Without getting into a whole argument ...
Actually, I was making a subtle dig at the xMac fans.
...but why Apple cant do this can someone honestly tell me why Apple is so far behind on things like this since the Gateway One had dual drop in hard drives way back in late 2006 early 2007.
IMO, its a question of teutonic-esque minimalism of functional design philosophy, for which one needs to challenge every feature to determine to what degree it really adds (not merely 'contributes') to the overall total.
To a great degree, this is why Apple clung to the one-button mouse for so long: multiple buttons are better for power users, but such a complex control was intimidating to the then-majority and thus, a negative instead of a positive.
Again I am not trying to reload the Mac vs PC argument but I do notice that many of today's most common peripherals seem not to be included on Mac desktops. Dual hard drives card readers etc. I mean these are just plain old staples in the computer world these days yet when ever some one mentions that Apple include it on a model its like "how dare you ask for such a thing"
When it comes to hard drives, recall that their general progression of storage capacity has broadly been 10MB - 20MB - 40MB - 80MB - 120MB - 250MB - 500MB - 1GB - 2GB - 4GB ... etc ... 40GB - 80GB - 160GB - 250GB - 500GB - 1TB ... (2TB due this summer) ... which for the most part is a doubling progression, generally paralleling the principles of Moore's Law.
And the rate of this technological progress? Just over the past few years, I've upgraded my main HD on three occasions. On each occasion, I spent roughly $100: the first time, that bought a 250GB (to replace a 160GB); the second time, a 500GB (which replaced the 250GB) and most recently, a 1TB (to replace the 500GB).
Now having additional bays around would effectively lets one retain the 'old' drive(s), but if we did so, we would see that these "leftovers" quickly gets into diminishing returns:
1 bay: 1TB total
2 bays: 1.5TB total
3 bays: 1.75TB total
4 bays: 1.90TB total
In this hypothetical example, the last (4th) bay only is adding 8% to the capacity, and the last two are only contributing ~20%. Even for going from a 1 bay to a 2 bay only adds 50% to capacity...which if I really wanted, I could have spent an extra $20 to have gotten a 1.5TB drive today to have put it into just 1 bay.
Thus, when we try to figure out how much that second bay is really "adding", one estimate would be the current cost of upgunning from 1TB to 1.5TB; another would be the difference in cost between a 500GB and a 1TB and a third method would be the cost of a 500GB drive today. Pretty much all of these are indicating today that its <$50.
From there, the next question would be to ask what the benefits are of having a small machine. This is more aesthetics for desktops, but for a laptop, its a decent chunk of additional size & weight. There is no foolproof right/wrong answer: its shades of grey and preferences ... but given a minimalist / teutonic philosophy, the extra feature probably doesn't make the grade.
In a somewhat similar fashion, let's consider a flash card slot. Because there's a billion different memory card sizes, it gets ugly (& big) fast. Also, even if you pick one fairly popular one (say, SD), you'll make a chunk of people unhappy: I'm a fairly early adopter of digital cameras, so I have 40GB+ worth of CF cards, so I'm not going to be happy to see a slot that's useless for me. Finally, except for "old" CF, all of these formats are proprietary and rapidly changing: my Thinkpad has a built-in SD slot ... which is now incompatible with SDHD cards, so I have to carry an external adaptor anyway. Thus, is adding such a feature really "better"?
Finally, because of product differentiation, Apple has the luxury of being able to make these design decisions and limit their product line variation / proliferation. One can argue that this takes choice away from the consumer, but what it also does is strengthen the brand identity and message. Dell (et al) have a different problem being that they're in a cutthroat commodity segment, so have to try to compete on a commodity basis, where for the same price, having an extra HD bay or SD card slot can be a consumer "tie-breaker", even though Dell ultimately pays for this accommodation by having a much broader product line which costs them more to logistically support.
Plus then there is also the factor of how excessive choice turns many consumers off (See the book,
Paradox of Choice.., or visit Dell's mess of a website).
The Art is in trying to balance "just enough" against "too much". Philosophically, some designers prefer to err on the conservative side to prevent from going too far. For Apple, they went too far back in the dark days of the Performa proliferation of the 1990s, and that experience nearly killed the company, so it is burned into their corporate identity as something to avoid repeating at virtually all cost.
For an automotive analogy, consider Volkswagon, who up until roughly 1990, only used two different speedometer cluster designs across roughly 40 years worth of products. I learned this one by accident one day circa 1989 when waiting at a parts counter: a guy walked in, told the clerk that he needed a new speedo, and the clerk said "Okay" and headed for the bins. The customer said "Wait! I haven't told you what model VW I have". The clerk returned and said, "Oh?". Customer said a '62 Beetle ... and the clerk's reply was, "Okay, you need the other one.". Now consider for yourself how much the speedo layout influences your decision of if to buy a particular product ... and now consider how much money VW saved itself for years by only having to stock two versions...and now consider why GM/Ford/Chrysler are in so much trouble...
-hh
