holy mother of Mack the new iMac is
upgradable while we were only expecting
the front of updates to be processor
upgrades it turns out the 21.5 inch 4k
iMac had some surprises for us getting
into this new iMac was a familiar and
sticky process we used our iMac pizza
cutter
I mean opening tool to cut away the
adhesive list the display and disconnect
it from the logic board it's time to
compare and contrast this new iMac has a
slightly larger logic board than the
last version we saw making the right
speaker a bit smaller but even more
noticeable is a conspicuous heatsink
mounting plate right in the middle of
the board but we'll get to that in a
minute since a speaker was trapped by
the logic board we had to remove the
power supply hard drive and the fan just
to get to the good stuff but now let's
talk about the most interesting part of
this iMac removing the logic board
reveals something we haven't seen in
years
removable RAM a huge win for upgrade
ability but the surprises weren't over
remember that he things we saw earlier
someone didn't want us to see what lies
beneath but whatever we ripped off that
warranty void sticker like a band-aid
and it felt so good what do we find a
modular CPU that's right this 3
gigahertz quad-core intel core i5 7400
processor can be lifted right off its
standard LGA 1151 CPU socket please
don't make me say this again and the
other less modular chips on the board
includes the AMD Radeon Pro 555 GPU and
the 2 gigabytes of SK Hynix B Ram if
you're looking for it we've got the
complete list of chips we've identified
over on our site with the iMac fully
disassembled it was time to evaluate its
repair ability the 20-17 21.5 inch 4k
iMac scored a 3 out of 10 and here's why
on the upside the CPU and RAM 2 of the
components you're most likely to upgrade
at some point are both modulars the
standard 2.5 inch SATA hard drive is
fully upgradable but you can't add a
blade SSD thanks to an empty pad on the
logic board cutting the tape to open the
iMac isn't too hard with the right tools
but it must then be replaced to complete
any repair but on the downside the glass
and the Retina display are fused
together increasing the cost of
replacement and most replaceable
components like
are buried behind the logic board
meaning you'll have to take apart most
of the iMac just to gain access avec but
we believe in you can do it we are so
excited to help you upgrade your iMac
that we're doing parts compatibility
testing as we see so stay tuned to find
out just how upgradable it actually is
that's all for this teardown don't
forget to check out the full tear down
over at ifixit.com and stay tuned for
more tear downs coming this week see you
next time