the latest computer in apple's lineup to
inherit the snazzy m1 chip
is the 24 inch imac redesigned with a
new color palette and a shockingly thin
profile it's hard to imagine there's
much room for repairability in this
thing
but as always we would love to be
surprised the only way inside is through
that new 4.5 k screen
so thankfully the adhesive holding it in
place is forgiving
our imac opening tool does the trick
perfectly this is nowhere near as nice
as the magnets that held in the ancient
imac screens but
at least it's not ipad adhesive our
first look inside reveals an empty
looking machine but remember
a lot of this space was taken up by the
display hardware one thing's for sure
there's a lot of metal there's two
massive grille chambers
the stand contact hardware a plate over
the apple logo
and twin plates covering what looks like
a pair of cmos batteries
tucked into the chin is the logic board
surrounded by fans and speakers and
masked by this shield the shield has
some torx screws holding it down but
won't fully come out until you remove
the extra screws hidden under this black
sticker
the board is similar to the one we saw
in the m1 macbook air and is held down
with 2.5 millimeter nuts
a strange choice but again anything is
better than ipad glue
before we take a closer look at the
silicon i'll pull the fans out so we can
take a look at the whole cooling system
together
four screws hold the heat pipe on and
underneath is the star of the show
the m1 chip the small heat pipe draws
heat away from the m1 and into the heat
sinks where it gets blown away by the
two fans our mid tier model comes with
in addition to the eight core m1 system
on chip this side of the board's got
eight gigabytes of sk
hynix lp ddr4 memory 128 gigabytes of
keoxia storage
and a morata wi-fi bluetooth module on
the back side there's another 128
gigabytes of storage
a broadcom ethernet controller for that
ethernet port built into the power
supply
and a cirrus logic audio codec to the
right of the logic board are some nifty
flip-up usb-c
port housings they're secured with more
torque screws and once those are out of
the way you can lift them up and
disconnect them
each unit houses two ports for a grand
total of only four ports
that's not a lot for a desktop computer
but at least they're modular
each side of the imac is home to newly
designed speakers with some pretty cool
tricks up their sleeves
each speaker unit houses two woofers and
a tweeter and to increase the amount of
air they're able to displace they're
connected to those giant metal chambers
on either side of the imac
since this thing is too thin to
accommodate a headphone jack around the
back with the rest of the ports it's now
on the left side tucked into this corner
next to the power button
it's not the simplest thing to fish out
but dispatch a few screws
and some gluey cables and it's yours
well we've picked at just about all the
interesting bits of this imac
one last thing to know is the new stand
hardware which isn't removable from the
outside like some previous imacs
so you'll have to take your screen off
to make the swap if you didn't buy the
visa mount version from apple
now that we're done with the mac we can
move on to the new magic keyboard
we are really only interested in the new
fingerprint sensor here since this is
still just a glue a mess on the inside
our testing revealed that like on an
iphone the touch id sensor in these
keyboards is paired to the board that
it's built with
which is basically what we expected but
we just had to check so it's safe to say
that a lot of impressive engineering
went into making the imac as thin as
possible
but did anyone really need an ultra thin
desktop computer
making the adhere display the only entry
point to the computer complicates all
repairs
and switching the imac over to m1 in
such a cramped space
eliminates any chance of easy storage or
memory upgrades
there are several modular components but
that's not enough to save this from our
repairability scale where it scores a
disappointing
2 out of 10.
you