madison

The Apple Core

Jason D. O'Grady & David Morgenstern
Home / News & Blogs / The Apple Core

OWC to offer eSATA upgrade for new top-of-the-line iMac

By | July 30, 2010, 11:17am PDT

Prominent Mac vendor, OtherWorld Computing, said Friday on its blog that the company will offer an eSATA “interface solution” for the 27-inch iMac that was announced this week by Apple. The details of the program such as pricing and scope have yet to be finalized.

The company said it expects to offer an upgrade service for the new iMac, including solid-state drives and memory upgrades.

Complete details on how you can have this high performance interface added to your iMac by OWC will be rolled out in the next several days. In the meantime, look for a possible news release later today on an entire turnkey upgrade program for the 27″ iMac. Now, adding an SSD to the new iMac won’t just be limited to an overpriced, under-performing factory option. And you’ll have more memory options at lower cost than factory. Multiple wins across the board for what will amount to a far superior iMac than what you can configure from the factory.

The company must expect that some owners of the 27-inch model will work on video and on its iMac performance page, Apple is promoting Final Cut video editing for these systems. Customers can pick between a 2.8-GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, and the 2.93GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor. The systems can support up to 16GB of RAM.

OWC sells a number of single hard drives and RAID systems that offer an eSATA interface.

(Note: I own a OWC eSATA drive that I purchased several years ago, which is connected to my MacBook Pro via an ExpressCard/34 adapter card.)

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

More from “The Apple Core”

Topics

Apple iMac, eSATA, OWC, Desktops, Hardware, David Morgenstern

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

Disclosure

David Morgenstern

Freelance journalist/blogger David Morgenstern has nothing to disclose.

Biography

David Morgenstern

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. In the recent past, he founded Ziff-Davis' Storage Supersite, served as news editor for Ziff Davis Internet and held several executive editorial positions at eWEEK. In the 1990s, David was editor of Ziff Davis' award-winning MacWEEK news publication as well as its successor title, eMediaWEEKly, which focused on multiplatform professional content creation. His byline can be found online and in print publications including CreativePro.com, Peachpit Press' Mac Bible and Popular Photography.

Talkback Most Recent of 9 Talkback(s)

  • What?
    So, I go out and spend a whole lotta' money on the top of the line iMac. Then I pay to have it upgraded?

    Shouldn't a machine that costs that much already be "upgraded"?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    trickytom2
    30th Jul 2010
  • What what?
    @trickytom2 Please show me ANY PC that costs the same, stock, that canNOT be upgraded.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    nssdiver
    30th Jul 2010
  • It's not a question of "can", but "should"
    @nssdiver

    Sure, you can, but few stock PC's cost as much as the top of the line iMac
    ZDNet Gravatar
    trickytom2
    30th Jul 2010
  • RE: OWC to offer eSATA upgrade kit for new top-of-the-line iMac
    @trickytom2

    Perhaps I am ignorant, but I just configured a ?baseline? top of the line iMac with the 2.93 GHz iCore7 processor. The Apple price is about $2200. When I go to Dell and try to configure a similar computer (Optiplex 980 SFF) I stopped when the price hit $3100. The processor, memory, hard drive are the same; Dell is not really an all-in-one, but it tries to look like one; graphics card is NVidia Quadro NVS 420 with only 512MB of RAM (couldn?t find any card with 1 GB RAM, not sure if cards perform similarly). Looks to me as if Dell is the overpriced computer.

    Before you gripe that you Dell isn?t relevant, I would say that they are representative of a name brand similar to Apple. Of course I would expect to purchase an off brand for less.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    rabber
    30th Jul 2010
  • Forget Dell
    @rabber

    Dell is not a good reflection of PC pricing. They begin with a low cost, basic configuration, but when you start building the system, it gets very costly very fast.

    Alienware is a better match.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    trickytom2
    30th Jul 2010
  • RE: OWC to offer eSATA upgrade kit for new top-of-the-line iMac
    @trickytom2

    But isn't Alienware just another Dell brand these days?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    nix_hed
    30th Jul 2010
  • Yes, the sooner we forget Dell, the better.
    @trickytom2 I'm one of those people who keeps buying (and having happy clients buy) Macs because they do simply provide a more productive, stable, learnable experience than anything I've seen in 25 years with Windows and 15+ with Linux.

    One of the main reasons that's been true has been the consistently high-quality hardware Apple ships. I've also had years of experience trying to either make Dell PCs work as well as they can or shipping them back when they (quite often) don't.

    My favorite Dell story is when one of my clients ordered 50 identically-configured middle-of-the-road desktop systems... and no two systems received had identical configurations. No. Two. Systems. Out of 50. Why would any customer make a volume purchase like that (well over US$120K at the time) and not have a right to expect that they could all be configured, imaged and deployed identically? And to have such low quality... their Dells had dramatically higher just-out-of-warranty failure rates but, since those costs came out of a different budget item, it took a while for top management to understand why they were having problems.

    There's a saying that "friends don't let friends be used by Vista," but there are some things you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy or fiercest competitor. Dell tops my list there.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Jeff Dickey
    30th Jul 2010
  • RE: OWC to offer eSATA upgrade kit for new top-of-the-line iMac
    @trickytom2
    Dell is the second largest PC maker in the world. How are they not a good reflection of PC pricing? Is it because they disprove your biases?

    http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2010/07/23/pc-market-share-q2-2010.aspx
    ZDNet Gravatar
    msalzberg
    31st Jul 2010
  • RE: OWC to offer eSATA upgrade kit for new top-of-the-line iMac
    I would have to state, you plucked ur phrases effectively. The valuable information and facts you gave are proficiently position nfl jersey ed.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812
    11th Oct

Talkback - Tell Us What You Think

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
Click Here

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources