Apple’s design changes their new iMacs prevent firms from doing third-party upgrades to the main hard drive, according to Other World Computing (OWC).
OWC Blog reports, “For the main 3.5-inch SATA hard drive bay in the new 2011 machines, Apple has altered the SATA power connector itself from a standard 4-pin power configuration to a 7-pin configuration. Hard drive temperature control is regulated by a combination of this cable and Apple proprietary firmware on the hard drive itself. From our testing, we’ve found that removing this drive from the system, or even from that bay itself, causes the machine’s hard drive fans to spin at maximum speed and replacing the drive with any non-Apple original drive will result in the iMac failing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT).”
“Now this isn’t to say that our Turnkey Upgrade Program isn’t going to include the new model iMacs. The external eSATA port, or adding hard drives or SSDs in addition to the main hard drive are still perfectly viable and working options in our testing so far. But it isn’t looking good at the moment to have the option to upgrade or even replace the main 3.5″ hard drive as shipped from Apple,” OWC Blog writes. “It really begins to raise questions: Is this planned obsolescence at work, or is the freedom promised in 1984 being revoked?”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]