo]

The new iMacs use SODIMMs? I knew the Rev.A-D original iMacs did, but not the new ones..

[bjr1028]

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.

 

The 1400CS was a product of Michael Spindler's Apple. He was a typical suit type and had a very different philosophy from Steve Jobs.

[R. Bear Helms]

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.

One of the reasons why I made the switch from a PC to the Mac Mini was the compatibility with PC peripherals (monitors and USB devices), and also the Halo effect (I did have an iPod).

 

However, these facts alone didn't win me over. I caught some articles on how to boost the clock speed of the Mini, and after reviewing it and practicing with my soldering iron, I successfully overclocked my base model Mac Mini from 1.25 to 1.50 Ghz. I would have chosen a higher speed, but this was a very simple operation (remove a very few components without adding any). Also, the firmware would have needed patching because several higher speeds were not recognized. I also determined from reading an entire thread on overclocking the Mini that 1.50 Ghz was the highest stable speed upgrade for the unit. Beyond this point, certain software tests weren't consistent.

 

I proceeded to upgrade to 1gb RAM, add a bigger hard drive to the Mini, a 2L DVD-RW drive, and even put in the Airport/Bluetooth "Mezzanine" ugrade myself.

 

Of course, had this been a PC with peripheral slots inside, I'd have had the option to beef up the built-in GPU. I admit the Mini is a weak system for the gaming-conscious consumer.

 

Apple definitely seemed to buckle under stress when 3rd parties sold non-Apple spec hardware and licensed the Mac OS for their systems. I am confident Apple is not capable of handling the testing and certification like you can get for PC peripherals supplied by Microsoft and their Windows Hardware Quality Labs.

 

I don't even know if Apple has any diagnostic test suites meant to certify graphics adapters for full compatibility with OS X, let alone any other kind of hardware. Without rigorous testing, new hardware added to an Intel Inside Mac is going to either have to be functionally identical and compatible with drivers Apple includes with OS X, or the manufacturer will provide us with their own driver which the consumer will have no idea (other than reviews) whether or not this product works well.

 

If we get to the point where we have even 1/10th the number of choices PC users do in terms of CPU chips, graphics adapters, hard drives, motherboards, sound cards, wireless networking adapters, and other peripherals, I'll be genuinely surprised at how far Apple has come from its closed architecture mindset.

[yoda75]

This just in from Intel:

 

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=2742

 

The four core processors have been announced and Intel says they will use the same socket as the current dual core. If you have an iMac Core Duo then you should be able to just upgrade the CPU like you would any other PC. ( I think I read on this site that some people in Japan had already established that the imac CPU's can be easily removed and replaced)

[Guest goodtime]

Umm, the Mac Plus, and Mac SE line had the Tube exposed when Upgrading anything inside the box.

 

The original iBook does not have a good way to upgrade the Hard drive.

 

I have a Compaq Presario X1000, it needed a new hard drive. You don't even have to open up the case to swap out a new Hard drive. Just flip it over and open up the HD compartment and pop out the Hard drive.

 

I cannot think of any PowerBooks or iBooks that let you get the Hard drive without tearing up your PowerBook.

 

Okay, now the original post talked about Processors and I agree that future Macs need to have Upgradable Processors. Just don't soder the Motherboard to the Processor and stick with PC Intel/AMD compatible processors. I am no expert here, but it looks to be a simple solution in the future line of Intel Macs.

 

Of course Apple wants us to believe that their Intel Processors are faster and beef up everything like Duo Core on every box and maybe even two Duo Core's on the high end towers. So you count on that the Processors will not be upgradable.

 

gt