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The iMac and Hot-Swappable Expansion Bay Modules
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- April 26, 2000
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.
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