Teardown of New 4K 21.5-Inch iMac Reveals Removable RAM and Modular CPU

Megalith

Megalith

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Apple has done something revolutionary yet again: they are letting their users remove the RAM and CPU from their computers. An iFixit teardown has revealed that the memory modules aren't soldered onto the logic board, and the Intel SR32W Core i5-7400 Kaby Lake processor sits in a standard LGA 1151 CPU socket. These are truly exciting times.

After slicing through the adhesive that secures the 4K display to the iMac's housing and removing the power supply, hard drive, and fan, iFixit discovered that the memory modules aren't soldered onto the logic board like previous models, but instead sit in two removable SO-DIMM slots. Similarly, after detaching the heatsink and removing the warranty voiding stickers on the backside of the logic board, iFixit found that the Intel SR32W Core i5-7400 Kaby Lake processor sits in a standard LGA 1151 CPU socket, making it possible to replace or upgrade the CPU without a reflow station.
 
Yeah but who wants to instantly void the warranty on their $5000 iMac (I made that up, I don't know how much it costs).

Is this thing any good? "Radeon Pro 555 GPU with 2 GB of VRAM" Too bad that's not upgradable, looks soldered to the motherboard...

Edit - I was wrong, $1300. Still....
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/apple/new-imac-2017-news-release-date-price-specs-3648111/

  • iMac 21.5in - $1,099
  • iMac Retina 4K 21.5in - $1,299/£1,249
  • iMac Retina 5K 27in - $1,799
  • iMac Pro - $4,999
 
I'll bet that "letting" means voiding the warranty and risking a lawsuit if you get paid to change the parts.
 
Yeah, that's a lot better than they used to be. But you're still stuck with the shitty GPU. Imagine paying $2300 for a 20% underclocked RX 580?

The rest is "upgradeable," but that price is outrageous for a device with a "fusion" drive and 8GB ram standard.

This is why I laugh at AMD fans who sing the praises of the Apple win. The only "affordable" part of AMD's GPUs gets passed on directly to Apple's coffers. You pay the Apple premium no matter what shit they sell you, because pretty screen. Even though you can't reuse it as an external screen in future computers you purchase, people still pretend it's a "great value."

If you consider how long most displays last (decade or more), It's pretty sad that Apple stopped offering Target Display Mode. Even with the wide availability of USBC-Thunderbolt3 (more than enough bandwidth for 5k, as the Macbook Pro can attest), there''s no support for it in the latest models.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7976201?start=0&tstart=0

"Great deals" become sour quickly if you have to buy one every 3-4 years, and throw away the old one.
 
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whateverer said:
Yeah, that's a lot better than they used to be. But you're still stuck with the shitty GPU. Imagine paying $2300 for a 20% underclocked RX 580?

The rest is "upgradeable," but that price is outrageous for a device with a "fusion" drive and 8GB ram standard.

This is why I laugh at AMD fans who sing the praises of the Apple win. The only "affordable" part of AMD's GPUs gets passed on directly to Apple's coffers. You pay the Apple premium no matter what shit they sell you, because pretty screen. Even though you can't reuse it as an external screen in future computers you purchase, people still pretend it's a "great value."

If you consider how long most displays last (decade or more), It's pretty sad that Apple stopped offering Target Display Mode. Even with the wide availability of USBC-Thunderbolt3 (more than enough bandwidth for 5k, as the Macbook Pro can attest), there''s no support for it in the latest models.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7976201?start=0&tstart=0

"Great deals" become sour quickly if you have to buy one every 3-4 years, and throw away the old one.
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Underclock by 20% 580 lol? You are giving Apple to much credit.
 
Weird of them backtracking after everything was soldered.
 
whateverer said:
Yeah, that's a lot better than they used to be. But you're still stuck with the shitty GPU. Imagine paying $2300 for a 20% underclocked RX 580?
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That's what the Thunderbolt 3 ports are for I suspect. Didn't Apple do an external GPU demo recently? They seem to be committed to supporting that.
 
Probably because their shitty OS isn't selling itself anymore like it used to. Seems that all they've done is add gimicks to it, other than changes to sell their other products. Time to do OSXI becuase OSX is feeling dated compared to Windows now.
 
