It’s quite certain that the designers of recent iMacs didn’t consider what might be required if you wanted to change anything more than RAM. And on the 21.5-inch version, you can’t even do that. So this forces you to load up such Macs on Apple’s build-to-order page when you place your order, so you don’t have to concern yourself about lost upgrade opportunities.

Now I bought my late 2009 iMac towards the end of that year, a few weeks after release. I did customize some, with an Intel 2.8GHz i7 processor, and the upgraded graphics card. I kept the standard 8GB RAM, since I could always flesh it out later if I wanted; that was the one thing that could be upgraded easily.

Indeed, when the time came to move to 16GB RAM, I did the deed in about five minutes from the time it took to lift the iMac from my desk, place the screen on a large towel, open the tiny cover at the bottom of the unit, and replace the RAM.

Although that RAM upgrade should not have made a substantial performance change, or at least I didn’t expect one, I found that some apps seem to be less apt to clog system resources. A particular example was Parallels Desktop, where I was able to launch into a Windows virtual machine somewhat more quickly, with fewer slowdowns impacting other apps. Understand that I seldom gave Windows more than 1GB of RAM, so the slowdowns shouldn’t have been as drastic as they were.

In any case, I appreciated the modest performance boost, but still suffered from long startup times, amounting to several minutes because I launch half a dozen apps at startup, and opening one of those large productivity apps, such as Adobe Photoshop and QuarkXPress, took 20 seconds or more. Anything that involved copying large numbers of files seemed glacial, and the 1TB Western Digital Caviar “Black” drive that shipped with the iMac was regarded as reasonably swift for its time.

So I enlisted the expertise of Other World Computing, who specializes in Mac upgrades, to suggest a suitable drive upgrade for review. We settled on the closest match to the stock drive, OWC’s 1TB Mercury Electra 6G SSD. If you want to buy one, it retails for $478, a fairly normal price for such a device. If you can don’t need that much storage, or can rely some on an external drive, you can get a 480GB SSD for $259.

OWC also includes some useful features that make it suitable for use on Macs. So what OWC calls “global wear leveling algorithms” and “StaticDataRefresh” are said to eliminate the need for one of those TRIM hacks, not officially supported with OS X Yosemite, which are often necessary for third-party SSDs.

The major claim to fame with SSD is a performance level several times higher than a traditional hard drive without the wear and tear. OWC advertises “sustained reads up to 535MB/s and writes up to 443MB/s,” although I made no effort to verify that claim.

Alas, you can’t just pop the hard drive out of an iMac and put a new one in. Installation involves a laborious process that you shouldn’t try without some careful instructions. You’ll also need to buy a special kit that contains some special tools and a pair of suction cups. OWC sells such a kit for $59. They have also posted an instruction video that makes the process seem less intimidating. It’s still not a cakewalk, but if you pay close attention, and you’re comfortable with a tiny Torx screwdriver and fiddling with slim, delicate wiring harnesses, you’ll probably do all right.

In addition to the SSD and the drive installation kit, OWC also sent along a 3.5-inch drive adaptor — the SSD is a 2.5-inch device — although you actually can get by without it.

Oh, and by the way, next-generation of ultra-thin iMacs are even more difficult to upgrade. In place of magnets to hold the glass in place, Apple has moved to a special adhesive tape.

In any case, I received the kit on a Saturday, and steeled myself for the installation the following Monday. I watched the video several times, and kept it available on another Mac, the review iMac 5K that has since been returned to Apple, just in case I needed a refresher. And I did.

I won’t detail all the steps here. But it starts with using the two suction cups to pry the glass from the iMac’s chassis. After that, you have to unscrew a bunch of tiny Torx (six-point) screws to remove the LCD display. All this has to be done real carefully, and it’s best to have some clean, soft surfaces on which to place the delicate components you’re removing. Disconnecting the LCD involves unplugging some real slim wiring harnesses, and you have to be extremely careful. It’s not that replacement cables are necessarily expensive, but getting them from a local Apple dealer or even an Apple Store will not be easy. They are not regarded as user serviceable parts. To prepare myself for the process, I ran a full clone backup to the external FireWire 800 drive with Carbon Copy Cloner.

