Presently Mac products include the new upgraded iMac and the entry-level Mac Mini desktop models, the Mac Pro tower, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro laptops and the Xserve server. They now have the Power Mac G4 Cube, the eMac for education, the PowerBook G4 laptop for professionals.

The unique thing about Apple is that it uses a vertical integration model, which means that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system. Apple pre-installs its operating system on all its Mac computers. The Mac also has no internal floppy disk drives for storage, but uses compact discs for removable storage.

If you are interested in Mac upgrades for your Mac consider the following:

Storage and RAM

If you are ready to upgrade your Mac you can start with the hard drive and RAM. Generally this is an easy upgrade that you can do yourself.

If you are upgrading your hard drive, pay attention to what bus your hard drive resides on. If you are not sure – there are some sites that you can use to find this info out. You should also know what speed your hard drive spins at and if your computer’s hard drive bus is limited to 128GB and below drives.

For RAM, note the type of RAM and how many RAM slots you have. Guess what? Some Macs will operate with faster RAM and some will not so avoid taking a risk and get the exact RAM speed originally used by your system. Pay attention to your RAM ceiling per slot so you don’t exceed this maximum, and also the overall RAM maximum of your system.

Processors

What if you have to replace your processor? Do your research! You have to learn which sockets and which upgrades are compatible with which Macs. If you are not sure, and you want to make a good decision, find a faster processor from the same model. So if both models used a basic 133 MHz system bus generally you are ok - but if you want to take the processor from a model with a system bus of 167 MHz then you may not be able to use a processor from the same model to upgrade your machine. So the two things to pay attention to when replacing processors are system bus speed and socket.

Video Cards

Upgrading Video cards in Macs can be tricky. If you don’t have the proper video driver, the card is useless so be careful here.

For those of you who still with to proceed with mac upgrades – go to this website for all kinds of support: http://www.ifixit.com/. It helps with mac, ipod, and iphone repair.