iFixit Tears Down the New 21.5-Inch iMac [Images]

iFixit has completed its tear down of the new 21.5-inch iMac.

Slimming down to a wafer-thin 5mm at its edges, the newest iteration of iMac is by far the slimmest of its kin. We are very curious what sort of diet could cause such a drastic change, so we opened it up to find out!

Highlights:
● Around the edge it is 5 mm thick. At its thickest, though, it is over 4 cm thick
● Cooling vents on the back of the rear case hidden behind the "foot."
● Heat gun and guitar picks are needed to get past the adhesive holding the display down
● Apple opted to fuse the front glass and the LCD
● Apple moved from multiple small fans to a single centralized fan
● The iMac's RAM is "user-replaceable" but you have to remove the display and logic board to do so.
● In order to carefully join together the pieces of the case, Apple turned to friction stir welding

iMac 21.5" EMC 2544 Repairability Score: 3 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair)
● You can still replace the RAM, hard drive, and CPU inside this machine.
● The glass and LCD are now fused together, and there are no more magnets holding the glass in place. That means it's heatgun time!
● Most replaceable components (like the RAM) are buried behind the logic board, meaning you'll have to take apart most of the iMac just to gain access to them.
● Budget-minded folks can no longer add a second hard drive to the base iMac unless they are super-fond of soldering missing proprietary connectors onto the logic board.
● You'll have to masterfully peel off the old double-sided sticky tape and apply new tape in order to reseal this iMac into original condition.

Take a look at a few photos below or hit the link for the entire tear down.

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