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iMac G5 Porn Roundup
boredMDer writes "Apparently someone who has already recieved their iMac G5 has decided to take it apart. Stupid if only for the fact that he's just voided his warranty."
pjcreath writes "Apple has posted official pages listing the components that are 'easy' to install (including the LCD!) and describing how to troubleshoot hardware problems using diagnostic LEDs inside the case. For the very curious, you can download the high-resolution TIFF (10MB) of the iMac's innards from Apple."
The new IMac presents a wonderful new opportunity for those of us stuck on the old terminal hacking mode of operation to get with the program. This article even shows that the innards of this machine can be beautiful and may win some appreciation among the Linux and GNU crowd. Despite some of the issues with sound, hopefully this will result in the development of more software for the currently undersupported Mac X OS.
This is more interesting than one might be lead to believe. If the parts are easy to replace then this saves on repair labor costs and it also makes nearly the whole unit a collection of field / user swappable parts. Being a PC field tech for a number of years this is really a radical shift for apple.
Now keeping this in mind i have seen many a screwless case come and go from both dell and gateway, and i would have preferred that they had screws as the mechanisms they used were so crappy it would have been easier to repair.
I was quite suprised at the Porn heading... and yes it was cruel. But carrying on looking at the box, it seems very tightly fitted. Looks like a really well thought system. I wish the guy could show some more important images of the system like how well it sucks in air and removes it. But the most amazing thing about the iMac is the price and technology. A nice PPC chip with a Nvidia 5200 board all sounds great. It would be great if Apple made the system such that you could just use it as a media center. It plays DVDs like that, even though a MAC out of sleep mode does not take too long ... But the Broadcom ethernet chip is a real bad one. Broadcom runs hotter, they should've got the Intel Pro 1000. They also supposedly run at higher MTUs. But how many people are gonna run these boxes on a gigabit network. But definately a nice thin client is very appreciated. I use my workstation's fans to cool of my sweaty feet.
Over all a great system I give it 4 out of 5. Kind of pricey, and loss of sweaty feet drier :). ( but a G5 with a dual FPU is nice, and that PPC architecture kicks ass. ).
But thin clients are the way to go for the home.
So much easier to move around and easy for that 2 year old to knock around. :)
I was wondering around my local Microcenter the other day when I saw one of these. "Funny," I thought to myself, "I've never seen this style of Apple flatscreen. I thought they were all styled in the Cinema line." Little did I know it was a full computer! Very impressive.
Fella I know is an exporter in China. One time, they were exporting sunglasses. My friend wants to know, do these have UV protective coatings? After several confused back-and-forths through the translator, the Chinese factory rep finally lights up, and says, "Yes! We have sticker!"
True story.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have no idea how, but Firefox took care of it for me when I downloaded it. After downloading it, it had the name 04imac_inside.tif.hqx.tiff and it opened fine.
...
I took apart a 20" iMac G5 today. It took 45 minutes to take it 100% apart (well, at least 100% as far as under warranty replacement parts are concerned) and put it back together.
Easy as pie, as long as you don't strip the screws like an idiot.
Plus, the midplane isn't very heavy or awkward at all, I'm not a burly geek girl, and I could handle it all by me onesy.
Cthulu saves... in case he gets hungry later.
::helping geeks get laid since 1983::
Yes, there's only one HDD, but it's actually not that big of a deal since the iMac ships with USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 ports. Simply add an array of firewire drives if you need more storage. I personally have two 250MB LaCie D2 drives connected to my mac laptop via firewire and it's an ideal solution an extremely convenient. Yeah, it may add to desktop clutter, but the iMac has an extremely small footprint so it's not a huge deal.
I do, however agree with you on the GPU. If it were upgradeable, it would be okay, but since it's soldered to the logic board, Apple should have at least thrown in an ATI 9600XT or even a 9700/9800 Mobility if heat were an issue. I know I'm dreaming, but I keep hoping the next iMac will feature the new mini PCI-e slots ATI and NVidia are developing... As for people recommending Macs for hardcore gaming, I really don't know who you talk to. Most avid mac fans would probably say that gaming is adequate, but if you're a hardcore gamer you'd be better off buying a console or designated PC since it takes forever to get games ported.
