Gadgetory

it's finally here we have all the pieces we need to put together our iMac pro we've got a new iMac Pro 5k display we've got a new logic board complete with CPU and RAM that are by the way socketed and not soldered on so yeah we covered that in part two and we have the one and only Lewis Rosman from Rosman group time to learn how to put together an iMac and as I say you should never learn on your own stuff always learn on somebody else's way know you're supposed to learn on your own who like me has never actually assembled an iMac bro so let's have some fun today Shelley sponsored of course by mr. Rothman's favorite Tool Company I fix it their screwdrivers have a very nice personality I fix it as your one-stop shop for repair tools and guides for pretty much everything under the Sun you can check out the link to their pro Tech tool kit in the video description so Anthony's laid everything out for us pretty much we've got our fan component of the thermal solution we've got all the pics and adhesive strips and everything that we should need we've got their little prop up thing for the doodad here that goes in there and then of course is this your first time seeing an iMac pro logic board in person this is my first time so why don't you kind of walk us through some of the things that are more and/or less obvious I mean I actually have one right off the bat here somebody's getting fired because the RAM is not soldered to the board for some reason apples gone with this weirdo configuration with five DRAM chips per side so normally you would have four or eight and the the fifth one is for ECC that's error checking and that's a feature of the z9w processor that's in there but why wouldn't they just put all of them on the one side why would they be a dual sided dinner for this maybe to get more on a single dude these are just eight gig games maybe they planned on it but then that person got fired because may using too much memory would result in this not not efficient power usage wait no that was the excuse news in the resin I mean a lot of people have asked like why they might have gone with socketed memory rather than soldering the memory on because we all know that apples sort of MO here is making as few components on the board upgradable by the end use and the CPU is socketed too that's another person that's gonna get fired so I figured it out someone at Apple was just like you know what if we want to deliver enough configurations without spending a bunch of money for the sole purpose of making things less upgradable for the user sockets make a lot of sense more than idea Apple and if the processor fails you don't have to buy a new board and what's the cost of that board you do know it Apple only sells the logic board as a complete unit what with the CPU and the RAM already in it what if you only have a bad CPU because even though there's socketed they still treat it like a single unit so what happens if you have a bad RAM stick okay that one I don't know but I know that when we had to buy the new logic board we had to send back our CPU and RAM if we wanted to qualify for replacement which there's still a chance I heard from our contact who got us this so there's still a chance we can get replacement pricing on it so you have to send back everything and if you don't send back everything you don't get replacement pricing but you get charged twice the actual price of it which is ready four times the price that it should cost at any other computer yes well so those are standard SSDs you could buy a new egg right I mean in their defense their SSDs do perform pretty well so I'll give them that but a lot of people asked us where were you guys opening up and I'm a pro in the first place it's not meant to be opened the reason we were opening it was because we wanted to shed some light on the cooling solution that Apple is using for up to an 18 core processor and a Vegas 64 GPU just looking at it tells us everything we need to know about how much this sucker is gonna thermal throttle and in order for us to take our thermal throttling results and sanity check them this is why we were opening it because we're a review channel and we know that opening up the product is not something that everyone's gonna do but this is a pro product in a professional environment where you you might actually have technicians on staff to help people through both software and hardware issues it is my expectation that you would be able to use their service a professional machine and you would be able to get the parts that you need is that an unreasonable thing I think it's very unreasonable that you expect that you should be able to clean the dust out of it three years from now and it's filled with junk and runs 30 Celsius hotter when they say that you're not supposed to open it it's not designed to be open I can understand that to an extent but wouldn't you want to open it so that you can clean it three years from now there's so many of these old machines they wind up dying when the graphics chip start running 20 and 30 Celsius hotter and this design if you blow compress there and there it's just going to wind up blowing the dust around the machine yeah oh here here what we can do is we can kind of we can kind of line this up and this is something that's very difficult to do if you don't actually open it up and have a look at it so if