While
the iMac is the hottest product
Apple has ever built, there is always room for improvement. Beyond
the faster, bigger, cheaper ideas, Apple should seriously consider
rectifying the iMac's shortfall in the expansion department.
While the iMac comes equipped with two USB and two FireWire ports,
every user knows that those get used up mighty quickly. It is
possible to add ports to the iMac with products like the IceView
USB hub to get the most out of your ports. However, this usually
leads to the snarl of cables that Apple lampooned in its early iMac
commercials.
One way for Apple to reduce the clutter that seems to have been
overlooked so far is making the front drive bay hot-swappable. Why
not take this approach to allow users more drive choices? The
technology already exists on the PowerBook
line, so it would probably be an easy enough transformation.
A
hot-swappable expansion bay on the iMac would open up many new
possibilities for iMac owners. If you wanted to burn CDs, you would
no longer have to sacrifice precious desk space for an external
device. In fact, TechWorks
already markets an internal CD burner called the PowerCDR
for Revision A to D iMacs. This concept could apply to DVDs, CD-ROMS,
burners, Zip or Jaz drives, or even floppy drives.
The advantages to this approach are pretty clear: users could free
up precious desk space as well as expanding the capabilities of their
iMac. A drawerful of expansion modules seems like a better choice
than several external units that require cables. If Apple could make
the expansion modules fit both the iMac and the PowerBook, users with
a primary machine could still share devices. This could be especially
handy if a hard drive was available. Instead of fiddling with cables
or floppies, an information transfer could be as easy as moving a
hard drive from one machine to the other and copying the files.
To carry this even further, a hot-swappable expansion module on an
iMac could possibly be used as a backup power source, if you could
somehow place a battery in the bay. If you were using your machine
during a storm, a battery would provide a small window for you to
wrap up what you have to do if the power fails. Running the iMac's
monitor off of battery would severely limit this session, but it
could still be a useful feature.
What can Apple gain from this feature? More bundling options is
one thing they could capitalize on. Right now, they have expansion
bay modules available for PowerBooks. Offering the same modules with
iMacs could easily increase sales of the modules as well as providing
consumers with more choice.
Apple would also add to the "gee-whiz" factor of the iMac. We have
a few PCs in my office with swappable hard drives, but most desktops
have fixed internal drives.
Apple could also benefit from a tighter integration of their
products. If drives can be shared with several different computers,
why not buy a PowerBook and an iMac instead of a PC laptop and an
iMac?
There are some problems, of course. Each iMac would have to ship
with a standard drive. Some consumers would want a CD burner while
others may prefer a DVD drive. Apple already has a fairly diversified
lineup, so adding more confusion wouldn't help matters. Apple could
alleviate this problem by sticking with its current lineup and
offering other drives only as add-ons.
Marketed as a simple machine, the iMac could become even more user
friendly with the addition of a hot-swappable drive bay. More uses,
more features, and less clutter would make an option like this
extremely appealing.
Stephen Van
Esch is the founder and president of
the
E-learning Foundry, an online training
resource for Mac users. Steve loves the Mac and is doubly bilingual,
since he's also fluent in Windows and French.
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While
A
hot-swappable expansion bay on the iMac would open up many new
possibilities for iMac owners. If you wanted to burn CDs, you would
no longer have to sacrifice precious desk space for an external
device. In fact, 