Combine a G5 type thing with a Wacom Cinteq so that we can have some seriously scary tablet computer stuff for artists? I mean, the G5 is almost completely a Tablet computer, it just lacks a way to point directly at the screen. So why not do overkill? The only problem is that if you straight out combine the prices, it gets pretty sick.
@Whee
This is not only cruel but also quite dangerous as it has just caused Slashdot to be firewalled here in my lab. Not that it would be a bad idea productivity-wise... Maybe whitelisting it wasn't so good idea after all.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
HQX is not a compression scheme, it's an encoding scheme. 7 bit binary, IIRC. It's called binhex. (I still don't know why they used it on a .TIFF file.)
Companies that mass-produce computers usually operate on a razor-thin profit margin.
That's a valid point.
If money is no object and you're willing to pay extra for something that you might never see like a heatsink as a casual computer consumer, then you are purchasing a luxury item.
Please! His points were accurate. If you are HP or Gateway or Dell, then that statement is wholely true. The differences are trivial and end-cost is a hugely important factor. This is not flamebait, merely a statement of why purchasing apple is a status symbol!
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
To me, a pretty computer ceases to be pretty when it sounds like a vacuum cleaner.
While they aren't the first in alot of things they are usually the first to perfect a concept, or make it usable to the vast majority of people.
Por ejemplo, these all-in-ones have been around for a few years. They have also universally sucked. We got a chance to demo two models (one from Omnitech now MPC and another from Gateway) back in June. Each one was nearly 40 pounds. They were *beasts*. Each was constructed mainly of plastic and felt very flimsey - the gateway model had a few little plastic panels that fell off while we were demoing it (yeah, we're gonna buy this for University students to use...). In addition, each one had a - basically - notebook cdrom drive with a tray. Ever try putting a cd in a tray that's sideways? It sucks. Apple realized this and came out with the nice slot loading concept. There were also a lot of little things wrong with them (buttons placed on the front that weren't very easy to read at a distance, ports on 3 sides left, right, front, etc).
Basically every single thing wrong with the all-in-ones we demo'd apple fixed. *Directly because of this* for the first time in forever we are going to add apple's to our public rotation of computers. Good job apple!
"good" and "dell" in the same sentence? What are you smoking?
I'm typing this on my work Dell Latitude (yes they put a gun to my head:( ) and let's see:
So you can understand why I laugh in the face of anyone that describes any consumer computer made by Dell as good. They're not. They are the epitome of why Wintel PCs are shit.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
*Boggle*
What's a MAC 2E?
An Apple IIe? Mac SE/30? Mac IIcx? Mac LC III?
And what's a HYPERDRIVE? Macs had what Apple called a "SuperDrive," but that was a high density 3.5" floppy. Recently the same name got applied to a DVD-R drive.
I charge plenty of PC owners $100/hr to fix their Windows crap.
I have to wonder about clients who think they are saving $300 on a cheaper no name PC from Costco, only to spend a couple years on a crappy machine that runs poorly, has flakey software bundled with it, and requires expensive repair time when users plug it into their DSL, fire up IE and saturate their machine with viruses and malware.
If they bought a Mac, they could pay me to teach them useful things like learning Photoshop or AppleScripting their workflow instead of bailing out their Windows problems.
If anyone at Marathon is listening, I'd buy a rack kit in 2 seconds. Include a power supply to install in the iMac case and power the LCD, plus add a DVI port, and you end up with a great rackmounted Mac and a nice display to use on some other Mac.
I wonder if I can order all the parts except the case and LCD, and get the computer cheaper that way. Probably not.
I wasn't trolling, just very suprised that a machine that looks like it's intended to be fairly high-end would use a very weak video processor....
The Geforce FX 5200 processors, while supporting the latest features, are slower than the previous generation Geforce Ti4200. Lots of people in the PC world were suckered into buying a 5200 based card in the recent doom upgrade craze, only to find out that they are amazingly slow.
I guess any comment that points out a shortcoming must automatically be a troll.....