you were to blow dust or if you were to blow air through through this very thoughtfully designed baffle here so that you don't get as much noise from the fan I guess which is neat if you open any of these that are more than three years old I would be surprised that the fan even spins just based on how much dust they're in here after a few years so you would want to open it just to be able to blow it out and you can't do that in this machine so it makes sense that somebody would want to open this and if not now than a few years from now if they want it to last always and Apple wants it to last right is there anything about this main board that should that makes it special it does have a GPU built right into it which is either a feature or a drawback depending on how you look at it that's a good board it has to some extent it has four Thunderbolt ports four USB ports Ethernet LAN it does use the same USB C muxing that the touch bars did and I remember with the touch bars when I tried to use a third-party dongle rather than the original Apple dongle it didn't work and the original Apple dongle was like 80 bucks I mean this appliance your chip said to buy a card with this on it is about a hundred bucks I can understand how if it comes with a graphics card and it's specifically custom-designed for this machine like I could see how this board would cost yeah like I would say this is a solid 800 $900 board okay cool but not $4,000 what that's how much the non replacement pricing is if you break the the warranty void if removed seals on it and when we priced out the iMac Pro we actually found that compared to a an apples-to-apples PC with is neon W like trying to get feature and performance parity it was actually pretty darn similar so it's only when you want to try to get a replacement part and you don't have the untouched by non-authorized technicians like yourself pricing that you really get owned rammed yeah I didn't think I'd bring this guy on and he'd be one toning my language down the entire machine it's not necessarily that much of a ripoff considering the form factor that you get in it and when you do actually price it with a display that's for a PC that would be equal it actually isn't the terrible deal spec wise it's just if you ever have anything go wrong with it ever then you're really screwed I do think that Apple could do more to design things not to fail and when you look at this cooling solution the inability to clean out the dust we look at the 500 watt power supply like this to me is common sense stuff when I initially set out to build a computer there's a whole freaking a lot to it these days it's like putting together Lego you got your form factor which Apple does a great job of you got your acoustics and you got your thermals that's step one of building a computer make sure that it's not going to overheat and it's not going to be super loud oh and don't use a crappy power supply so that it doesn't blow up in two years I'm just surprised by the heatsink because I know that in many of their machines they focus on it being quiet which is a good thing they wanted that machine to not make noise but if you want it to not make noise you would want a larger heatsink not a smaller one and what they've done with a lot of the newer machines they took the 2013/14 design which is actually a really nice design except the fan just doesn't turn on for another 20 C okay so should we get started then they get to figure out that I don't know how it goes together yeah I know now now neither of us looks like an expert yeah I know so I've done I've done an iMac 5k but I've never done an iMac Pro like in terms of disassembly and reassembly have you done an iMac 5k no oh really it's time I reassembled on iMac was 2012 or 13th most of what we do is liquid damage repairs but you got to be pretty special to spill water on here yeah like water typically goes down not beside this you'd have to be drinking water over a bare board sitting on a table and it into your iMac or someone has to say something really funny you have one thing that sucks with this form factor at least for the older ones is that if you want to replace the hard drive you have to remove the screen to get to the drive and the screen cable is short so when people take the screen out they don't realize that they have to hold the screen on their chest they don't do that they just take the screen out like this they wind up ripping the screen connector right off the board okay so do we want to put this no you know I mean no just the opposite should be okay right well hold on a second cuz we've got we've got brackets in here called like Wi-Fi and stuff so I want to make sure that we're that's this has Ethernet though right that's one thing that I have to say I love about Apple they're wireless it's just they're the only ones that I'm aware of that do a 3x3 by in in a notebook because everyone else is using the mini pcie standard that is just not physically large enough to do a three by so this looks like some kind of sense 4G power supply I guess okay so hold on we've probably got two got to put this put this lead in oh okay that one comes around as well hmm okay this guy's blocking you hold on hold on oh that's lifting up some kind of cover that probably serves some kind of purpose here hold on okay it covers coils yeah covers things that you shouldn't touch I