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It's disheartening how, while that generation of Macs from late 2000s to early 2010s is holding up (and perform quite well) as long as they don't suffer significant physical damage, models from the past few years are so limited in upgradability/mod-ability, they'll have the same paperweight fate of mobile devices.

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Absolutely. I have a 5k iMac and I love everything about it except I made the mistake of getting the 512GB SSD and I already need more space. But I'm fucking stuck with it. So now every few weeks I have to go hunting for things to clean off of my disk.

If you have an iMac, not the iMac Pro, you can increase storage quite straightforwardly by adding a SATA SSD (or replacing the PCI-e blade SSD, but that's much more costly). [I think you may need to buy a proprietary cable too if it's not shipping with an HDD/"Fusion Drive", but that wouldn't be too hard.]

The machine is much easier to work on than it seems at first. You just need some good double-sided tape to put it back together.

How about the much simpler and safer solution of just adding some external storage?

I thought this website was titled Hacker News. :-)

I sure like my iMac with 8TB extra storage not to waste additional space on my desk and be connected via a fast and reliable SATA bus as opposed to USB-3 or super expensive Thunderbolt.

Just duct-tape it to the back of the case /s

Simple, just void the warranty on your brand new $5000 computer. Something you can't easily get parts for, and Apple is the only person who can repair it. It's not worth it.

Empirically, I have brought modded Macs to Apple Stores and they have fixed unrelated issues without saying a word. IANAL but there are consumer protection rights keeping your warranty rights depending on where you live if you don't actually cause a damage while you're adding a HDD (FFS, it does not even need soldering or anything; more like playing with Legos: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Di...).

BTW, iMac 5Ks have been out for a few years now. Many of them are probably out of limited warranty anyway. $5k is quite a bit of stretch on the price approximation for an average iMac out there too.

In my experience, going to an Apple Store as opposed to an authorized repair shop is the way to go (I have had bad experience with the latter). Charming the "genius" on the other side of the bar is not a bad idea either. :)

This is the tape I used a few times to attach the display back to the case. It's slightly thicker than the original tape but works well nevertheless. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HLY50P8/ref=oh_aui_deta...

> by adding a SATA SSD (or replacingthe PCI-e blade SSD, but that's much more costly)

I think that's all true. Also note that the external SATA SSD is going to be much slower (500 GB/s) than the internal (1700 GB/s or even higher).

This is one place the drawback of the Apple branded, unibody iMac strategy reveals itself. In a more roomy, user-friendly, conventional box case with standard parts, the consumer has a much more reasonably priced way to increase storage capacity without sacrificing speed or paying two times as much per GB.

Fast M.2 SSDs (e.g. Samsung PRO series) are almost as expensive as Apple's proprietary SSD that you can find on the market. It's a fair point that one cannot opt for cheaper M.2 SSDs and has to either settle for the very high end or cheap SATA.

I use an external Samsung SSD as my boot disk. USB3 isn't as fast as native, but its pretty darn fast. This iMac came with a spinning disk drive which is worse than useless so it was a major upgrade.

based only upon personal experience but consistent with your "paperweight hypothesis," the build quality seems lower than it was three or four years back.

and i think maybe Apple has squeezed component suppliers too hard. some components (e.g. power supplies) seem to be junkier than in the past.

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