You're right. BinHex II (.hqx) is a format from the early days of the net and online services. Back when people would e-mail programs to a repository, get them through FTP-mail getways, or using Kermit. In this case, as someone else noted, all you're getting is the file meta-data, including icon.
.hqx simply because its intended use is to be downloaded and used in Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Freehand, Quark, or other design tool. Making it an .hqx file has the virtue of making it go to your hard drive, not perhaps a browser window. As a son-in-law of a graphic designer, I can say that the overhead of the BinHexing the file is more than worth not having to explain how to save an image in a browser window, especially if a designer's browser shows nothing but a broken image icon, because it can't display TIFFs.
The file was probably made available as a
Dragging and dropping as well as right- or control-clicking are, sadly, not techniques used extensively by many people. Of course a designer is dragging and dropping all the time in e.g. Illustrator or Photoshop, but the idea that you can drag a picture from a browser window to your desktop or to a folder can be mind blowing.
I just "accidentally" visited the apple wwwstore a few days ago and needed all of my restraint to not call Visa and extend my credit a couple G's :) Those tiny G5's are damn sexy, and if they didn't cost so much I think I'd crack one open as well. I have a hunch they're using notebook technology in there. Heck, my P4 notebook is bigger than this G5 =)
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Now when ours arrives tomorrow I'll be able to resist the urge to open it up and see what's inside.
Well, hopefully.
Amen brother...
As means of comparison, in Sept 2000 I got a Compaq laptop at work. The POS only lasted two years before pieces of plastic started breaking off. When I turned it in March 2003 I told my boss it was unusable because it was falling apart.
At the same time, my wife bought a tangerine clamshell iBook. She's still got it, it still runs and, except for the tangerine leaf in the lid of the case all the pieces are there and the computer still runs.
My father is a blogger.
Back in the annals of yesteryear our department maintained a few MAC's. Being a PC tech at the time I knew sweet little about the little beige boxes, but when they did break I always offered a hand to see if I could fix what was wrong.
An external floppy drive at one point died on the unit (which was out of warranty). I verified that it was indeed toast and called our local Apple shop to source a replacement.
They gave me a price and we were in the middle of processing the order when the slipped in a By The Way.
"We need the old drive back"
I told them No You Don't. The machine isn't under warranty. I'm buying a replacement part - this isn't a warranty service.
They pushed the point and said that they couldn't sell me the replacement drive unless I gave them the old drive back.
At that point I hung up on them and bought the replacement drive through an online vendor.
Is Apple still as anal these days about dispensing replacement parts for out of warranty repairs?
I can't tell from the kodawarison take apart or the Apple diagrams if the processor itself is on a daughtercard this time.
If so, I wonder how long it will be before PowerLogix or Sonnet can come out with a faster CPU.
I've also wondered about the GPU (Graphics card) since the educational units have such a different graphics card - I wondered if they were making motherboards specifically for education for the new iMacs or whether the GPU was simply on a card that easy to replace.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The NeXTstation slab was built with the precision of a swiss watch and the strength of a bulldozer. The 4 screws were just about perfect -- they kept tool-less folks from poking around inside, and the prevented the need for cheap "easy to use" latches and such.
:)
Still, my favorite part of the NeXTstation was the airflow design. Air was pulled in through a row of holes across the top of the rear of the case, flowed past the CPU heatsink, pushed out via a downward-facing fan near the front of the case, then back under the case past the power supply heatsink, and finally out the lower left rear of the case.
The NeXT keys and mouse were awesome too -- control key where it belongs, no traditional "caps lock" key. Full size power, brightness, and audio keys above the arrow keys. And the best part? The keyboard and mouse were surrounded by a thin rubber bumper to muffle any plastic "clump" sound that would otherwise be made if the mouse were to bump into the keyboard.
Oh, and the price matched the engineering!
There are numbers out there about the longevity of Macs in workplaces, both in terms of their not breaking down and in terms of how long they're usable for their task. The Gartner Group has done some, I know.