guess this if I can kind of guide you in here stay up cables you really go ham like it's funny cuz I get a lot of flack for just kind of like going for it with stuff oh yeah but as far as we know this board works so please do be very careful good no pressure why did I fly in from here to do this for me so I could learn there we go now we're now we're getting in there huh there we go not a Bing okay all right so it's like being a dentist that's like say yes say yeah yeah okay do we want to screw it in first maybe I know we wanted to see if it works before you screw it in it's bad luck to screw it in before you see if it works so my thing is I don't close the panel first but I I'm willing to screw in a board I'll put in at least a couple screws cuz I don't like I don't like motherboard sliding around on standoffs oh yeah can I put in two screws okay okay stressing out here one thing about working on a PC like this that legitimately should require certification and legitimately is dangerous for the average person is the fact that it has exposed things on the capacitors on their power supplies no there's no no no there's nothing that goes on here it's just like this that is extremely dangerous you could die this this is nothing this is no tongue-in-cheek haha Apple or anything like that just I've never actually seen another finished goods product like this with an exposed power supply like that and as far as I can tell the only reason they've done it is so that they can use the cooler unit here to cool the power supply without having its own fan which would because of the thin form factor be quite small and therefore whining I'm surprised they didn't put at least some sort of cage over it but happened to be grounded so that if the somebody was going into let's say clean their fan they don't do that this is one of those things where I like to joke in my videos but I would not want to touch that and there is a good chance of somebody opening this and actually hurting themselves even if it's unplugged because those two capacitors will stay charged for a long time after a long time sometimes months or even years you don't mess around with that stuff now actually on the subject of these things being exposed a lot of people have asked us what exactly happened because the way that we showed our iMac pro failure was in the form of like a reenactment because obviously the camera wasn't rolling while we well we dropped the display yeah those sparks those master after-effects drawn sparks very real I know we deceived everyone believed in you up so what actually happened was when Anthony was removing the display he bridged something in here and it caused a spark which startled him and caused him to drop the display that was what actually happened and because the spark was on the motherboard that's why from the very beginning we have deceived no one we knew we definitely had a broken display but we knew we also possibly had a dead motherboard and therefore by extension a dead power supply actually the spark was off the power supply wasn't it so you know what's funny a shield would have prevented all of this a shield would prevent about how interesting so sorry the spark on the power supply so you know when you short out a power supply you can kind of kill almost anything downstream and because on this particular machine the power for everything runs through the motherboard it was probably gonna burn something on the motherboard before it carried through to something else so that was where our conclusion came from we knew we definitely had a dead screen because it was cracked we knew that we potentially had a dead power supply and a dead motherboard but that our other components probably worked with that said I've seen a lot of shorts occur in my day that have not resulted in dead hardware or I've seen them partially fail like oh well now that USB port doesn't work anymore yeah if you send 12 volts to the five volt rail your machine's dead if you send 12 volts to ground you just saw a big spark but it's nothing that's gonna actually kill it Wow you know those viewers are right this is really complicated because I mean the whole thing like oh these are it's like a supercar you saw those comments right it's not designed to be you know taken apart and put together and I'm kind of like well then how does Apple you know take it apart and put it together because they can they just wouldn't we're good so here's another thing that would definitely require training the screws for the power supply and for just generally mounting the motherboard are threaded the same as far as I can tell but they should not be confused because the power supply ones have these washers on them and they are actually designed we were talking about this off-camera how does the power supply connect to the motherboard it's actually through screw screw connections here so these ones with the little kind of mark next to them that looks like it's a little oval shaped mark those ones use the silver screws and then everything else uses the black ones that is a bit of a trick and you would need to be very careful with something like that oh not that one please do that moment when you bring in like a celebrity repair technician and it turns out maybe you should have gotten a real repair technician you know yeah in all seriousness though this is not very difficult as it