Macworld Senior Editor Rob Griffiths details his “FrankenMac” project, where he built a Mac clone from off-the-shelf parts that can run Mac OS X Leopard.

In a special segment of “The David Biedny Zone,” our Special Correspondent reminisces about the tenth anniversary of the iMac, and wonders whether it makes sense for Apple to produce a mid-range desktop without a display.

And AOL is back, with new Mac software now available to access the service. You’ll hear an update on what’s happening with that embattled company from Lee Givens, the Principle Product Manager for AOL Desktop for the Mac.

Click below to hear the show:

The Tech Night Owl Live — May 8, 2008

For more episodes, click here to visit the show’s home page.

Way back when, during the nasty 1990s, Apple had so many models, it was doubtful that any single company executive could identify all of them without a cheat sheet at hand. Even salespeople, who earned commissions on the hardware they could move, would have similar difficulties.

But it wasn’t just the hardware proliferation disease that consumed Apple in its efforts to break into consumer electronics chains in those days. Some models, meant for power users, remained downright hostile to upgrade. It wasn’t just fiddling with thin wiring harnesses to add a second hard drive. The actual RAM installation process sometimes required removal of the entire logic board in order to locate the slots placed, of course, in the rear.

I was once told by an Apple sales executive that the people who designed such user-hostile features, particularly in the Quadra 800 and its successors, were no longer with the company. I wonder why.

One day, I attended an Apple meeting where they demoed a new Power Mac with a sort of pop-out chassis arrangement, allowing for relatively simple upgrades. The presenter’s voice was soon drowned out by the resounding cheers and applause from the audience.

Today, upgrading Macs presents a mixed bag. It’s not so difficult on the MacBook and MacBook Pro, since it generally requires removing the battery and a protective cover. You just need the proper screwdriver. The MacBook Air, however, doesn’t have upgradeable memory, and you have to remove the bottom cover to change a battery. It is, in that sense, a close cousin to the equally unfriendly environment of the iPod and iPhone.

Sales, however, do not seem to have suffered as a result of choosing form above function — and, in large part, violating basic logic.

You’d think that the process ought to be simpler on a desktop Mac, but you’d be partly right. The usually forgotten Mac mini requires skills with a putty knife to pry open the case to access the chassis. Upgrading RAM became worse in the transition from Power PC processors to Intel, because now you have to remove the hard drive to reach the RAM slots. Either way, the risk of damaging the case is high, and you have to be really careful and have flexible fingers to avoid making scratches.

But I still wonder why Apple apparently hasn’t considered creating a removable cover for the Mac mini. That, and some judicious chassis design, ought to make the internal upgrade process fairly smooth. But, as I said, Apple ignores the mini and thus it remains a sealed box for most of you.

Today’s iMac isn’t quite so bad, since Apple designed a convenient RAM access door at the bottom of the case, which can be easily opened with a Phillips screwdriver. But don’t think about changing out hard drives and other components. It can be done if you do some online research to locate the correct instructions, but for normal people, it’s a difficult process best left to professional service people.

In the entire Mac desktop lineup, the Mac Pro is an absolute joy to work on. You don’t even need a screwdriver, except for adding and removing peripheral cards. Once you pop off the side of the case, using the rear latch, you’ll find the eight RAM slots split between two slide-out printed circuit cards. Replacing or adding hard drives is essentially a slide out process, and you merely anchor the drive with the four thumb screws provided in each of the four available slide-out carriers. No cables to fiddle with, and I still remember the cuts and bruises I suffered years ago when I had to navigate through the tight pathways of a poorly designed chassis to replace such things.

The vision of a mid-ranged headless Mac desktop — one without a display — would also involve a product that’s essentially as easy to upgrade as the Mac Pro, even though it would probably be less than half the size. That harkens back to the original Mac II and IIx/IIci series, where it was simple to pop off the top cover and have your way with the internal components to add the appropriate hardware.

In those days, though, Apple’s limited warranty seriously discouraged such practices. Later, it was modified to allow you to do what you would, so long as you didn’t damage anything, in which case it would be your responsibility to pay for any resulting damage.

When I look at Apple’s entire lineup nowadays, I do find it unfortunate that they apply the toaster oven approach to so many of their products. You don’t expect to pry apart your small appliance to change things, and Apple apparently doesn’t expect you to do that with your computing appliance either, except for some sharply focused exceptions.

The Mac Pro, naturally, exists in its own universe, since the people who exploit the power of eight cores are the ones who are apt to max out memory, add extra hard drives, and peripheral cards for various types of content creation.

As far as the mystical midrange minitower is concerned, though, it’s an open question just how much expansion you really need. Aside from RAM, most of you probably don’t concern yourselves with adding hard drives or pondering the advantages of a different graphics card. But if Apple does decide to build such a beast, which is by no means certain, I hope they will make upgrading easy, whether you care to exploit that capability or not.

