iMac 24-inch surprise: graphics card is upgradeable?

I bought the new 24inch imac on the 12th this month and have to say, Wow and bring your sunglasses! This puppy is amazing and tons of canvas space. I think I now might replace my 32inch tv set at home and use this for EVERYTHING! Way to go Apple. Now hopefully after reading about all the graphics card I will be able to upgrade to 256mb in the next year and expand the memory to 3gb soon. You got to get this one, it makes computing even better than before. I love to watch a movie in the corner and still have two full 8.5 x 11 pages open...

The 20" and the 24" iMac have different upgrade cards and different upgrade procedure. On the 24" you have a f... huge heatsink with pipes glued to the video card for cool air to go in and hot air to go out toward the heatsink. Which you don't have on the 20". I don't have enough info about how difficult it is to disconnect the heatsink from the video card, but at first sight it seems pretty difficult if not impossible. This combination of card and heatsink seems to be specifically tailored to the 24" iMac. A third party who would want to provide a video upgrade card for this machine would probably have to provide a kit specifically for this machine and wouldn't work on the 20" iMac. So, I don't think we will see anything cheap from third party to go into these iMacs.

Most mac users aren't gamers, and upgrade-ability should be across the board in every mac. A video card upgrade is going to be the least of your worries, when you already know that you'll never upgrade your processor. MacBook(Pro) PowerPc users. (Note: I think you can upgrade the new MacIntels, but I personally would never dare open up my MacBook Pro)

any idea if it will support the apple 30 inch display as a second monitor? Doesn't look like it, but not sure. http://www.apple.com/displays/specs.html

The 20 inch iMac also has a BTO graphic upgrade option so I wonder if that means it also contains one of these MXM slots?

funny that... someone started singing the muppet show theme song in the next room three seconds before i read #14.

We'd also like to echo MacsimumNews' observation that it would be stellar if Apple could work this standard into the next MacBook Pro revision, as the company kinda dropped the ball with their current lineup.

Do I understand correctly that the ExpressCard 34 in the MacBook Pro machines is (more than theoretically?) capable of supporting graphics upgrade circuitry?

I thought one of the big advantages of Mac's was that stuff just works.

The moment you start dropping in 3rd part cards, you'll start to have support issues. Who will you call? Apple will say its an unsupported card, and the cards manufacturers will say they don't support Mac's and then you are stuffed.

Granted, only "Power Users" would be doing this to start with, but once word gets around, every muppet will want to try it, and when they encounter a problem, they's start to whine "Crapple stuff just doesn't work right, I'm goung back to my Dell with XP/Vista"

One of the main problems with Windows is the amount of support they have to provide for all the differnt Hardware combinations out there, and the resulting conflicts that can happen in such situations.

Just my 2 cents

"runnning Visa in BootCamp"

Please don't spread the confusion Apple is trying to create about this. BootCamp as the name implies is nothing else but a plain boot sector program. You don't run Linux and Windows "IN grub" or "IN lilo"...

So just say they are running windows natively, not in some kind of emulator. So in the end, a newer more powerful PC hardware runs Vista better than some older one. Great.

Or maybe Apple is planning to put something in the slot in the future...like a tv tuner?

I hope they don't drop the boat on this one.