just takes about five minutes should an Apple Authorized service provider like is there any justifiable reason why they shouldn't be able to just stock replacement parts for an operation like this and be able to turn a board swap around for a customer in a day the reason that they don't want them to have parts in stock is because they're afraid of them ending up on the open market or on eBay or being result like that data recovery tool that I had bought for the new touch bar MacBooks I got it from some likely authorized service center that was selling all of them on the side the downside of it is that if the parts are not stocked the customer has to wait one to three weeks to get it in if you tell somebody it's going to take longer than 2 to 5 days they just walk out of the store this is an entirely different story imagine for a second that I'm not some youtuber also a celebrity tech you know imagine that I bought this $5,000 machine so that I could run my you know home graphic design business imagine that someone told me this is gonna cost more to repair than I initially spent on it how does that make any sense the thing that made me most furious was the people acting like that argument made any sense that a machine could be a total write-off when not every component of it was dead and no broadcast facility is going to allow that any sort of recording studio any sort of video or news editing room they expect that there be virtually no downtime they're gonna have a machine to swap in a place and they expect to be able to repair this because they're using it for real work not to mention for a reasonable price I expect when I buy a replacement piece of something whether it's a car or a vacuum cleaner that if I were to buy every piece of it and assemble it myself it should cost a little bit more but I don't expect that if I were to buy all the pieces as replacement parts that the machine would cost literally double even if I'm putting it together myself that doesn't make any sense anyone making the argument that Apple can't sell it to me for for cheaper because they've got to make money their business is clearly not doing the math because if Apple couldn't afford to sell me this board for around $1,000 then they couldn't afford to build this computer I think I do stone this one so the the Wi-Fi thing is also a little bit tricky you've got to slide it into four little notches on these shields right here SD card area thing the card reader is over here somewhere so it's over here somewhere oh it's to hold down that new deaden okay let's not turn this into a competition of which of us has done worse because that's not gonna be that's not we were talking about credibility earlier you know that's not gonna help either well the thing is sometimes I'll have I'll read out the letter that somebody sent in with their machine so they'll know ok he's working on mine and then when I'm streaming it they'll see like me saying okay this is just for Thunderbolt but screw this let us take the saddle and go wink wink wink and then he'll get a call later saying excuse me was that my machine that he just ripped the Thunderbolt USB and Wi-Fi circuitry off and then I'll have to explain to him no he's joking he's gonna put that back when you get and then I'll like walk over to me and say did you stream knocking all that stuff over you watch these videos before you sent it to you you must have been expected like you know what you're getting it's not like it's false advertising so this is like me and my wife like I'll make some sort of like really offensive off-color joke and I'm just like hon I mean we were dating for six or seven years before we got married you knew what you knew yes video when people watch the live streams of their stuff getting fixed I can only imagine how stressful that is because of the show that I put on for what you're saying everything you see on TV is not you know an accurate reflection of real life you put on a show no way I think the real takeaway here is that if we can handle this apples store probably could have handled all right let's see if we get fan spin it may not actually do that now there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff where it into the display not just fans mail we did we're done yeah so I can go put the panel back on that's the whole point fans fin that's what was broken fan spins so this is the one actually like special thing that you need and it's a part that I fix it sells if you were to take apart and put back together and I'm at 400 other than that you just need like a screwdriver a couple of Torx bits nothing nothing really special like you'd be surprised how many repairs you only really need a pretty basic toolkit for this is the hardest part of this repair actually is finding the proper adhesive and this goes back almost ten years with this stuff is that if you can open it up you can it's it's putting it back together that's difficult yeah because if you tried it if you just go to Home Depot and try to find adhesive that fits it's just gonna fall right out oh they sent to just take it they knew who they were I fix it does sell really good adhesive toolkits for these machines I'll say well no I was saying they sent two they clearly knew who they were dealing with all yeah expected me to screw it up once we brought up the guide for putting on the strip's you really don't