It’s incredible the coverage generated by yesterday’s blog article on the further iMac upgrade restrictions. I’d like to personally address some questions, context, and provide additional technical detail concerning this issue.

I want to be very clear that I think these are absolutely the best iMacs ever. These machines up the game considerably and provide performance that can even match up with the Mac Pro for a lot of applications. We’ve been excitedly covering these new iMacs starting with an unboxing and teardown blog post just hours after they were first introduced.

Most iMac buyers (and buyers of anything Apple in general) are more than satisfied with how things are right out of the box. The vast majority will never even think about after purchase options that Apple does support, such as installing additional memory. These are great systems right from the get-go… But pardon us or anyone who wants to make them even better. :)

What is our testing environment/parameters?
In our lab, we have all the different flavors of iMac 21.5″ and 27″ 2011 models currently shipping. This includes one or more of each model processor option and/or video option. Apple’s current latest 2011 iMac models have Apple Model Identifiers of iMac12,1 for the 21.5″ and iMac12,2 for the 27″ regardless of what base model/options selected. Article Continues…