Nope - they removed that feature, so now come the end of the year, they're all e-waste.
It feels really stupid to have to throw away a perfectly capable machine with 64GB of RAM in 2026.
It feels really stupid to have to throw away a perfectly capable machine with 64GB of RAM in 2026.
For cables, my iMac had an opening in the back for RAM sticks, which I popped out and wired all cables through. I mounted the driver board on a piece of plexiglass so that most of the ports are accessible directly to the RAM opening. For power, I use a regular third party power brick I had laying around, though some people have reused the iMac’s original power cable with an internal power supply.
Honestly, the hardest parts were identifying the correct driver board and gluing the front glass back on after assembly.
Unfortunately, I don't know that Linux handles the bespoke 5k graphics. Moreover, our corp Linux distribution is only certified for particular devices. Even if the screen worked, you wouldn't be allowed on the network, which is the whole problem with Intel support being dropped in the first place.
The network connection isn't the main problem, it's every access to a protected system that would no longer trust the device.
I mean, I can understand defense in depth and not wanting anyway a possible unsafe device connected to the corp network which still might expose some unwanted data (i.e. I imagine a trusted device on the corporate LAN might relax some local firewall rules to make it easier to develop? I'm just guessing, no real idea)