We can’t think of a better way to ring in the new year than starting it off with a good ol’ fashioned teardown, so we spent all of our Christmas money to take apart the new iMac Pro. First, some good news: the RAM, CPU, and SSDs are modular. In fact, we saved some dough and successfully “maxxed” out our base model’s 32 GB of RAM to 128 GB with our handy Memory Maxxer kit. More good news: the space gray is pretty cool looking.
But now, the bad news: most of the key components require a full disassembly to replace. No RAM door, and a soldered GPU. These supposed “Pro” units aren’t cheap—and it sure would be nice to upgrade your $5000 workstation instead of replacing it with the new Mac Pro that’s around the corner…
Turns out this iMac Pro isn’t just a reskinned iMac after all—the Pro’s internal organs are newly configured to give priority to the cooling system, which is totally different from any other iMac we’ve seen. They increased the Pro’s cooling capacity by 80% through the addition of a dual-fan cooler, a ginormous heat sink, and a beefier rear vent. Said expanded cooling system likely benefited from the nixed RAM door and the switch from platter drive to SSD. Now we’ll all have to wait and see if the next iMac follows this design, and what the Mac Pro Apple wanted to make will look like. Cross your fingers for user-upgradeability.
iMac Pro Teardown Highlights:
Check out the rest of this iMac Pro teardown, and lots of other teardowns on iFixit.com/teardown
Apple computers always open new horizons.