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It's all pretty simple really.

The number of people who want more hard disk space and aren't willing to use an external drive is small.

So small in fact that it isn't worth Apple's time to design a computer specifically catered to them.

True, but the number of people who want an all-in-one desktop is also very small, and probably intersects with the people who want to replace stuff more than the general population of computer users does.

Counterpoint - what are the chances Apple hasn't run the numbers on that, and made the (business wise) correct decision?

You're right, we should never question a business's decisions because they have more data than us and cannot possibly be wrong

Given that the iMac is the best selling consumer desktop computer ever, I think it’s safe to assume Apple has put some thought into the matter.

It's likely only the "best selling desktop computer ever" because of the abundance of choice for non-mac users. Not sure how that's relevant to the parent's point though...

Exactly because the iMac is Apple’s main desktop offering for consumers, they need to know who the buyers are. I have no doubt they know exactly what their target market is and they’ve described it over and over:

– People who want an easy to use computer

– People who want a relatively hassle-free experience (good built-in apps, little chance of malware, good support from the manufacturer)

– People who value build quality and aesthetics and who are willing to pay for that

No it isn't.

Also given that Apple is very profitable.

The number of people who:

1) Want a Mac

2) Want a desktop, not a laptop (surprisingly many)

3) Can't afford a Mac Pro and a Mac Mini is both scary (no screen? :O) and too small

is fairly large, methinks.

Also, an all-in-one desktop (a box you can plug into the wall that requires no other wires to act as a full machine - cf. laptops) is, from the experience I've had (anecdotal myself too, amongst friends and extended interaction) pretty commonly desirable. :/

> So small in fact that it isn't worth Apple's time to design a computer specifically catered to them.

Apple never appreciated it when other companies treated them in the same manner.

The difference is that Apple has the money and influence to get what they want, so they're not the ones upset when a particular partner or supplier doesn't play along. It's the supplier's loss.

Companies don't have feelings.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. PowerPC? IBM wouldn't sell apple what they wanted, so apple bought from intel. If you don't like what apple is selling, you have the same choice: buy from some somebody else. Feel free to tell the world how much happier you are, too, if that's your thing.

> If you don't like what apple is selling, you have the same choice: buy from some somebody else.

That's a horrible sentiment, and horrible advice. Not liking a feature, or a missing feature, doesn't mean a product isn't good or worthwhile. No product is perfect, and there is nothing wrong with wanting more.

If Apple took your sentiments to heart, we wouldn't have their current lineup of products, all improvements on older models that had problems or lacked features.

Basically the time it would take to add a hard drive to a moderately fancy looking single unit machine like the iMac is equal to the dollar amount of a USB 3 or possibly even thunderbolt external drive enclosure.

Who still upgrades their own machine?

I like to tinker with hardware a little, which is why every 3 years or so I put my own home server together even though I could probably buy a cheaper ready-made solution.

In the days of my old Apple Powerbook I've pretty much replaced everything from memory, harddisk to optical drive, even though the latter definitely wasn't made to be upgraded by end-uses.

But in the last 10 years I've never had to upgrade any hardware, not even the stuff I've put together myself. The days where upgrading was a natural part of the lifecycle of a computer are in the past.

Storage and memory has become cheaper so computers are well equipped from the start, and the need for rapid upgrades in order to be able to use the latest software is no longer an issue except in very small niches.

My 2011 iMac came with a 500gb hdd. I decided to upgrade it to a 256gb ssd. Coming from a Windows PC background, I figured it would be a 15 minute at most installation. I even ordered the $40 hdd replacement kit from OWC, and it took me a good 2-3 hours to carefully disassemble and reassemble. The worst part was sliding the motherboard back down below the bezel. Holy shit I was gonna throw the thing against the wall.

But yes, for the most part I agree with you but we still aren't quite there yet. I think it wouldn't be too much to ask to have the ssd located in an easy to access spot like the ram is.

> Who still upgrades their own machine?

Hardware enthusiasts? PC gamers? Really, what a silly question on a tech oriented website. That's like asking who works on their car over at Jalopnik.

Personal computers aren't interesting "tech" anymore, they are commodity consumer products which most of us discard after a few years.

Tinkering with your own PC is rapidly becoming a niche similar to model trains. (Or working on your own car, also completely unnecessary and doesn't yield any new insights or advances.)

