iFixit is known within the Apple world as one of the first companies to carefully disassemble each of the parts of the new Apple equipment. This company whose main task is the repair of equipment, thinks that there is nothing better to know what you intend to fix in the future, than to know from today how each of the pieces of the products is installed.
On this occasion, has disassembled and shared with us his analysis of the base model of the iMac Pror, with an 8-core processor, 32 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
Let's go from the most generic to the most concrete. iFixit reveals to us how much RAM, CPU and SSD are modular and therefore can be replaced. If you want to know something more in detail, you can read the article posted a day ago on this page. But the rest of the components, including the graphics memory, are soldered, thus making their replacement difficult.
The first major difference from the iMac 5k (its predecessor) is that does not have a slot to replace the RAM. Therefore, today the best way to replace the RAM is to go to an Apple Store or authorized Apple supplier, who can perform the task. Doing it on our own, or in a generic repair shop, is not recommended. The rest of the components, CPU and SSD disks, are also replaceable. However, they are tailor-made for Apple, so we don't know if generic components will work.
As we progressed the GPU is soldered, making it difficult to replace. This whole part is redesigned. As Apple announced, it is very different from any other iMac. The reason for this is the substantial improvement in dissipating heat from equipment. We now have a dual fan cooler, which in iFixit's word:
It is a huge heat sink and a large vent
The display appears to be similar in structure to the 5-inch iMac 27k. The overall assessment for iFixit regarding the capacity for disassembling and replacing equipment is 3 out of 10, which indicates that today it is not one of the easiest Macs to replace. It is true that it will take several years to start requiring more power to this huge machine, and at that time you can always go to an Apple distributor for its expansion.