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.

[airedale1950]

The pictures were extremely well done. The comments, incredibly sophomoric drivel.

[-Roddly]

I'm surprised people suggest getting an external. The whole appeal of getting an all in one is the small footprint and sleek design. So why would you go spend extra money to have it look like Frankenstein and have your performance decrease?

It's also ironic that many Mac evangelist here justify the extra price because "it just works" and because the TCO is less than a custom built PC due to the negligible time spent building and and the fabricated time spent maintaining it. Then right here we see it both fail no later than the junkiest PC and see a huge waste of time spent doing one of the most basic of tasks.

It's also peculiar how many people suggesting paying another premium on top of the "Apple tax" to get Apple Care for a machine that supposedly needs far less maintenance and for an OS that "just works" because, based on their experience, it's worth it.

And it's not that PC users time themselves. It really does take just a minute to do, especially since many modern cases are completely screwless and require no tools to do such a basic task, much less buying tools like a torx screwdriver and suction cups.

Just out of curiosity, how do you lift up four suction cups with just your hands and by yourself?

[silkychicken]

Two big suction cups will do the trick as well. I believe the author suggested a friend help you, hence the 4.

[Gimpymw]

Don. While you were around the internal of your iMac, did you notice if the processor was soldered to the board or whether it could be removed?

[wheelie207]

I'm planning to get a Mac mini for myself as its compact and takes little space.
I'm just fed up with PC's running Windows and I find apple software much better and rock solid and has about all the software you would need except maybe 2 or 3 apps you may have to install from third-party.

[francissawyer]

Thanks for the article. A friend's iMac drive just died, so this is timely.

[danimir]

There is this great iMac hard drive upgrade guide maintained since 2007 when first aluminum iMac hit the market, it also includes updates for aluminum iMac 2008 and iMac 2009 and has some other stuff, like iMac DVD (optical) swap and iMac CPU and GPU upgrades - I've actually used it quite a few times in the several past years to make hdd upgrade to 1 and 1.5 TB for my and my firends' iMacs:

http://www.amfiteatar.org/content/view/155/57/lang,en/

[silkychicken]

Regardless of all the negative comments about Apple. This task was actually stupidly EASY to do. Thank you for the post!

[rawCNET]

It's always funny to listen to the whole, now completely uneccessary, Apple - PC debate!
Takes me back to when it was a relevant argument :)
If you like the way Apple make things buy one! If not buy a PC, some are even quite good looking now!

I've just done the whole Aluminium imac HD replacement and was delighted at how easy it really was to complete (I read another take apart reference and it made things sound more complicated than they really are). mac mini cases are fiddly! 12" macbook is also a tight squeeze! old original bubble imac optical drive is also not much fun. Xserve graphics card (when you have a RAID card is a pain, Mac pro is a couple of twists and turns for the lot.

The bottom line is: If you have an aptitude or ability or even inclination to make any technology/elctronic/computer repair yourself then you'll reap the benefit of not having to pay somebody else to do something that you can easily achieve yourself and is ultimately more rewarding.

As the pro PC person on this page keeps keeps saying "I WON - It's harder to repair a Mac than a PC", that's fine. Good for you. I'm sure that feeling those thoughts will enrich your life enormously :)
And for the pro Mac crowd, we'll no doubt appreciate the fact that as time moves on so do the designs of both the inside and outside of all computers. Now where did I leave my suction cups...