On 23/09/2008, at 5:38 AM, Gabriel Lapointe wrote:

> A high end Mac could also be a good machine, with bootcamp for the  
> windows only software, but (unless things changed in recent years)  
> they are not upgradable so forget about adding a new hard-drive or  
> adding more memory afterward.

It has long been possible to upgrade "high-end" Macs. Hard-drives and  
memory have not been a problem. It is the consumer level machines (eg  
iMacs) that are more difficult (and even then you can almost alway add  
extra RAM but not necessarily hard drives unless you want to get very  
intimate with the service manual or the mod-pages on the web :).

The extent to which you can add extra hardware has varied over the  
years and is generally not as extensive as a generic wintel box but it  
is certainly been there ( eg G5 PowerMacs could only take two drives  
whereas the G4s before then and Mac Pro after can take more (I've got  
a processor upgrade, upgraded optical drives, three hard drives and  
extra RAM in my c2000 G4)). It has been physically easy to access Mac  
"tower" machines for at least 10 years.


Regards,

Adrian Smith
Centenary Institute, Sydney, Australia