The sad state of Mac upgradeability

[FaRuvius]

This is bound for a flame war, but I must express my sorrow over the current state of Mac upgrades.

I just upgraded my PC at home.

I have power supplies, memory, hard drives, CD drives, video cards and keyboards GALORE. so all i really needed was a new mobo and processor.

I found this: 266mhz bus speed, 6 PCI slots, 4xagp, 4 usb, and 4 IDE controllers. I added an AMD 1800+ processor (1.46ghz me thinks). and it cost $316. $300 . A fast new mobo and a more than decent mid-range processor. FOR $300.

The only thing that I can swap from one mac to another are the minor components. If I want a fast new mobo and processor for my Mac, I have to spend $3000 on the entire widget. Ten times the amount!!

This brings a tear to my eye. Don't get me wrong, I love the mac. The new dualies give me the desire to rack up tremendous debt. Then I look at the g4 450 tower I have next to me. Its got plenty of ram, a huge HD, and a fabulous video card. All it needs is a new mobo and processor to be top of the line.

I know the whole reasons behind it, and I'm not asking for an open hardware platform. Why can't apple sell us new mobo's and processors? I would probably upgrade 2 or 3 times as often as I do now.

If not new motherboards, why not at least processor daughter cards? Com'on apple, let us upgrade SOME major component.

FaRuvius

[simX]

Look on the bright side: you'll get much more for your Mac when you sell it because of the sorry state of the upgrade market AND because Macs have a longer lifetime. So while it's not going to be as cheap as upgrading a PC, you can always auction off your current Mac on eBay, and use that to finance the purchase of a new Mac.

I agree with you, though... it is pretty sorry. In my case, however, since I'm basically in the market for an iMac, I don't really care about upgradability -- I'm just going to buy a new comp every 3 or 4 years anyway.

[Jadey]

Yeah, Macs could be built to be more upgradeable, but in my experience PCs aren't very upgradeable at all. Sure if one piece goes bad, you're supposed to be able to swap it out for a newer and better component. However unless you're upgrading your PC very often, your existing hardware becomes too obsolete to be compatible with any new parts.

Example: 3 PCs that people I know own need bigger hard drives (hard drive failed on one case). However, we couldn't buy hard drives that were small enough to be compatible with the installed motherboards. In one case, we did track down an 8 gig drive (limit for one of the motherboards), but the drive didn't work. There were no other drives that small to replace it.

So.... to get bigger hard drives, we had to get new motherboards. Now some of the old sound cards, ram and video cards weren't compatible with the new motherboard.

In all cases but 1, the people bought a new computer. The other person managed to find a used hard drive - but again, they may run into failure more quickly with it than a new one.

[serpicolugnut]

The Mac has never been about upgradeability. Apple at their best allowed you to easily upgrade the processor. While it's still possible to do it, Apple really frowns upon it and doesn't officially support it. But neither will a company like HP, Compaq, Dell, etc. All of them are in the hardware business and only make money by selling a new machine.

Sure, you could buy a new motherboard for any of those machines, but why would you want to do that?

In my G4/800DP, I can upgrade my RAM, HD, Video card, optical drive(s), and any PCI cards. The only thing I can't ugprade is the motherboard. So what?

By the time there's a new mac motherboard worth upgradeing for, the rest of the components (RAM, HD, Video, Optical Drives) will have been upgraded as well. At that point, it makes more sense to just buy a new machine. You can sell your current machine on eBay, and thanks to the wonderful retention of value by Macs, you can usually recoup 50-65% of your Macs original purchase price if you sell it within 2 years.

Part of the main reason Macs hold their value so well is BECAUSE of their lack of upgradeability....

[mrfluffy]

The mac is 'the computer for the rest of us' people who dont want to upgrade their computers (other than RAM or OS). I only know techies who've upgraded their PCs, not consumers because they dont want to (unless its broken) or dont need to, regardless of what Dell, M$ or PC world try to tell us a 200Mhz wintel with 32MB of RAM does what most families need - the net, word processing, homework stuff (as would a lower speced mac).

Slightly off topic I have to design and I think build a PC for my ICT course (over 200 windows computers at my disposal, great[sarcasm]) so can anyone recommend a non-windows OS that I'd be able to use, I was thinking of freeBSD, linux or some other unix type system.

[FaRuvius]

Originally posted by serpicolugnut
In my G4/800DP, I can upgrade my RAM, HD, Video card, optical drive(s), and any PCI cards. The only thing I can't ugprade is the motherboard. So what?

This is exactly my point. Compare my g4 466(digital audio) with your g4/800DP or the new 1ghz dualies. The RAM, HD, Video, optical, and any PCI cards HAVE NOT CHANGED. All I need is the processor daughter card, and I have your machine. But to get your machine, I have to buy another ENTIRE widget.

FaRuvius

[schnupie]

Originally posted by serpicolugnut
But neither will a company like HP, Compaq, Dell, etc. All of them are in the hardware business and only make money by selling a new machine.

Sure, you could buy a new motherboard for any of those machines, but why would you want to do that?

As a matter of fact you can not realy buy a motherboard for a name brand PC like the above either. Their case/motherboard layouts are as propriatary as Apples and no over the counter motherboard will fit them. You can probably find a motherboard for these boxes on ebay, but then again...the same applies to Apple parts.
A whitebox PC is a different story, but who wants to compare a whitebox PC with an Apple, HP, Compaq or Dell machine? The motherboards in all brandname computers are highly integrated and customized for perfomance reasons and a "made in Taiwan" Soyo motherboard simply is not up the same quality standard as what Apple, Compaq etc. sell you.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Originally posted by mrfluffy
Slightly off topic I have to design and I think build a PC for my ICT course (over 200 windows computers at my disposal, great[sarcasm]) so can anyone recommend a non-windows OS that I'd be able to use, I was thinking of freeBSD, linux or some other unix type system.

Howabout Darwin? You can get the ISO images from Apple's Developer site... see what happens when you run the guts of OS X on an Intel machine in front of your instructor!