teardown the new iMac 21.5″

iFixit didn’t take long to get their hands on one of the new iMacs and decided to dismantle it in short order.

The model in question is the 21.5″ sporting a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-2800S processor with 6MB Intel Smart Cache, 4GB RAM, and an AMD Radeon HD 670M GPU. For storage, Apple used a 500GB WD Caviar Blue drive. It’s an update mainly to give the line a much-needed performance boost as can be seen from those components.
As for the iMac itself, iFixit say this is pretty much just like the previous model, which unfortunately means getting inside is not the easiest of tasks. The display glass is held on magnetically meaning suction cups are your best bet for removing it without damaging the glass. Then there’s a bunch of Torx screws to remove in order to lift the display panel off the front bezel. Once that’s done you can gain access to all the components in the back casing.

If that hasn’t scared you off opening up your $1199+ iMac then things get a lot easier from there. The RAM, hard drive, and optical drives are easy to locate and switch out. There’s also a free bay for adding an SSD which is an option Apple offer of some models.
If you want to replace the CPU or GPU, however, the logic board has to be removed and some warranty stickers broken meaning no free Apple repairs. With the Core i5 chip and a Radeon HD 670 I doubt anyone will want to go this far as you have a lot of performance available by default.
The good news is Apple has done a solid job of cooling both the CPU and GPU. Each has the right amount of thermal paste applied and each chip has a separate heatsink and cooling units. You may remember the recent MacBook Pro teardown raised a concern about excessive thermal paste, but that is not the case with the iMac. The GPU also has four Hynix 1Gb GDDR SDRAM chips (512MB total RAM) next to it being cooled by the same heatsink.


iFixit give the iMac a 7 out of 10 repairability rating. So if you do want to save some money and upgrade the RAM or hard drive yourself, it’s not going to be too tough as long as you have those suction cups handy for the glass removal.