It's not about tech and curiosity anymore, just another hobby. And as such, you'll never see discussions about it on HN, there are other forums for such hobbyists.

Maybe if you've been doing it for 10, 20, or 30 years, but even still... how disingenuous to claim that few should or do have the hobby of tinkering with hardware. Not to mention, it's the very epicenter of what provides a market for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and every breadboard and sensor therein.

You'd have just as many model train enthusiasts, if that were the largest form of personal transportation and everyone had one at home (Re: cars, car enthusiasts, etc).

I don't know what you think HN is for, but -- and maybe I'm completely wrong on this -- hacking computers is surely part of it. We also discuss every day computing as well, of course, but not exclusively. That would be silly and uninteresting.

I had an iMac hard drive die somewhat out of warranty. So upgraded hard drive it is.

FWIW, I didn't find the iMac all that hard to get into, certainly no harder than unibody MBP. There are a lot of screws, and you have to pull the display out, but that's the cost of a sleek all in one. I did appreciate that there were no sharp sheet metal edges to cut my fingers, like my cheaper towers.

I'm not sure I'd buy another one though -- I'm disappointed with the display. It's ghosting/burning in, the backlight is uneven, and it doesn't profile worth a damn. I suspect that the issue with the dead HD was heat, and that also affects the display.

I believe the newer ones (2012) are much harder to get into. While the older models used magnets to hold the screen in place, the newer ones use adhesive. You now need guitar picks and a heat gun to get into it. See ifixit for details:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2544...

I replace my MBP hard drive every year, it's super simple and each year I get to double my storage.

I do. When I bought my Macbook, 8GB of RAM were extremely expensive. So I waited, and when the RAM got cheaper, I upgraded.

At the moment SSD prices are still high enough that it makes sense to buy an iMac with small SSD now and upgrade to larger SSD in a few years; but unfortunately that's no longer easily possible.

I swapped my HD for an SSD. Took 10 minutes with right tools (suction cups, etc) from OWC. There's a hundred YouTube instructional vids to help you along the way.

The new screens are glued.

Maybe I've been reading too much iFixit propaganda, but isn't this just going to cause the production of more "e-waste"? Or are we counting on third-world child labor to eventually take broken iMacs apart and fix them up for sale in non-first-world markets?

Yes it is going to make more "e-waste", but it's clear that we as the whole society prefer slight improvements size/weight/style over issues such as e-waste or possibility for repairs.

In words we often say differently, but the our actual actions show this preference very clearly.

I never understood why they would make a bulky machine hard to upgarde.

I have a 1.1 mac pro tower. So easy to open/add memory and hard drives. Even my polycarb (white) macbook was easy to update the hard drive.

Harddrives will fail... It shouldn't be hard to replace them.

What percentage of users upgrade their machines?

They want you to buy a new one.

This will sound pedantic, but...

It isn't hard to replace them. You pull out your iPhone, use the Apple Store App to schedule an appointment, drop off your iMac at the store, go have lunch at Sbarro and then pick it up and go home.

If you are buying an iMac, you are buying a sealed solution.

If you are the kind of user who wants to replace HDD or upgrade components, the iMac is not the computer you should buy. Bad buyer!

A lot has been made of Steve Jobs comments about cars and trucks and the future of computers. I think that is very much how Apple views what they do.

The iMac is a family-friendly, automatic sedan or wagon for the kind of person who gets his oil changes done at the dealership because they have a nice waiting room there.

He said Apple would continue to sell trucks and cars, but he expects the cars to cannibalize the truck market.

There's no use in a truck with a bed cover that's locked into place and unremovable. There's equally no use in a truck that's not built body-on-frame, and the Mac, one of my favorite computing platforms, is moving away from it.

The truck analogy wasn’t about internal upgradability, it was about devices running a mobile OS versus devices with desktop OS (notebooks, desktops, etc.). In Jobs’ analogy, the upcoming Mac Pro is just as much a truck as the current one is. However, Steve Jobs didn’t say that Apple would continue selling trucks, just that companies would.

Here’s the full quote:

When you did your presentation on the iPad, you described it as a new category of device, says Walt [Mossberg]. But in order for it to succeed, people have to feel that it’s worth carrying around. Do you think the tablet will succeed the laptop, he asks.

