Teardown of 5K Retina Dispay iMac Reveals What’s Inside
Continuing with its fascination for Apple products, iFixit, who are known for surgically removing all the organs of devices and laying them side by side, has acquired and disassembled the new iMac with 5K Retina display.
Apple’s newest iMac continues to use many of the same design elements from previous iMacs, including an easily accessible RAM upgrade slot, the same SSD, and logic board on the back of the device. With the RAM slot, users will be able to install their own RAM modules with little trouble.
Along with an AMD Radeon M290X GPU and i5-4690 processor from Intel, the iMac contains SK Hynix 256 MB GDDR5 SGRAM. It uses the same SanDisk PCIe SSD as the late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro, with Marvell Controller, and it uses the same AirPort/Bluetooth card that was used in the 2013 27-inch iMac.
Though, the processor, GPU, and display controller (sporting a wider display data cable) have received significant upgrades. The teardown also revealed that the 5K display, which sports the screen resolution of 5120 x 2880, has been manufactured by LG Display. It is the same supply partner that has also manufactured previous generation iMac displays.
The 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display earned a repairability score of 5 out of 10, the same score earned by the 2013 27-inch iMac. iFixit pointed out that the RAM, hard drive, and CPU are user replaceable with some adhesive cutting, but removing the glass and LCD panel from the machine remains a difficult task.