The evidence isn't just anecdotal, but it is muddied by stuff like the fact that OS X has actually been getting noticably faster for older machines. (Ars technica: "Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.") That's not just a physical measure of the machine, it's to do with the whole set of end-to-end stuff that Apple can control in its little proprietary world. And yeah, it's a high-quality market niche, and nope, that's not just an imagined difference.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
While I see where you are coming from on this (I build every non-Apple box I use), some of the perception probably comes from the software that they run.
For example, I've had this PowerBook for two years, and I've had to reinstall the Mac OS once and that's only because I wanted to start fresh... there was nothing wrong with it.
However, the reference-platform dual Xeon workstation that I have in my home office has had four reinstalls of Windows 2000 and XP during the same time period, due to irrecoverable failures of the OS.
With that track record, I would say that my Mac lasts for a long time, where the x86 box fails sooner.
However, if I mix in Linux on that x86 box, we're in a whole new ballpark...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I dunno, I always thought of computers and people with their covers removed as simply being 'in the nude', and it's not actually 'ponr' per se, unless of course the subject is turned on at the time.
This leads to the dubious example of situations in which the subject is likely not actually turned on, but made to appear so in order to increase the appeal of the picture.
Granted the line between nudity and porn is a thin one, and in America one might construe mere nudity as porn, but in more progressive nations actual Software EXchange has to be taking place to be classified as pornographic.
'The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age,' -Hamá, the doorward
Actually we only have 3 Apples at work. We haven't had any problems at all with them.
I was just reflecting on the world at large, that people see problems with more generic (commodity) laptops as the cost of doing business, while a problem with an Apple laptop is newsworthy.
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Pretty Bad Privacy (PBP) Public Key
6
I managed one of the largest Apple authorized service centers for a few years. Sure, sometimes we could tell that it looked like *someone* had been in the Mac before, but that doesn't mean the person was the customer. It would be one thing if we sold the Mac to the customer and they come back later that day or something, but if it was purchased at another store, we have no way of knowing what the actual history was.
To be honest, we didn't really care much. If it was obvious that someone who didn't know what they were doing had done something that violated the terms of the warranty, and it resulted in damage, then we would start asking questions...but this was actually very rare...usually the customer would admit what they did because it was so obvious (like a broken ribbon cable).
The bottom line (which most customers don't/didn't believe) was that it was always in our interest to go in favor of the customer. Apple *paid* us for warranty repairs and in our case, they paid us more than what we charged customers for the same jobs. We would really push the evelope with Apple warranties in terms of what we could get away with and what was ethical.
YMMV
I have to admit, the G5 iMacs look pretty nifty. Not that I'm going to buy one... but my main complaint would be that the video processor is imbedded on the mainboard... so there's no way to upgrade it a year from now when it won't play the latest / greatest games any more.
Some laptops (like Dell Inspirons since it Inspiron 8000) have the video card on a seperate (but proprietary) daughter card. While it's not officially supported by Dell, you can purchase a newer / faster video card for them.
Too bad there isn't a "standard" mini-agp, or mini-pci-x video card for laptops and all-in-one units like the G5 iMac.
I'm not going to argue this. SEMA is wrong, their position is contrary to case law. You too can use google, if you wish, to dig the references up.
The "warranty void if removed" stickers on consumer electronics, including computers, have been tried in court and held to be legal. SEMA's position has also been tried in court over aftermarket modifications on cars and in every case its been found SEMA's position is wrong.
95% of people who argue the Magnusson-Moss relavence online seem to do so out of information they've read online from questionable sources, or in the case of car modders, wishful thinking. In the case of the car modders, I've known quite a few people to learn five-figure lessons on that one, not counting the fees they've paid to lawyers.
As an aside to your oil change example, one of the reasons free scheduled maintennance is included on so many high end cars now is it frees the dealer from most of the points around Magnusson-Moss. There have been a number of cases of engine warranty cases being denied using a 3rd party oil change as the reason, because the manufacturer pays for the required ones.
Either way, I have no intent on arguing it any more. I've had that arguement far too many times, and people who so strongly take your position tend to not want to sway their opinion anyway.
Do what you want, hopefully it won't bite you. A lot of people aren't that lucky.