New iMac frees you from the tyranny (and convenience) of servicing your own hard drives

Letting Apple control most facets of your computing experience is just a fact of life for the Mac faithful, but the company may have gone too far for some with the most recent iMac refresh . Want to swap out that hard drive for a bigger one or replace a dead disk? You’ve got no option but to go straight to Apple thanks to a new proprietary cable and special firmware. The standard 4-pin SATA connector has been replaced with a 7-pin configuration that keeps you from hooking up just any old hard drive, and without that magical firmware the iMac won’t even boot. Remember, this is the company that thinks swapping batteries is best left to the professionals , uses a custom BIOS to keep you from running OS X on non-Apple hardware, and forced a company to put the brakes on an SSD upgrade for the MacBook Air. Really, we’re kinda surprised the iMac doesn’t shock you when you try to pry it open. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] New iMac frees you from the tyranny (and convenience) of servicing your own hard drives originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 May 2011 15:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

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