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 Rossman
from Rossman 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. Wait, no, you're supposed to learn on your own. Is that how this goes? Who, like me, has never actually
assembled an iMac Pro, so let's have some fun today, shall we?
Sponsored of course by Mr. Rossman's favorite tool company, iFixit. They're screwdrivers of a very nice personality
iFixit is 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 toolkit 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 picks 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 Apple's 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 Xeon W processor that's in there
But why wouldn't they just put all of them on the one side?
Why would they do a dual sided DIMM for this? Maybe to get more on a single DIMM. These are just 8 gig DIMMs
Maybe they planned on it, but then that person got fired
Because may using too much memory would result in a not not efficient power usage. Wait, no
That was the excuse they used in the retina
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 Apple's sort of MO here is
Making as few components on the board upgradeable by the end-user. 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 upgradeable 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?
Except that you do
You do know what Apple only sells the logic board as a complete unit
But with the CPU and the RAM already in it
What if you only have a bad CPU because even though they're 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 pricing, 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 already four times the price that it should cost in any other computer
Yes, well
Go Apple
So those are the standard SSDs you could buy on Newegg, 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
Well, why were you guys opening up an iMac 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 vega 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 user 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 chips start running 20 and 30 Celsius hotter
Yeah, and this design if you blow compressed air in there, it's just going to wind up blowing the dust around the machine
Yeah, no
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 if the fan even spins just based on how much dust are 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 not now than a few years from now
If they want it to last at least and Apple wanted to last right, 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. It's a good board
It has to some extent it has four Thunderbolt ports for USB ports ether and 10 gig 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 that didn't work and the original Apple dongle was like 80 bucks
I mean this a quantia chipset it to buy a card with this on it is about a hundred bucks
I can understand how if it comes with the 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 eight hundred nine hundred dollar board
Okay, cool, but not four thousand dollars
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 a Xeon
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'm sure that's really the unit more PG PG. Yeah
I didn't think I'd bring this guy on and he'd be the 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 not a whole friggin lot to it, right?
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 gonna overheat
And it's not gonna 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 want a 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 now neither of us looks like I buy 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 last time I reassembled an iMac was 2012 or 13
Most of what we do is liquid damage repairs, but you got to be pretty special too
You don't want to spill water on here. Yeah, like water typically goes down not sideways
You'd have to be drinking water over a bare board sitting on a table
Yeah, you have to just like fountain it into your iMac and hope it falls through the screen
Or someone has to say something really funny
The 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 up it 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 three by three by in
In a notebook because everyone else is using the mini PCIe standard
Yeah, that is just not physically large enough to do a three by so this looks like
Some kind of sense for the power supply, I guess. Okay, so hold on
We've probably got to 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 and 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
Let me see if I can kind of guide you in here. Stay out 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
No pressure
Why did I fly him in from New York to do this for me?
So I could learn there we go. Now. We're now we're getting in there. There we go. Let a bing. Okay. All right
It's like being a dentist. It's like say
Yes
Yeah, okay, do we want to screw it in first?
Maybe or no, we want 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 because I don't like I don't like motherboards sliding around on standoffs
Oh, yeah, can I put in two screws? 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 it 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 it having its own fan, which would because of the thin form factor be quite small and therefore whiny
I'm surprised they didn't put at least some sort of cage over it that happened to be grounded so that if somebody was going into
Let's say clean their fan
They don't do that because 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. Yeah, because those two capacitors will stay charged for a long time after 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 while we dropped the display
Yeah, those sparks those after effects drawn sparks very well
I know we deceived everyone I believed in you 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 it's funny a shield would have prevented all of this
the shield would have prevented 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 5 volt rail your machines 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 or can they 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 was not working
The ones have these washers on them
and they're actually designed.
We were talking about this off camera.
How does the power supply connect to the motherboard?
It's actually through screw connections here.
So these ones with the little kind of mark next to them
that looks like there'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.
These two.
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, is it?
This 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 in a mess.
They're afraid of them ending up on the open market
or on eBay or being resold.
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 gonna take longer
than two to five 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 technician, you know?
Imagine that I bought this $5,000 machine
so that I could, uh,
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.
Yeah, no broadcast facility is gonna 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 cheaper
because they gotta 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 doofed on this one.
So the Wi-Fi thing is also a little bit tricky.
You gotta slide it into four little notches
on this shield right here.
SD card area thing.
The card reader is over here somewhere.
So it's over here somewhere.
Oh, it's to hold that doodad in.
I've done worse.
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-
Setting the Thunderbolt circuit on fire.
We were talking about credibility earlier, you know?
