Okay, so I am taking a serious look at the iMac you guys keep throwing in my face; it sure is a beautiful machine.

I looked at some of the upgrades, like RAM, and notice quite the premium, much like the system itself, on upgrades. RAM, for example, was a $200 upgrade to take it from 2G to 4G.

Are there other places that sell Apple harware, or are you stuck with purchasing all upgrades through Apple? One of the points that Apple drives home is that they produce all the hardware, which is why there is never any compatibility issues, unlike with PCs. If this is the case, i suspect the latter is true and you are beholden to Apple for RAM, HDs, et al.

And you can buy hard drives from any reseller. However, upgrading your iMac's hard drive by yourself will require special tools.

But if you own a Mac Pro, it's the easiest upgrade ever. Just slide out the drive tray, screw the drive onto the tray and slide it back in. Easy! For RAM just slide out the risers, plug in your RAM modules in pairs and slide the risers back in.

I usually get my RAM from whomever offers it cheapest. I use http://www.ramseeker.com to do my comparison shopping and http://www.pricewatch.com for hard drives.

I usually just visit macsurfer.com, they have a box about half way down the page with current ram deals.

For users from Europe like me, www.macway.com is really good too.