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Lots of pundits are content with putting the words “Apple Inc.” and “proprietary” in the same sentence. A lot of that is, of course, due to the tight vertical integration of all of their products, from the iPod to Macs and Mac OS X.

However, there is an awful lot about the Mac these days that isn’t exclusive to Apple, which is why people can now, without any special training or engineering skills, assemble their own Macs. But this story really began in 1998, when the iMac was first announced.

In those days, you see, I was a member of Apple’s Customer Quality Feedback (or CQF) program, before journalists were barred. In addition to prerelease operating system software, one day they sent me an original Bondi blue iMac. The optical drive’s cover was missing, but it was otherwise fully intact and functional. I ran it through the usual spate of tests, and even let my son, then 12, have at it for a few months, with the promise not to tell his friends about his special access.

In the end, I expected to be able to keep the iMac. But just week’s before Apple’s hot-selling all-in-one Mac first went on sale, they sent me a firmware update, which somehow bricked the machine. I don’t know if that was deliberate or not, but it also meant that I had to return it for diagnosis. Oh well, it would have been nice to be the first on the block, but that’s how it goes.

Now Apple confronted a spate of harsh criticisms from the Mac faithful at the time, because they ditched all the proprietary ports, such as ADB and LocalTalk, in exchange for USB and Ethernet (which had originally trickled down from high-end models) when they introduced the iMac. Now USB, in those days, was strictly the province of the PC. Yes, there were adapters to allow you to use your old input devices and other peripherals, but the handwriting was on the wall. Within a year or so, as the rest of the Mac lineup fell in place, companies could build one device, such as a printer or a scanner, and have it work on a Mac or a PC simply by supplying compatible drivers.

That, and abandoning standard SCSI ports and all the misery they caused brought Macs closer in design to standard personal computers.

Please don’t ask me about the infamous hockey puck mouse. A nice cottage industry arose around that time, servicing folks who wanted sensible extensions to the mouse, so that misbegotten device would look almost normal. But it was just as cheap to buy a separate mouse, normally shaped, and be done with it.

Of course, one of biggest changes began in mid-2005, when Steve Jobs confirmed the published rumors that Apple planned to ditch the Power PC and move to Intel processors. At the time, if you follow this site, you’ll know I greeted the news with great anticipation. Others didn’t feel so optimistic, and there was criticism at the time that Apple was abandoning a superior processor architecture for nefarious reasons, and would suffer greatly.

That was before the entire Mac line transitioned to Intel in months, rather than the expected two years. More to the point, Apple is now moving nearly three times as many new Macs each quarter than they used to. Today’s Macs also benchmark a lot faster than their predecessors, and, all in all, the Intel transition was actually a good thing.

What it means, of course, is that the internal workings of the Mac and the PC have become extremely close. They share processors, graphic chips, hard drives, optical drives and support circuitry. This is what makes it possible for hobbyists to make those unauthorized Mac OS clones, of course.

Then there’s Mac OS X. Although the higher levels are proprietary and controlled by Apple, the underbelly, the so-called Darwin core, is open source, and uses a number of traditional Unix tools that power users know all about. You’ll even find such things as the Apache Web server and MySQL among the hundreds of thousands of files that make up the typical Mac OS X installation.

The operating system is also incredibly portable, meaning that Apple can make it work on different processor platforms in fairly quick order. While the original NeXT operating system, on which Mac OS X is based, began on the original Motorola 68K family (the Power PC’s predecessor), it did move to the Intel platform years ago. So Apple already knew what was required to return to x86 chips, and that’s one of the reasons the transition was handled so seamlessly.

The iPhone and iPod touch use ARM-based processors, and OS X too, and Apple apparently managed that migration pretty well too, although they had to postpone Leopard’s release by several months to finish the job. This is not a process, as Microsoft should know but doesn’t, that you can speed up simply by adding more bodies to the code mines.

Where Mac OS X and Apple’s technologies will go next is an open question. But by embracing open standards in many surprising ways, the original iMac paved the way for Apple’s incredible 21st century resurgence.

Sure, you may argue that today’s iMac is perhaps a little too slick, and the glossy screen is certainly a controversial matter in some quarters. But it is not just descended from the original version in 1998, but the very first Mac in 1984. Then as now, the mainstream Mac was meant to be an all-in-one personal computing appliance.

You may debate the use of the term “appliance” for any personal computer, even now, but it’s clear that, despite all the ups and downs, Apple has come a long way towards achieving that worthy goal.

Related Articles

• A Fast Look at the Apple Hardware Upgrade Equation
• Is a Home-Built Mac a Waste of Time?
• Apple Needs to Open Up!
• Newsletter #440 Preview: The Mac Versus PC Hardware Wars Continue
• The MacBook Pro: Two Years On