That's not gonna help either of us.
The thing is sometimes I'll read out the letter
that somebody sent in with their machine.
So they'll know, okay, 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.
I'll just take this out and I'll go vink, vink, vink.
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 he gets it to turn on.
And then he'll like walk over to me and say,
did you stream knocking all that stuff off the box?
You watched these videos before you sent it here.
You must've been expecting,
like you know what you're getting.
It's not like it's false advertising.
See, 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 were buying.
You knew, yeah, that's what I am.
But yeah, 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 it.
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
Apple's store probably could have handled this.
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 wired into the display,
not just DisplayPort.
Fan spin.
Oh, we did.
We're done.
Yeah, so I can go home.
We have to put the panel back on.
That's the whole point.
Fan spin.
That's what was broken.
Fan spin.
So this is the one actually like special thing that you need.
And it's a part that iFixit sells.
If you were to take apart and put back together an iMac Pro,
other than that, you just need like a screwdriver,
a couple of Torx bits.
Nothing really special.
Like you'd be surprised how many repairs you only really need
a pretty basic tool kit for.
This is the hardest part of this repair actually,
is finding the proper adhesive.
And this goes back almost 10 years with this stuff is that
if you can open it up, you can,
it's putting it back together that's difficult.
Because if you try to,
if you just go to Home Depot and try to find adhesive
that fits, it's just going to fall right out.
Oh, they sent two just thinking they knew who they were.
iFixit does sell really good adhesive tool kits
for these machines I'll say.
Well, no, I was saying they sent two.
They clearly knew who they were dealing with.
Oh yeah.
They expected me to screw it up once.
We brought up the guide for putting on the strips.
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.
Thanks one of us.
I ended up picking the side.
It should be noted that there's not actually
that much pressure on you
because we are going to 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 at 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 like a lot of people have bought into the idea
that this is kind of a utopia.
And in some ways it is, you know,
the software is easier.
It's easier to use.
It didn't crash as much when Vista was out.
It looks nice.
Did you put this on?
Maybe kind of, sort of.
Clearly I don't watch your videos.
There are at least 1,000 MacBook Airs out there
with the adhesive applied like that.
Four and a half stars, baby.
Yeah, they think it's a utopia
so that if anything goes wrong, it has to be their fault.
Or it has to be your fault.
It couldn't be that they just did something wrong.
So people wind up denying their own experience
when they have a problem.
Like I remember seeing this one thread
in 2011 where so many people were saying,
you're wrong, this machine doesn't run too hot.
You must've been doing something wrong.
You must've got dust in it.
You got a defect.
You must've been running it too hard.
Yeah, and ironically, on their own page,
it says, you know, 70% faster at video editing
than last year's model.
And all you were trying to do is edit some video.
Oh, I screwed it up.
Oh, I really missed.
That's what fingernails are for.
No, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on.
I got this, I got this.
No, no, you don't want it folded.
You definitely don't want two layers of it.
But 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 and then I screwed up the last one.
Dang it, that's karma for you.
Do you wanna do the ribbons and I'll hold the screen?
Yeah, let's move it closer to the edge.
Yeah, let's actually do that.
Now to pretend that we didn't forget to plug the microphone.
For some reason, they use that connector
for the webcam on the MacBook,
so I thought that that was a webcam as a part of the screen.
By the way, for those watching at home,
this is the smarter way to handle these recessed screws
on the cooler.
You just put them in the rubber grommet first.
Then screw them in.
It was all going very smoothly.
Yes, nothing is broken yet.
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 method.
Or use your chest because it's very easy to drop this.
That's the manly way.
Yeah, you have to have bigger pecs than me
for it to really work very well.
I have more man boobs 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 kinda 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.
Now do we get Apple logo?
Hey!
Apple logo!
All right, that's a good sign.
We're done.
I was hoping you would do it with your right hand.
That was a very anticlimactic.
Well, I'm holding the screen with my good hand.
That would be a good part four.
Should we go like the Top Gun,
the Top Gun style high five?
Do you know the high five they do in Top Gun?
Here, you gotta go over here.
This is gonna end with the screen being dropped.
Okay.
Yeah!
So I think that's pretty much it.
A 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 Apple's policies here.
We would have had no way of knowing
that it was gonna 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, if 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 Louis Rossman for showing up
and helping me reassemble the iMac Pro here.
It was a lot of fun.
Thanks to iFixit, of course,
for providing us with the adhesive strip.
Thanks to iFixit, of course, for providing us with the adhesive strip.
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 disliked this video,
you can hit that button.
But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
and 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 mainboards.
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.