From beginning to end, it took over an hour to install the SSD. The photo at the left shows the iMac at the point where the LCD panel was being removed. The only fly in the ointment was the dust that accumulated inside after five years in dusty Arizona, and it required a few moments to blow it out. No doubt I improved the long-term reliability of this computer in the process.

After the iMac was closed up, I carefully reconnected all the peripheral cables and the power cord. Since I had to install a new OS onto an empty drive, I pressed Option during the startup process to allow me to select the Yosemite restore partition from the backup drive. The relative speed of the installation signaled what I’d expect once the iMac had its own OS.

The migration process required some four hours to restore 500GB of data to the new drive, about the same as the same migration procedure took on the iMac 5K. Once restored, I was able to give the SSD the acid test, and I was amazed. Normally it takes up to three minutes for my Mac to boot and all startup apps to load. This time the process took little more than 30 seconds to complete, and I hit the desktop in 15 seconds flat. Most apps launched instantaneously, and Adobe Photoshop took maybe three seconds. QuarkXPress 10.5 loaded in about 10 seconds.

As any of you who has used an SSD can testify, just about everything runs amazing fast, and the dream of almost instant response is realized. Indeed, it is now hard to detect much of a difference between my old iMac, and the iMac 5K — the latter came with a 1TB Fusion Drive, which gives you most of the performance of a true SSD — which goes to show how much of what you do on a Mac is drive related.

Based on the system tools I put into action, the iMac is also running a lot cooler now, since the drive generates little or no heat, usually not much higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit after some intense action. It’s hard to complain about that. The sole downside, and it’s minor, is the fact that a 1TB SSD generally formats to around 960GB capacity, short of the 999GB used by the previous drive. But that’s really a minor trade off to gain those amazing speed advantages.

True, an SSD, and the accompanying installation kit, aren’t exactly cheap. But it’s a lot less expensive than buying a new Mac. If you would rather not engage in such extensive transplant surgery yourself, and I understand why, see if a local Mac dealer would do it for you; an Apple Store would refuse for obvious reasons.

You can also ship your iMac to OWC’s own plant, of course, but first see if you find a nearby dealer to handle the chores, because it will cost less, particularly when you include the cost of shipping. A nearby authorized Apple dealer, MacMedia of Scottsdale AZ, considers iMac drive upgrades a Tier 2 process for which it charges $95. It’s definitely worth the peace of mind if you choose to take this step.

Now OWC normally sends out review hardware for 30-day evaluations. But since reviewing this drive involved a complicated installation process, they aren’t exactly rushing me to return it.

In a recent article from USA Today tech columnist, Edward Baig, it was reported that only 55% of Millennials own a TV set. That may come as a surprise to those of us who are at least a little older, or in my case, a lot older. I recall when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t wait to have a TV set. Indeed, my mom sent one as a present shortly after I moved to a new apartment when I was a mere lad of 22. It wasn’t too many years after that when I subscribed to one of the early cable TV systems since, at the time, I lived far from any local stations.

Yet my son, age 28, hasn’t had a TV set in his Madrid apartment since a roommate, who did have one that he shared, departed. These days, he uses his 2008 black MacBook to watch TV streams from Netflix and other services. When I asked him if he intended to buy a new TV, or any TV, he said it wasn’t very high on his list of priorities.

What this appears to indicate is that the age of the average cable or satellite customer is clearly increasing. Traditional broadcast stations are reaching declining audiences. The viewing level achieved by a successful show nowadays would have been totally inadequate five or ten years ago. Since the TV networks also have a number of cable stations in their mix, and the way stations are organized on a cable or satellite system, the distinction between broadcast and cable-only has not only blurred but disappeared for most of you.

So it doesn’t matter if I watch a show on NBC or a cable channel owned by Comcast/NBC, such as USA Network or SyFy. For all practical purposes, the viewing experience, complete with commercials, is essentially the same, although cable content may be a tad more explicit. If I’m willing to pay for a premium channel, such as HBO or Showtime, I have the privilege of watching fare uninterrupted by the ads and without the content restrictions mandated for over-the-air broadcasts via the FCC.

