Personally, I would think that if I bought a new iMac now, by the time I was ready to upgrade the hard drive there would be “2011-iMac-compatible” generic drives that avoid the errors, connector, and fan control issues and allow me to replace the drive myself.  Or, it would be time to go the generic SSD route.  Or, the thunderbolt route.  I’m really not seeing the big deal here with future options that will most likely be available to me.

Still, not a nice thing for Apple to do, and it will hurt them in the long run with the do-it-yourselfers…

RonMacGuy

RonMacGuy - 19 May 2011 03:52 PM

Personally, I would think that if I bought a new iMac now, by the time I was ready to upgrade the hard drive there would be “2011-iMac-compatible” generic drives that avoid the errors, connector, and fan control issues and allow me to replace the drive myself. 

That should be the case but I’ve been burned more than once by assuming that ‘the market’ would provide what I was waiting for. Personally if I was looking at a new iMac, I’d be very dubious until I knew there was a workaround in the field, tested and that Bryan or John had reviewed it and given it a thumbs up.

Bosco (Brad Hutchings) - 19 May 2011 02:42 PM

Just because there is no conspiracy and no bad intent doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for concern. Regardless of why, this will be a problem for a lot of users down the road if they want to replace the drives.

My thoughts too. I’m strongly considering upgrading to a high-end i7 iMac this year, but can’t afford the Apple SSD option. OWC’s speed-demon options are currently unusable on the new models.

I do think Thunderbolt might be a suitable workaround though. The question is a) whether a Thunderbolt drive can serve as the boot drive, and b) what the relative speed differences are between external Thunderbolt, ESATA-Thunderbolt adapter, and internal 6G SATA.

Of course, it’ll be impossible to tell until we actually see Thunderbolt products in action.

Seriously, if it’s possible to boot off a LaCie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk with a dual-SSD RAID, and there’s little difference between Thunderbolt and the internal SATA, then I won’t care too much.