“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

http://allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/

Your analogy is nothing like what Apple is doing. A more apt analogy would be selling trucks that don't have easily upgradeable engines where you wouldn't be able to access the engine components without a ton of work, which is exactly how they build most trucks nowadays. The sealed bedcover is more like a limitation in software since that's part of the functionality of the truck. Upgrading a Mac isn't part of the functionality, it's something you do to increase the speed at which you work on it.

And as for the body-on-frame comparison, I don't really know what you mean there. If you are talking about the actual, physical chassis of the MacPro not being on a conventional computer frame, then again, that is a bad analogy since a body-on-frame chassis on a truck directly affects the towing and load capability of a truck, which is not so with computers. You can have your components scattered across the floor and they would perform just as well as in a conventional chassis.

> "It isn't hard to replace them. You pull out your iPhone, use the Apple Store App to schedule an appointment, drop off your iMac at the store, go have lunch at Sbarro and then pick it up and go home."

This sounds pretty annoying. Around here that means lugging your giant 27" iMac down the stairs of your walkup, down the stairs of the subway, up the stairs of the subway, and over to the Apple Store. Then doing it all in reverse.

Or calling an Uber - either way, inconvenience, cost, and annoyance that seem hardly necessary.

What I really want is to be able to sit on my ass, wait for a hard drive to show up at my doorstep (via Amazon, or Apple themselves, I really don't care), and pull a lever/panel and slip the new one in. If you want to play up the "this needs to be fixed NOW" angle, it'd still be cheaper and more pleasant for Apple to send a bike messenger over with a new hard drive from the Apple Store and let me do it without disentangling the iMac from my workstation setup and hauling it.

For a company that espouses "it just works", one of these sounds way less annoying than the other.

Apple support does mail-order instead of store appointments. They'll send you the empty box too. just call UPS.

I'm in Bozeman, MT. Where do I stop by to drop it off again?

Not everyone lives in a major city.

The nearest Apple Store is in Boise, Idaho. It’s only a 500mi drive! But seriously, in your case, you’d call Apple and they’d send either a technician or a courier – or you could take it to an Apple Authorized Reseller, there are loads of them.

601 Nikles Drive, Suite 12

https://locate.apple.com/service/?pt=4&lat=45.6834599&lon=-1...

As nknighthb replied, there is an Apple affiliated service location in Bozeman. Be glad you don't live in Butte, though, or you'd be looking at a drive to Helena.

Not everyone lives in a country that Apple even has a presence in. Or, to exaggerate even more, not everyone can even afford enough food to stay alive. How does that affect the argument?

I agree. I was glad to find that it is easy to upgrade the RAM, it would be awesome if the hard drive was just as easy.

I ended up going the external thunderbolt SSD upgrade route, since I didn't really feel comfortable pulling apart my expensive new computer. It works great, but has obvious down sides.

What obvious downsides are you referring to? In the past it was performance, but that's not an issue with thunderbolt...

I have the same setup with an external Thunderbolt SSD (from LaCie). I'm aware of the following downsides:

* The only Thunderbolt port on my 2011 iMac is occupied.

* I can accidentally remove my system disk if I'm clumsy (and crash my system).

* I can't hide the disk and can see it if I stand beside the desk.

No biggies in other words. Very happy with the setup.

> The only Thunderbolt port on my 2011 iMac is occupied.

An unfortunate design flaw specifically on LaCie's part. As with FireWire before it, and SCSI before that, Thunderbolt is a daisy-chain interface. Single-port devices in such ecosystems are best considered defective.

And even then, if you have one device with only one Thunderbolt port, you can always place it at the end of the chain.

Yep, these are the ones I was referring to. Nothing major, and I do like my setup.

As someone with a 3 year old Mac Mini desktop because I was cheap -- External drives really clutter up a desk.

Of course, now even Mac Pro customers don't get the space to add more storage internally.

I really like how easy it is to upgrade the RAM. They should make updating harddrives just as easy.

Try upgrading the memory in the 21.5" version, you are going to need a soldering iron and a lot of time.

One thing that's pretty important to remember here is that it's incredibly easy to boot from any of the peripheral busses on modern computers, especially OS X.

If home or professional replacement of a HDD was necessary but unavailable, Thunderbolt could be a viable alternative (and USB 3.0 an inexpensive one). 10gbps would definitely cover your fastest SSD on SATA 6.0gbps and there wouldn't be a need for heat guns, etc. Not exactly SATA but damn close.