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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."
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 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.
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."
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.
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
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!
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
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