I spent the whole day playing with a stack of Apple ][+, //e, and Enhanced //e machines, testing a stack of 80-column cards and memory expansions and fifteen Disk ][ drives and an Applied Engineering Music Synthesizer card, and the whole time I was using and/or abusing that old Apple hardware (several times I had to pull out the old “Programmer’s Reference” and call stuff from the Monitor ROM because I wasn’t sure what I was doing) I had one thought: “Apple would never allow me to do any of this anymore, if they had their way.”
The Apple //e has seven slots, a special “auxiliary” slot for 80-column and RAM expansion, and chips that were socketed for easy replacement/upgrading. The top snaps off. The manuals say to call Apple if you have trouble sticking new ROM chips in the motherboard.
If you open your iMac, you no longer have a warranty.
Granted, there’s a lot less of a reason to open an iMac than there was an Apple ][+—which is an incredibly limited computer without any expansion cards, though it wasn’t at the time it was released—but still. Apple used to encourage you do do whatever you wanted with your Apple computer. The Monitor ROM was there, and it had a disassembler built in so you could peek into other people’s programs, see what was happening.
Here’s the way Apple’s platforms have evolved: You have to tell the Apple II what to do, or it doesn’t do anything. With the Mac, you can do whatever you want, but the basics are already there if that’s all you need. With the iPad, Apple essentially says “Pick from this list of things to do.” I think that’s what makes me sort of uncomfortable about it. You can’t get to the Monitor ROM.
The downside of the Appliance Mentality is the death of hardware tinkering.