Those who want to cut the cord free themselves of cable or satellite — and the high fees they charge. They have gone to such streaming services as Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus and, of course, Netflix. Indeed, Netflix has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to produce exclusive content, such as “House of Cards,” which is almost always in contention for awards. Indeed, star and producer Kevin Spacey this past weekend won the Golden Globes award for best actor in a TV drama. The huge audience of this provocative show clearly indicates the potential for streaming video.

I remember when I used to rent DVDs from Netflix, at least until they agreed to enforce the 30-day delays, mandated by the entertainment companies, for releasing new movies.

When you’re not attached to the traditional cable/satellite system, you have loads of options, but also the potential for loads of confusion, although the situation is evolving.

So last week Dish Network, a satellite system, announced a low-cost Sling TV video streaming service that would include a small number of channels, including Disney’s ESPN, for download to your computer, mobile gadget, and some set-top boxes. But not Apple TV for now. Dish clearly realizes that there’s a sizable untapped audience for such services out there, customers who would never subscribe to their satellite network.

You can pretty much get most of the shows you want if you carefully select a few of these services, including Apple’s iTunes for rentals and purchases. But if you want to watch your local terrestrial stations, you still have to install a traditional TV antenna. And if you live too far from the local stations to get a decent signal, you may consider subscribing to the cheapest cable/satellite plan. Suddenly you’re back where you started.

The real problem I have with streaming is that, for it to provide the depth of content you want, you have to subscribe to at least several services. In trying to find the shows you want, you are forced to contend with a number of different apps and different interfaces. Apple TV makes no effort to consolidate this clutter, except to allow you to only display the channels you want to watch. Roku offers 1,200 or more (the list grows almost daily), but can search among all of them to find specific movies or TV shows, after which it presents you with a list. If you want to rent a movie, such as “Guardians of the Galaxy,” you may find it listed on several services, but each requires a separate account, and a separate payment.

Confusing? You bet!

You don’t even need a set-top box to get the major streaming services. Most new TV sets are “connected” or “smart” devices that include the very same services. I can receive Netflix on an Apple TV, Roku 3, plus my VIZIO TV set and Blu-ray player.

This, to me, is an outrageous situation. I can well understand why Tim Cook has remarked, over and over again, that he feels he’s gone back in time when he enters his living room and has to cope with this mess to find the shows he wants. Apple holds the promise of a solution, but Apple TV remains essentially untouched for now. Well, except for having more channels and more clutter.

While I realize the streaming networks want to brand and customize their content, all they are doing is confusing their customers. Once you add more than one or two, simplicity goes out the window. Can Apple find a solution that makes cord-cutting an easy, uncluttered experience, which just works? Would an Apple TV become a TiVO alternative, meaning a simplified, elegant front end for your cable or satellite account?

What can Apple do to make TV viewing simple and straightforward not just for young people, but for anyone? It almost makes me pine for the long-ago days when I lived in New York City and had seven stations from which to choose.

All it took was an Apple developer’s complaint about the supposed declining state of Apple’s software to fuel a number of articles saying that things are going from bad to worse. One story had it that, in light of bugs that are never actually mentioned in the article, iOS and OS X software quality may not be quite as bad as Windows, but it was getting closer. So we have the meme here that Apple is releasing too many products and needs to focus more sharply on perfecting new releases before they are posted for download.

Everyone’s whipping boy is iOS 8.0.1. How could Apple have allowed that wretched thing to pass the QA labs anyway? It doesn’t matter that it was withdrawn a little over an hour after its misbegotten release, and a fixed version came out the very next day. What about those estimated 40,000 users of an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus who had their gear virtually bricked because of Apple’s monumental screw-up?

All right, you could restore the affected devices, but why the inconvenience? An Apple executive said it was all due to a glitch in the distribution system, which he referred to as the “wrapper,” and that, actually, the update was fine. Version 8.0.2 was said to be the same update, but I suppose with a proper wrapper so that things wouldn’t go wrong. If only those who talked to that Apple executive would have asked him to define what he meant so regular people could understand what really happened. But proper follow-up questions are rarely asked, maybe because they don’t want to upset the interview subject and lose access.

