Comments on: Photos: Inside the 24-inch aluminum iMac

Have you ever wanted to take suction cups to an iMac display just to get to its hard drive? Don Reisinger shows you how, with illustrated, step-by step instructions.

[sanenazok]

The part I like the best is that the hard drive also has an Apple logo! I guess when you pay for the logo you better get your money's worth, including on parts that should not see the light of day. How about printing the Apple logo on internal cables, you know the ones that will be get snagged when you pull the display out.

[Gadget70]

I have an iMac and if I had to do this every 5 years, not a big deal. It's strange how the PC'ers are almost like a formula 1 pit crew and time everything in seconds. Do you remove your PC hard drive with a power drill as well? Jeesh give me a break.

[codynews]

I thought this was a joke. Are you serious? ? All that to replace a hard drive? Yikes.

I had a HDD die in my PC a year or so ago and changed it in .001 seconds. My mom had a laptop disk die and even the laptop disk was easily accessible.

Amazing that Apple would make a machine with a component as important as the hard drive so difficult to get to

[lickmoreshoes]

You think some 40 year old can easily do this? i dont...very disapointed.

[TowerTone]

I can easily do this, lick your girlfriend, and whoop your butt at the same time.
Just kidding. I know you don't have a girlfriend...

[sythara]

Wow. I can strip out my entire gaming box (peripherals, mobo, etc) and put it back together faster and in less steps than this.

I guess I'm not 'cool enough' to put up with such level of pain in the a$$ as replacing a simple hardware component.

[csoccer1]

well no duh. anyone can strip apart a gaming box quickly. now how about if that gaming box suddenly turned into a very thin all in one. i think you'll run into a few problems.

[sythara]

I've worked with taking laptops apart before, and it wasnt as much pain as taking this apple apart seems. I am always open to the consept that I am wrong here, of course.

[bawkbawkboo1]

Am I the only one who thought that you should've gotten rid of all that dust on the main fan while you had the thing opened already? I had to replace the HDD and memory in a Mac Mini (2.0ghz, intel, last generation) recently and I removed its fan and used canned air on it, as well as the heatsinks, and now that machine's average fan speed under load is way lower. It is much quieter and presumably more energy efficient too. note: to measure the fan speed, I used the widget istat pro.

[nickh2]

Don Reisinger wrote: "invalid sibling link and invalid node structures..."

Both of the error messages indicate directory corruption.
Disk Warrior (alsoft.com) would have fixed this in about 10 minutes.

But having linked those error messages to threads on Apple Discussions, you already knew that didn't you?

[ikramerica--2008]

As long as DW could get it mounted. But yes, DW can bring directories back from the dead most of the time. Just salvaged my friend's external drive this way.

[tipoo_]

Wow, that fan is pretty grungy for the short time you guys had it! Did yo

[paulimusmaximus]

This is retarded. They obviously know that a hard drive has a higher chance of failing than a lot of other parts. They could have easily designed an access panel on the back for your hard drive, but they didn't. Why? I guess Steve Jobs is just trying to squeeze even more money out of mac owners since he figures they'll have to take it to the Apple store to get it fixed.

[Angmarr]

such a genius idea to combine everything into the desktop monitor LOL

[csoccer1]

it's an all in one. dell and hp do the same exact thing, i'm surprised that you've never ran in to one of these before.

[afterhours]

You need to note two things from this experience: You will find more RAM will make running your Mac a much more pleasant experience. Any computer today (Mac or Windows) runs so much better with 2 Gb or more installed. And that western digital crap will really bite you in the rear. Seagate, dude. Seagate.

[ikramerica--2008]

I've had 5 external seagates die in 1 year in 3 cases. Two of those were the replacements from Seagate for 2 of their failed drives. Worse, Seagate has a nasty habit of replacing their so called "media" class drives with non-media models when RMAd.

So honestly, I don't know if Seagates are all that much better.

[al0afofbr3ad]

shoulda cleaned the fan

[tipoo_]

Yea...

[TowerTone]

On the last day of my three year warranty, I took my 20" iMac Core Duo in for repair.
Apple replaced the logic board, no fuss, no muss.
Everything is working just fir

[b_baggins]

Point of order:

The cover over the display is glass, not plastic.

Secondly, It's a desktop machine. Just buy a FW 800 external hard drive and use it as your boot drive and save yourself the huge hassle of disassembling the machine.

[umdajs]

Never buy a mac "period"

[cp256]

Why in the world would anyone want a computer that wasn't easy to service? I hate windows as well as mac, but it literally takes me a very easy 5 minutes to swap out a failed hard disk. I always run a RAID mirror or several disk clones with staggered backups so I'm never down for longer than a reboot if I really need to use it, even on my notebooks. I'll never complicate my life to be pretty or trendy when it comes to a computer.

[afakirani]

Was I the only one who was shocked at the amount of dirt and grit that was stuck on the fans? For a comp that not that old, it seems like a lot of accumulation. With my towers, it was just a matter of opening the panels and cleaning out the dustbunnies that inevitably crawled in there. With a Mac? Wow! What a process!

Couldn't this also lead to over heating and CPU failures due to heat damage? Or worse, fire? Maybe I'm just paranoid! :)

[pithenumber]

you are just paranoid

I've seen much worse dust accumulation before
its scary to think that, but oh well

[speedvillain]

The IMac is a recyleable computer; frame and parts.. They try to sell IMac's by promotiing them " they are good for the environment".. I have old Dell computers that are running in optimum condition and they are on 12 hours a day. New always beat recycled hands down.

[borispmchan]

I don't think I'm going to replace my faithful IBM Thinkcentre with an iMac anymore. I used to open my Thinkcentre without unscrewing a thing..It's just tool-less operation.

[pcfish]

All those Apple haters are ridiculous. First of all, iMac is not decided for people to change the hardware every day, and Apple does not say the HDD is user changeable, therefore, it is not their job to make accessing the HDD easy. Secondly, if you really need a bigger space, get a Firewire 800 drive or a NAS.