Stuart,

Considering Apple’s own upgrade price on a BTO iMac just to 16GB is $600, that sounds like a bargain. It’s interesting that nowhere on the iMac page on apple.com does it say that the machine is expandable to 32GB. I wonder why the discrepancy.

I recently upgraded my 2009 iMac to 16GB RAM for only $100 from OWC, and it’s a very nice upgrade. But for me it was mostly about having multiple apps open at once, and running out of memory as I swap between them. I don’t know how much benefit you’d get from that much RAM if you’re only working in Aperture or Final Cut Pro X or whatever, but if you’ve got multiple heavy apps like that open at once, I’m sure it’ll make a difference.

Of course if it’s a $600 difference is up to you :-)

How much is it at OWC to go to 16GB? If it’s only $100 for that iMac like it was for mine, you may want to consider putting that saved money into a SSD/ATA hard drive combo. The SSD can make a huge difference. I have SSD in my MacBook Air, and even though it’s a much slower processor, the speed of switching and launching apps is remarkable.

Stuart,

DISCLAIMER: anything here is entirely speculation and based off no actual knowledge. ‘Cause I don’t got none!

When Steve first launched the redesigned MacBook Air (as it currently exists), he said something to the effect of “all portables should look like this”, which basically means, “all portables WILL look like this”. Removing the optical drive makes all kinds of room for bits and pieces that can be in nearly any shape you want — unlike a DVD ;-) So yes, it’s inevitable that there will be a 15” “Air” looking product. I think it’ll still be called MacBook Pro, and just be in the teardrop shape.

You can already get the 15” MBP with an SSD if you like, that’s an option and has been for a while. I think it’ll continue to be an option, unless they can’t fit one into the teardrop shape. But you can still get a lot more capacity out of a spinning plate so in the case of bigger portables, storage capacity is still an important factor for a lot of folks.

I haven’t heard anything about USB 3 on the Mac, so I wouldn’t count on it. But I could be wrong, and hopefully am, because as you said USB 3 drives are everywhere — and cheap. I wouldn’t buy it for a performance drive, but I would for archiving or backup. USB 2 sucks, so yeah, hopefully we’ll see 3.

There are never upgrades to current hardware that you can buy from Apple. So don’t count on that. Ever. They aren’t designed to be upgraded. Keep in mind that the hardware that goes in those things is designed in concert. The particular motherboard paired with a particular chipset and particular cache type and on and on. If you replace one then the rest is out of whack. RAM, and in the case of towers, the graphics card, are generally the only upgradeable items. Not counting hard drives, of course.