CPU upgrades are a boon to users, and who cares if Apple sells them?

Suddenly, they're the hottest slots in town.

I'm talking about CPU slots - the logic board sockets that have made the central processor replaceable in most recent Macs and clones. The idea always sounded good, but when Apple introduced it to the Mac world in 1995, its value was more potential than real - early PowerPC processor upgrades didn't offer enough incremental performance to be very compelling to most users.

But this year all that has changed, first with PowerPC 604e chips running at 200 MHz and up, and now with the PowerPC 750. The G3 upgrades I've been testing get more performance out of previous-generation PCI Power Macs than I thought possible. These boards are still expensive, but they're already cost-effective for users who require lots of processing power, and prices are likely to come down quickly.

In terms of customer self-interest, this is a marvelous turn of events: Take an aging, midrange Power Mac, pop in a card and in minutes you've got one of the fastest desktop systems on earth. I foresee a full-blown upgrade mania in 1998.

Apple's dilemma

But consider the effects of this on Apple. Nothing would do more to help it regain financial balance and restore market momentum than to have every owner of midrange and high-end Macs trading up to new G3 models. But until new systems offer performance and features that can't be had with processor-only upgrades - which to my mind is not the situation today - some of these users are certain to turn instead to the CPU-card vendors.

In this light, it's probably no coincidence that Apple won't call its new Power Mac G3 systems upgradable. And although their CPU modules are easily removable, switching to a faster one will be a bit more complicated and, to some users, intimidating than it is today: You'll have to set jumpers on the logic board, which means disregarding a "Void if removed" sticker covering the jumper blocks.

According to Power Mac Product Line Manager Linda McNulty, Apple used the socket design for "manufacturing and inventory-management reasons" and won't be selling upgrades; she said the company wants to "focus our efforts on future systems" rather than enhancements to old ones.

Let Roger do it

All this has some Mac users worried that Apple is backing away from making its machines upgradable. I'll admit that those "Void" stickers bothered me, too, when I first saw them. But McNulty said Apple hasn't "done anything to preclude third parties" from offering replacement CPU modules; it just doesn't want to say "upgradable" for fear some users would take that as a promise of future Apple offerings - and get the Federal Trade Commission to enforce it. That makes sense to me. As long as Apple doesn't try to stop the likes of Newer Technology Inc. and PowerLogix R&D Inc. from doing their thing, I don't really care if it never mentions the u-word again.