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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up. No fixability / no upgradability is the price we pay for laptops, but does it really have to be the price for desktops? I'd think that swapping a video card or adding a drive or two is the sort of thing that one might do over the lifespan of this thing.

I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?

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> I guess after this machine is obsolete, there's a "screen mode" where these things can be used as a monitor and the 18 Xeon cores are powered down?

I wish, there used to be Target Display Mode but it was removed in recent years (anything after Mid-2014). For the 5K iMac it was pretty obvious why it was missing, until fairly recently (DP 1.3 was ratified late 2014) there wasn't a connection fast enough to even drive the internal display (they ended up using a custom timing controller to overdrive a DP 1.2 link) so TDM was a no-go, but it'd be nice if they brought it back :/

Even when Target Display Mode was a thing, it still required a running OS on the target system.

I do love my iMacs, but I spend more than zero time shaking my head at the tight coupling of expensive, high quality components that will, eventually, fail independently.

Apple generally does a great job keeping the "eventually" at bay. But it's always coming.

Supposedly a modular, easier-to-integrate updated hardware Mac Pro is coming at some point [1].

https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

You "can" swap out parts and repair iMacs, it is just not something one does casually. You need tools, instructions, skills and will-power.

The thing is most people, even pros, don't bother with that stuff even when they have Dell boxes. Apple knows that and, I think, trades off ease-of-repair for sleekness and mostly wins out (until recently).

AFAIK, there is no "screen mode" that enables one to use these things as monitors.

> * AFAIK, there is no "screen mode" that enables one to use these things as monitors.*

You actually can! It's called Target Display mode:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592

Not for the iMac Pro.

Very interesting – is this documented by Apple? Can’t imagine why they’d disallow this, though of course an iMac pro would be a very expensive external monitor....

"iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014) and later iMac models can't be used as Target Display Mode displays."

From the page you linked. It hasn't been possible with new iMac models since 2014. I'd expect the Pro to be the same.

Personally I would love it if tablets and new iMacs had video input to enable use as external monitors but unfortunately not

Wow, totally blew it on that one. Sorry! Like you, I wish this were still available on newer iMacs. I wonder why this useful feature was so short-lived.

Yeah, as much as I like tinkering on my own machine, if someone has a machine go down at work, or gets approved for an upgrade, etc., tech support gets a call and they come drop a new box on our desk. Not enough time in the day for us to make it more complicated than that.

The iMac is actually stupidly easy to open, I had to replace a fan on one recently - got the fan on ebay for very cheap, then used a plastic guitar pick to get the glass off the screen(it's held by magnets so you need to wedge something between the glass and the case to separate them) - then used a normal screwdriver to release the 8 or so screws holding the display itself and voila, the whole thing was open and easy to work with. It looks scary but actually it was super easy to repair.

It used to be sensibly designed and just need a screwdriver, but look at the latest iFixit teardown. You have to pizza-slice through screen adhesive to crack it open now, and have a replacement custom cut seal to pack it back together. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+Retina+...

There is supposed to be a more standard desktop system coming 2018 or early 2019, I think.

>This is an impressive feat of engineering to get all that hardware into a that kind of a package, but man, I bet there are a lot of pros who'd have preferred an aluminum box that they could open up.

They have already announced that is coming later on in 2018.

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