[krzymac]

This is my concern for Apple and the direction it is heading with its desktop computers. There was a time when you could get an iMac with a top of line processor for about $1,699 and you could then upgrade the ram for less than have the price Apple is charging thru Crucial.com. Well those days are gone and I will miss all my iMac's that I have been using since the late 90's. I was going to upgrade to a new iMac (I do this about every 4 years) but to my dismay the prices have skyrocketed to over $2,300 (iMac 21.5 inch) including tax for hard drive, RAM, and CPU upgrades. Apple has made the iMac a CLOSED BOX, one that only they can upgrade which is really a bad thing for us consumers. So now that I have been price out of the iMac market by Apple I bought a $899-BTO Mac Mini, (upgraded the processor), with a Samsung-T22B350ND Display. Now I can upgrade it (RAM to 16GB-$85 and the hard drive to a 480GB SSD-$500) for myself and not break the bank or piss-off my wife. Total price would be approximately $1,650 which is a lot less that $2,300!!!

I guess my days with iMac's are gone and hopefully Apple will see that it needs to build a consumer friendly desktop...........some of us Mac Heads still like to tinker with hardware.

I will miss my iMac.....

[gooser]

krzymac, on 02 January 2013 - 07:01 PM, said:

This is my concern for Apple and the direction it is heading with its desktop computers. There was a time when you could get an iMac with a top of line processor for about $1,699 and you could then upgrade the ram for less than have the price Apple is charging thru Crucial.com. Well those days are gone and I will miss all my iMac's that I have been using since the late 90's. I was going to upgrade to a new iMac (I do this about every 4 years) but to my dismay the prices have skyrocketed to over $2,300 (iMac 21.5 inch) including tax for hard drive, RAM, and CPU upgrades. Apple has made the iMac a CLOSED BOX, one that only they can upgrade which is really a bad thing for us consumers. So now that I have been price out of the iMac market by Apple I bought a $899-BTO Mac Mini, (upgraded the processor), with a Samsung-T22B350ND Display. Now I can upgrade it (RAM to 16GB-$85 and the hard drive to a 480GB SSD-$500) for myself and not break the bank or piss-off my wife. Total price would be approximately $1,650 which is a lot less that $2,300!!!

I guess my days with iMac's are gone and hopefully Apple will see that it needs to build a consumer friendly desktop...........some of us Mac Heads still like to tinker with hardware.

I will miss my iMac.....

you're not the only one. in my case i will move to used imacs. you know the ones that have superdrives built in, firewire connectors and 10.6 so i can run my older software.

This post has been edited by gooser: 05 January 2013 - 07:53 PM

[bastion]

krzymac, on 02 January 2013 - 07:01 PM, said:

This is my concern for Apple and the direction it is heading with its desktop computers. There was a time when you could get an iMac with a top of line processor for about $1,699 and you could then upgrade the ram for less than have the price Apple is charging thru Crucial.com. Well those days are gone and I will miss all my iMac's that I have been using since the late 90's. I was going to upgrade to a new iMac (I do this about every 4 years) but to my dismay the prices have skyrocketed to over $2,300 (iMac 21.5 inch) including tax for hard drive, RAM, and CPU upgrades. Apple has made the iMac a CLOSED BOX, one that only they can upgrade which is really a bad thing for us consumers. So now that I have been price out of the iMac market by Apple I bought a $899-BTO Mac Mini, (upgraded the processor), with a Samsung-T22B350ND Display. Now I can upgrade it (RAM to 16GB-$85 and the hard drive to a 480GB SSD-$500) for myself and not break the bank or piss-off my wife. Total price would be approximately $1,650 which is a lot less that $2,300!!!

I guess my days with iMac's are gone and hopefully Apple will see that it needs to build a consumer friendly desktop...........some of us Mac Heads still like to tinker with hardware.

I will miss my iMac.....

I think you've lost sight of what the market is for Apple in general and for specific models. It's kind of summed up in your penultimate sentence: A consumer-friendly machine is not a tinkerer's machine. A consumer-friendly machine in 2012 is as close as you can achieve to an appliance without compromising the functionality of a general purpose computer. The market for the 21" iMac is dominated by buyers who will not once perform any internal upgrade on their machine during its service life. For *those* consumers, and for Apple and its sharedholders, making that model a closed box *is* the friendly thing.

[flashmanandy]

At least it should be more reliable than my wifes old e-mac. I had take it apart in the most hideous way possible, replace 10 of the most annoying transistors known to man and re-solder the board.

I love being out of warantee

Pay what you can. not what you want.