Hard-over-ware

The new switching barrier that cropped up while Apple was working on the software barrier was the hardware. First was the fact that Motorola was really sucking mud on G4 improvements, and this was causing the G4 to really get old. The G5 seemed to spur Motorola's G4 development, and there were finally some improvements that made it a respectable laptop processor. The other problem was all the cool form factors that Apple had been coming out with. The flat panel iMac was perhaps the most brilliant thing in computing hardware I think I've ever seen. Except that it intrinsically has the same problem any all-in-one has: the fixed display choice. Initially, the 15" screen was nice, but certainly too small for me. They quickly came out with the 17" widescreen model, and that was way better. However, the iMac suffers an additional problem: in being a very small all-in-one, it has very little expansion capability. To make matters worse, one of the few expansion options, one memory slot, was going to get filled from the get-go since it only starts out with 256MB of RAM. That just left the Airport card slot and whatever you want to dangle off the Firewire and USB ports. At least the Cube had an AGP slot to upgrade the video card. Indeed, I had fallen in love with the iMac, and wanted it as my Mac, but I was hesitant about the no expansion thing. I wanted to have certain capabilities in the box if I was going to lay down that kind of money on a machine with limited expansion options. I then got hard-over on wanting a G5 iMac.

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