I have been moved down to Rutland from South Burlington to cover the tech position for a short duration. The queue down here is running smoothly and the average turnaround time is actually doing pretty well considering I can only be in the store three days a week and normally after hours. One repair that I ran into that took me off guard was for a brand new Retina 5K iMac 27 inch that just came out. It had a defective display where it displayed both vertical and horizontal bars in different colors with varying screen flickering. I ran it through normal diagnostics and narrowed it down to the actual display itself and ruled out the graphics card. The display is on order and I’m just waiting for it to come in.
I didn’t anticipate having to repair a 5K iMac so soon, but it did give me a unique opportunity to see how the internals were arranged and changed from the previous generation of iMac. Everything appears to have been shifted to the bottom of the machine, leaving open space where it tapers towards the top of the machine. Apple went back to a 3.5” hard drive in the new iMacs, where the previous two generations all used 2.5” drives. Externally it does look very similar to all the previous iMacs but internally its completely different. For example, the speakers are larger and the boards are smaller and shaped differently. It looks beautiful on the inside, a technicians dream with how modular everything is getting. The most difficult part of having to service the new(er) style of iMacs is having to deal with the adhesive that holds the display to the back housing. Having to cut the adhesive with the provided pizza-style cutter can be frustrating if the display refuses to come off the back housing, as happened with this repair.
The second worst part is putting the display back on, which requires having to get the adhesive perfect with everything aligned, because if it’s not aligned, you have to cut the display off and try again. One aspect of the new iMac that I really like is that the display isn’t screwed down to the main logic board and only has one connection internally. This makes diagnosing easier because the inverter board, which manages the backlight level of the display, is incorporated into the display itself rather than a separate board within the machine.
All in all, I can see the new 5K iMacs being an easier to diagnose machine then its predecessor but, hopefully for your sake, I don’t see too many of them!