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They didn't know what the two huge metal plates are about, I would think that is for increased rigidity and weight for the iMac chassis, behind the LCD panel.
They know, it’s just that all their Apple related tear downs are two separate days now. And, I wouldn’t count on them posting the end of it tomorrow.
 
Show us the "Mystery Button." What happens when it's pushed? o_O
CounterZeroHieroglyphic.jpg
 
The x-ray version looks like a single-fan, so presumably is the 7-gpu and not the same one they’re actually disassembling.
It also appears to be missing that ‘daughterboard’ in the space made by the non-rectangular acoustic chamber where the second fan would otherwise be.
 
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I just love that the X-ray shows the Apple logo on the back is perfectly center aligned with the rounded-square internal area in the middle.

That's what I called obsession: the desire to perfectly design anything down to the smallest detail, even if it's just an alignment between something you see and you don't.
I'm going to assume you've never seen inside an iMac before - that "rounded square" IS the logo. It's a plate thats hot staked (or now maybe glued?) into a gap in the back panel.

The actual square in the middle of the logo is a WiFi antenna - as the logo is plastic it's the only place on the back they can put it.
 
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ONE fan on the 7-core GPU variant? I didn't see that coming
Indeed, Apple's recent trend of neutering the cooling on their consumer macs and "base" models is a really beginning to grate... It was bad enough when they started using 2 vs 4 ports as a differentiator, but with cooling... particularly when these are already expensive machines and there's no good reason better cooling couldn't have been included in the chassis (as its included in the upsell variant), the lack of transparency and blatent penny pinching at the expense of user experience just feels really gross. Reminds me of some of the scummier things you see PC OEMs doing :(

Apple Silicon is power/space efficient enough that EVERY mac deserves appropriate cooling, and its particularly egregious to see this on a desktop mac.

At least on the MBA it's an easy enough fix... just pop the back cover off and slap on some cheap thermal pads. I shudder to think of trying DIY a fix on an iMac though.

Also, I can't say the idea of an iMac that performs like my MBA is a very attractive idea... It feels like they really should've waited for an M1X/M2/etc.
 
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Indeed, Apple's recent trend of neutering the cooling on their consumer macs and "base" models is a really beginning to grate... It was bad enough when they started using 2 vs 4 ports as a differentiator, but with cooling... particularly when these are already expensive machines and there's no good reason better cooling couldn't have been included in the chassis (as its included in the upsell variant), the lack of transparency and blatent penny pinching at the expense of user experience just feels really gross. Reminds me of some of the scummier things you see PC OEMs doing :(

Apple Silicon is power/space efficient enough that EVERY mac deserves appropriate cooling, and its particularly egregious to see this on a desktop mac.

At least on the MBA it's an easy enough fix... just pop the back cover off and slap on some cheap thermal pads. I shudder to think of trying DIY a fix on an iMac though.

Also, I can't say the idea of an iMac that performs like my MBA is a very attractive idea... It feels like they really should've waited for an M1X/M2/etc.
…the machines are night and day more performant than the ones they replaced. Are you annoyed that Apple is simply using thermal constraints to differentiate (slightly) between performance tiers rather than having a chip selection?

I don’t see why this upsetting.
 
A stupid observation, but I see only one fan in the X-ray and in the photo, where is the second fan?
Their teardown has a four-port mid-tier model which has two fans as seen in some of the photos. While the x-ray is done by someone else on a two-port base model. This means the two models hardware-wise differ in number of fans.
 
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Apple made is so complicated to be fixed/tear down from a third party LOL
Of course. They want to close things down. Even more so in the past years (everything soldered etc.). I don't think, we will see many new Macs, where you could swap out components, except for the whole logic-board. If at all.
 
Only if the chipset was moved to the top, there could be no chin..
And where would you place the speakers and webcam? The speakers need to be bottom firing to take advantage of your table for reflecting the sound, so Apple can put smaller speakers. And if the logic board is moved to the top, the webcam has to go somewhere, and nobody likes a nostril webcam.
 
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Very nice to the see the inside of 24" iMac. Looks like two CMOS batteries?!! Interesting. Waiting to read more about it at the end of teardown.
 
All those metallic plates and empty spaces and they couldn't remove the chin
 
…the machines are night and day more performant than the ones they replaced. Are you annoyed that Apple is simply using thermal constraints to differentiate (slightly) between performance tiers rather than having a chip selection?

I don’t see why this upsetting.
Let me explain by going over why its problematic in the specific case of the iMac (which also handily explains why its a problem in other Macs.)

The main issue here (IMHO) is transparency. Just looking at the spec sheet on Apple's homepage one could reasonably assume the only difference, aside from storage capacity between the two 24" iMac options is 1 GPU core (or about a ~9% performance deficit in heavily GPU bound tasks based on previous M1 macs). This will undoubtedly lead some people to conclude they don't need that extra 9% GPU performance (maybe their workload is CPU bound) and just order the stock config, or CTO a 7C GPU iMac and used the money saved to go for 16GB of ram (for example.) Many of those people could be in for a rude awakening when they realize they've actually bought a mac with a significantly worse cooling system and consequentially slower performance/more noise.

To be clear, I don't own a 24" M1 iMac, and given how the M1 performs in the MBA/MBP/Mac Mini I don't expect cooling to be a major bottleneck, but it's still a major difference between the models that Apple needs to be clear about if they're going to use this as a point of differentiation going forward. While it may not matter much today, next year (or even later this year) when we have an M1X/M2/M2X/etc with more CPU and GPU cores and a potentially higher TDP, the differences could be quite significant.

So, to recap, the differentiation itself isn't the problem, the issue is the completely non transparent way that Apple is going about it. With Intel Macs, you generally knew what kind of performance you were getting by looking at the CPU/GPU on the box/spec sheet, and could thus make an informed decision. While there were a few Intel Macs where Apple really messed up the cooling, this tended to be the exception and not the rule, and typically applied to all SKUs across the product. Also, Apple doesn't get a pass on this kind of behavior just because they increased performance X% over last gen.
 
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They show a picture of the soc and ram, and say it's Hynix RAM.
So the M1 soc is not exactly one apple chip?
I thought the m1 would be 1 part made for apple, with "apple ram".
 
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