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The illusion was conveyed last year that Apple was in deep trouble. Quality control, particularly for software, was supposedly down in the dumps, new products were just minor revisions of old products, and wasn’t Samsung taking over the tech industry? I wouldn’t presume to suggest that some of the skepticism was manufactured by people with agendas, such as dampening stock price momentum. But sometimes you have to wonder about the motivations of certain people, especially when they lie through their teeth.

Even when Apple was clearly doing well, every little dip in the stock price, even if it was all part of a stock market trend, was regarded as a sign by some that something was seriously wrong. It didn’t matter that other well-respected companies also suffered from wild swings in stock prices without the claims that they were in danger of folding, losing their mojo, whatever.

Consider the emotional complaints about iOS 8.0.1, or the fact that the first maintenance update for OS X Yosemite failed to fix all the reported Wi-Fi connection problems. Clearly Apple’s quality control has declined, and how dare they release updates that make things worse, or fail to fix the problems they are supposed to fix?

It doesn’t help that the media can always find quotables from an Apple commentator or an Apple developer complaining about this, that, or another. What about inconsistent App Store review policies, for example? Well, in that case, they’ve always been inconsistent. Even though strict guidelines have been posted, there are enough gray areas to require human intervention on a case-by-case basis. Very likely the review staff is overwhelmed with submissions for new or updated apps, and one individual or group may interpret things differently from others. Just put two different lawyers in the same room, with the same law, and the interpretation of that law may vary considerably.

So while I would agree it would be nice for Apple to clarify some of the fine details about what apps and app features are acceptable or unacceptable, and maybe avoid some of the worst policy reversals, don’t expect to see things change drastically. It’s always been this way, though it seems as if there are fewer complaints now than there used to be. What I wonder is why you don’t hear similar complaints about app review policies at Google Play and Microsoft. Well maybe because they are more inclined to accept submissions without as much critical review?

Just asking!

When it comes to the quality of Apple’s software updates, it’s fair to say that there have always been lapses of one sort or another. I remember a Tiger update that bricked external FireWire hard drives. At least an iPhone that lost its cellular and Touch ID capabilities after installing iOS 8.0.1 could be restored with no loss other than the 30 minutes it took to set things right. The real fix came the next day.

But when those external drives were bricked, you had no choice but to reformat. If you didn’t have a backup of your data, too bad. Meantime, what about the 10 worst Microsoft updates for 2014 (I wonder how many faulty patches missed the cut), which included a few that caused endless reboot loops and other startup problems. But I suppose that’s par for the course for Microsoft, so the media didn’t pay much attention.

But one thing is clear, and that is that Apple is getting far more favorable press these days than before. There are still huge pockets of house critics, people who will never admit that Apple does anything good, people who can’t resist the digs about the alleged Apple Tax and that Apple is trying to do too many things at once. In other words, the usual offenders.

Remember that Apple actually offers fewer product lines and individual models than most other tech companies with similar gear.

Despite the flavor of the coverage, here’s still an intense desire to play the “bigger they are, harder they fall” game, where those on the top are treated more critically than others. We also have the eternal myth of declining iOS market share, being supplanted by the Android juggernaut. But the latest figures show that iOS is gaining market share, and most of those gains appear to be at the expense of Apple.

Once a media darling, Samsung continues to report eroding sales and profits from its mobile division (which also includes PCs). Apple is killing them at the high end, and they are being hit left and right by low-end mobile handset makers. Samsung’s biggest sales gains these days are in components, including display and memory. Don’t forget that Apple continues to buy billions of dollars of parts from Samsung despite the ongoing legal skirmishes over smartphones and patents. So maybe Samsung’s gains are partly due to Apple?

Now it’s fair to say that there are uncertainties this year. There will be the expected Mac, iPhone and iPad updates. But the Apple Watch remains the great unknown. Some suggest that only a small number of people are going to spend upwards of $349 for a watch, forgetting they made similar claims about a certain $399 digital music player known as the iPod in 2001. And look what happened!

When it comes to Apple, those who assume failure are usually wrong.