want to screw this up because they're one-time use oh holy crap they've got like eight steps for each strip they really they really walk you through the steps there I think I can handle this I ended up picking the Dutch side it should be noted that there's not actually that much pressure on you because we are gonna take it apart again for sure to do our iMac pro repair guide which is what we were trying to do in the first place I'm offended of being in a video with foul language it's so frustrating to me that Apple tries to create this like you know mystique around how difficult these machines are to repair and the really frustrating thing is that it works we had these comments from people who think that it's more than printed circuit boards capacitors wiring and stickers I think a lot of people have bought into the idea that this is kind of a utopia and in some ways it is you know did the software is easier to use it didn't crash as much when Vista was out it looks nice on maybe clearly I don't watch your videos there are at least 1000 MacBook Airs out there with the adhesive applied like that yeah they think they think it's the Utopia so that if some anything goes wrong it has to be their fault or it has to be your fault it couldn't be that they did something wrong so so people wind up denying their own experience when they have a problem like I remember seeing this one thread in 2011 world so many people were saying you're wrong this machine doesn't run too hot you must have been doing something wrong you must have got dust in it you got a defense you must have been running it too hard yeah and it Roenick ly on their own page it says you know 70% faster with video editing than last year's model and all you were trying to do is that it's some video oh I screwed it up oh I really missed that's what the finger knows if you hold on hold on hold on I got I got this I got this I don't want it fold it you definitely don't want two layers of it cut if it's a little bit ah shoot no that's really bad actually I gave you so much for your application of the first couple then I screwed up the last one dang it that's Karma for you do you want to do the ribbons and I'll hold the screen yeah let's move it closer to the edge yes that's actually do that now to pretend that we didn't forget to plug the microphone some reason they use that connector for the webcam on the MacBook so I thought that that was a webcam Zapata's screen by the way for those watching at home this is the smarter way to handle these recessed screws on the queer you just put them in the rubber grommet first then screw them in it was all going very smoothly yes nothing is broken you that we know it's best if you have somebody hold the screen while you're plugging things in so that you don't drop the screen or there's always the chest or you or use your chest because it's very easy to drop this that's the manly way you have to have bigger packs than me for it to really work very well I have more men moved it than pecs myself it's good to use your nails rather than on the edge of the connector over here so you're gonna see it's kind of shaped like an L and don't be afraid to just push it in on the edges don't try to push the whole thing in at once that's very difficult and then you can plug in the screen connect it without breaking it and we'll try not to drop anything in the power supply this time famous last words moment of truth come on come on over here Brandon I want people to know we're not faking anything there's no reenactments so we got fan spin how do we get Apple logo something you do that was there very antique Leblon holding the screen with my good hand crash should we go like the top gun the top gun style high-five do you know the the high-five they do in Top Gun okay you got it you got to go over here just so I'm gonna end with the screen being drop okay yeah so I think that's pretty much it massive thank you to absolutely everyone who was involved in this thank you to Anthony for breaking our iMac Pro because otherwise we never would have really started this conversation about right to repair and apples policies here we would have had no way of knowing that it was going to be so difficult to repair a professional-grade machine thanks to our community who really stepped up and helped us out getting this thing fixed for a reasonable price well we can throw our total bill of materials up here compared to what Apple would have charged us we can do that right huge thanks to Luis rossmann for showing up and helping be reassembled was a lot of fun thanks to iFixit of course for providing us with the adhesive strips and the tools we need as well as their awesome online guides for disassembly and reassembly of your electronics and of course for sponsoring this third installment of this video series and thank you to you guys for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts just like this one and our community forum which you should definitely join can you buy screens and boards to Apple products on your merch store no you cannot extra for the people who stayed till the end yes we are aware of the serialization process for Apple main boards don't ask any questions but this does work with FaceTime and iMessage and all that stuff don't worry about it but you might run into issues if you were to actually try to just buy a random board on eBay