Lifelite said:
Probably because their shitty OS isn't selling itself anymore like it used to. Seems that all they've done is add gimicks to it, other than changes to sell their other products. Time to do OSXI becuase OSX is feeling dated compared to Windows now.
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Are you shitting me? OSX is a nice breath of fresh air from the Microsoft advertising platform that is Windows 10, loading its 3rd party software without permission and installing updates when it wants even if you want to actually do some work. Oh and dont even get me started on useless Cortana vs Spotlight that was perfected year ago... then you have the utterly insane and convoluted permissions and ownership hierachy that only a retard would design.
 
They may have merely done this in the attempt to sell upgrades that can only be performed under warranty at an apple retailer. If you bought 500 of these computers for a business, wanting to keep the warranty, you would be forced to shell out for the premium upgrade experience instead of slamming in some more RAM down the line.
 
King of Heroes said:
That's what the Thunderbolt 3 ports are for I suspect. Didn't Apple do an external GPU demo recently? They seem to be committed to supporting that.
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*with the limitation of using an external display, if you want to get anywhere near full performance out of these things. Remember, the whole attraction of this thing is "all other screens ugly," right?

See that performance hit on Heaven between external and internal? Yeah, kinda defeats the purpose, especially since the under-clocked RX 580 will have about twice the performance of that Macbook Pro.

https://egpu.io/macos-pascal-drivers-gtx-1080-ti-2016-macbook-pro/

So again, why are we paying a premium for an all-in-one with limited upgrade options? But HEY LOOK THUNDERBOLT! Because it comes with a pretty screen that you can't even use when gaming at-full-tilt?

Really, did anyone at Apple even think about this design for even one hot second? The upgrade-able parts that truly matter are ham-stringed.
 
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Well, it is a lot cheaper for Apple to repair machines if everything isn't just soldered onto the "logic board" motherboard.

In the recent past, RAM, CPU, or anything else goes bad, they have to replace the whole board. Now if something goes bad like the RAM, they can just replace the RAM.

Exactly how hard is it for Apple to use common sense? What is this sorcery that has invaded their ranks?
 
aokman said:
Are you shitting me? OSX is a nice breath of fresh air from the Microsoft advertising platform that is Windows 10, loading its 3rd party software without permission and installing updates when it wants even if you want to actually do some work. Oh and dont even get me started on useless Cortana vs Spotlight that was perfected year ago... then you have the utterly insane and convoluted permissions and ownership hierachy that only a retard would design.
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Must agree with you.

I just wished that apple bothered in considering the clones market again, considering that they are making all their money on iphones and store cuts, not like before, that they depended solely on Mac sales.

There is nothing magical on their macs, besides being artificially limited by themselves.
 
cyclone3d said:
Well, it is a lot cheaper for Apple to repair machines if everything isn't just soldered onto the "logic board" motherboard.

In the recent past, RAM, CPU, or anything else goes bad, they have to replace the whole board. Now if something goes bad like the RAM, they can just replace the RAM.

Exactly how hard is it for Apple to use common sense? What is this sorcery that has invaded their ranks?
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They have the toaster mentality.

Nobody repairs a toaster, it gets replaced.

They have always being a hardware company, which uses software as bait. But I honestly think that they have one hell of a shot in the desktop OS market, given how insane MS is acting lately.

They can easily sell OSX for 50 every year and people would be happy to pay for it.
 
aokman said:
Are you shitting me? OSX is a nice breath of fresh air from the Microsoft advertising platform that is Windows 10, loading its 3rd party software without permission and installing updates when it wants even if you want to actually do some work. Oh and dont even get me started on useless Cortana vs Spotlight that was perfected year ago... then you have the utterly insane and convoluted permissions and ownership hierachy that only a retard would design.
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But can it run Crysis?
 
Lifelite said:
But can it run Crysis?
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If Apple would build a hypervisor that would let me run windows apps with access to the a virtualized GPU, on top of OSX (instead of boot camp), i'd be all over it. In a hackintosh of course. Apple still see gamers as the lowest form of rebel scum, even though they would have gladly had my money in the old Mac Pro tower days. Haven't they heard that gaming on computers is a thing again?
 
grtitan said:
Must agree with you.

