iFixit
Posted on 06/10/2017 10:24:59 AM PDT by Swordmaker
You can transform the basic iMac into a far more powerful machine with some time and tweaks.
Apple has broken away from the soldered mold by allowing RAM to be upgraded and CPUs to be tinkered with by users in the new iMac range.
The iPad and iPhone maker's product ranges are known for being notoriously difficult, if not close to impossible, to DIY upgrade.
While many PCs and desktop systems on the market allow swappable RAM and quick upgrades to everything from graphics cards to internal storage, Apple's use of soldering and how its devices are fashioned not only break the warranty if you tinker, but are often not worth the trouble.
(Excerpt) Read more at zdnet.com ...
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Good God, I never expected this..!
I just upgraded the RAM on my early 2008 iMac from 1GB to 4GB. The RAM chips snapped right into place on the underside of the monitor. Took less than 5 minutes.
The SSD or HD is also upgradeable according the iFixIt tear down. . . but one still has to dismount the LED backlit Screen to get at these components which is not for the faint of heart to attempt.
That task is a piece of cake compared to this upgrade. That access port is not available anymore. The big news here is that the RAM is no longer hard soldered to the logic board.
Apple is essentially giving up a small modicum of reliability for upgradeability.
Woz was right.
I just bought a new iMac after the hard drive died in my 2011 iMac which I had replaced and will give a a needy family member...
Good thing when I bought my iMac last year I fully upgraded it.
iMac 2016 Intel i7 6generation chip
16 GB DDR3 Ram
3.3 GHz that bursts to 4.0GHz
2 TB Fusion Drive
4K 21” screen
Love it and it runs very smooth. Very easy set up too. It’s extremely fast and no issues so far.
If you have to replace a hard drive in an iMac please replace with an SSD the single best upgrade you can do on any of these older machines. If I have to boot from a hard drive backup anymore I begin to think it isn't booting and start looking for problems. 😄
My friend took it to a authorized Apple repair shop in the next town and I have no idea what was installed. What do you use for a internet speed test...
Yay, I'm not crazy about the current double sided foam tape method of holding on the iMac glass panel. You have to cut the tape to remove the panel, then once the insides have been accessed, you have to apply a new tape kit before reattaching the glass. I liked the earlier iMac that used magnets to hold the glass frame in place.
[Insert random old-fart mutterings about how "In -my- day" here...]
Yup. Upgraded a 2012 iMac with a Samsung SSD. Made a world of difference on the speed of startup, launching apps. Not to mention no noise whatsoever.
Yes, a sure way to speed up your Mac. No need to defrag, as it is solid state. However, it is still a good idea to rebuild the SSD once in a while, as the machine will slow down over time for various reasons like the cache. Do it by copying to another new SSD (same size or larger), then swap drives. Now you have a full backup, and can repeat the process in the future.
The only modification I made to the Samsung SSD was to enable TRIM. With this set, I haven't done anything special with the drive and it seems to be fine going on 2 years.
I may investigate enabling it on my Mac Mini. After I got it, TRIM wasn’t supported by Mac OS/X for non Apple drives. I have two SSDs in my Mac Mini Server (2010). And I do believe in backups, copying the drives every year or so. I had one Samsung SSD 240GB fail on me, which surprised me, got a couple years out of it before then. But as I had a backup, I booted on the 2nd SSD and swapped the bad SSD. They are fast, even after running them for a few years, but there is a slightly noticeable drop in some writes - presumably due to lack of TRIM and the corresponding move of data to the cache during an overwrite. Perhaps I’ll upgrade and enable the TRIM as you have done and see what happens.
Other web based sites work as well.
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