“It’s incredible the coverage generated by [our] blog article on the further iMac upgrade restrictions. I’d like to personally address some questions, context, and provide additional technical detail concerning this issue,” Larry O’Connor blogs for Other World Computing. “I want to be very clear that I think these are absolutely the best iMacs ever. These machines up the game considerably and provide performance that can even match up with the Mac Pro for a lot of applications. We’ve been excitedly covering these new iMacs starting with an unboxing and teardown blog post just hours after they were first introduced.”
O’Connor writes, “Most iMac buyers (and buyers of anything Apple in general) are more than satisfied with how things are right out of the box. The vast majority will never even think about after purchase options that Apple does support, such as installing additional memory. These are great systems right from the get-go… But pardon us or anyone who wants to make them even better. :)”
“Apple didn’t make any barrier with [respect to upgrading hard drives in] the 2010 (or 2009) models,” O’Connor writes, “the barrier to plug & play drive options in this case is a lack of industry drive standards on the extra drive pins. So, perhaps use of this additional line on the power connector (which is standard on all SATA drives) might be an industry standard in the future.”
O’Connor writes, “And if so – then it’s only Apple today, with a firmware set that enables this feature, which just isn’t standard on retail drives yet. If so – it might not be as big a deal. There is still a question I’d like to know the answer to – why isn’t Apple simply using the S.M.A.R.T. reporting feature of today’s drives for the drive temperature information? That doesn’t require/use any extra pin out/line out and I am not aware of any disadvantage from utilizing this option. Maybe someone out there has insight on Apple not using the thermal data via S.M.A.R.T.?”
“The bottom line is that work around options are in play now, and with further testing, we should be able to be confident in one solution [or] another,” O’Connor writes. “Whatever the solution – the best solution, in my opinion, would be not needing to find a solution in the first place. Certainly it’s a very small percentage that are even going to want, or need, to replace drives in their iMac… Apple made that hard enough as it is… But for those few, it didn’t need to be this hard.”
Much more detail in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
OWC: Apple’s design changes to new iMacs restrict main drive upgrades – May 12, 2011
SSD Shootout: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD vs. the rest – April 13, 2011