I just wished that apple bothered in considering the clones market again, considering that they are making all their money on iphones and store cuts, not like before, that they depended solely on Mac sales.

There is nothing magical on their macs, besides being artificially limited by themselves.
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As someone who runs a hack, I partially agree with you but if they sold OSX, they would need to support it and all the hardware variations out there. One of the advantages of Apple and OSX is how cohesive their hardware and software is together, with Windows you constantly feel like the hardware and software are fighting each other to work properly.

I don't think its reasonable to expect Apple to open their OS up to clones, they put so much work into bring the world of software and hardware together and they have succeeded for the most part.
 
aokman said:
As someone who runs a hack, I partially agree with you but if they sold OSX, they would need to support it and all the hardware variations out there. One of the advantages of Apple and OSX is how cohesive their hardware and software is together, with Windows you constantly feel like the hardware and software are fighting each other to work properly.

I don't think its reasonable to expect Apple to open their OS up to clones, they put so much work into bring the world of software and hardware together and they have succeeded for the most part.
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If apple would release a tall mac mini with a choice of 1070/1080 mobile GPUs they'd be heroes among the alienware/razer laptop crowd to plug into their TV.
 
aokman said:
As someone who runs a hack, I partially agree with you but if they sold OSX, they would need to support it and all the hardware variations out there. One of the advantages of Apple and OSX is how cohesive their hardware and software is together, with Windows you constantly feel like the hardware and software are fighting each other to work properly.

I don't think its reasonable to expect Apple to open their OS up to clones, they put so much work into bring the world of software and hardware together and they have succeeded for the most part.
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I really hate that reasoning.

Hackintoshes runs great with zero support from apple, imagine if they supported them.

The hardware variations is a bit of a myth, since almost every major component these days belongs to one or two companies and they will provide the drivers for it.

The problem with windows is its own design, but i will admit, as much as i hate w10, drivers are not an issue in my experience, except for one old amd card that i had at work.

Besides, apple will have more income generated by macOS and as the business grow, they can hire more people for testing and validation.

They dont even need to release an OS every year either.

Lastly, there are people that would only buy apple hardware, for those, all they have to do is keep releasing imacs, mbp and whatever else they feel like.
 
grtitan said:
I really hate that reasoning.

Hackintoshes runs great with zero support from apple, imagine if they supported them.

The hardware variations is a bit of a myth, since almost every major component these days belongs to one or two companies and they will provide the drivers for it.

The problem with windows is its own design, but i will admit, as much as i hate w10, drivers are not an issue in my experience, except for one old amd card that i had at work.

Besides, apple will have more income generated by macOS and as the business grow, they can hire more people for testing and validation.

They dont even need to release an OS every year either.

Lastly, there are people that would only buy apple hardware, for those, all they have to do is keep releasing imacs, mbp and whatever else they feel like.
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That's quaint, but the truth is every hackintosh sold is a potential buyer who may have been adopted into the Apple family, cross sold on other Apple products ($40 dongles, iphone, accessories) and locked into their world view. The average lifetime revenue per Mac user is so much higher than the license for OSX it makes no financial sense to dilute their user base. Quite a few will just cave and buy an iMac or Macbook (specced to the max to just approach reasonable gaming performance, I've been tempted in the past) so there's no justification. Much as we'd like them to, that's economics regardless of how much we hate it.
 
Why does Apple insist on "logic board" instead of the more traditional "motherboard?"
 
MrTryfe said:
4k on 21 inches seems a bit overkill, no?
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I have 4k on a 28" screen and that looks tiny. I end up setting it at 1440p, cause I don't feel like sitting really close to my monitor.

Jim Kim said:
How about they "let" people build Hackentoshes by making it easier to do and legal. That would show real courage.
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Cause then they fall into MS's court. Where they'd get sued for monopoly practices. As Apple sells a plaform, not just an OS, they can get away with bundling their own software into the OS. Where as, MS got sued for bundling IE, media player, etc.
 
aokman said:
... then you have the utterly insane and convoluted permissions and ownership hierachy that only a retard would design.
Click to expand...

That bit I'm with you all the way on there. I would love to have seen the design meeting where the moron who came up with that tried to explain it to the room.
 
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