Hell freezes over: You can now upgrade your (new) iMac at home

ZDNet ^ | June 8, 2017 | By Charlie Osborne for Between the Lines

[Swordmaker]

You can transform the basic iMac into a far more powerful machine with some time and tweaks.

iFixit

Apple has broken away from the soldered mold by allowing RAM to be upgraded and CPUs to be tinkered with by users in the new iMac range.

The iPad and iPhone maker's product ranges are known for being notoriously difficult, if not close to impossible, to DIY upgrade.

While many PCs and desktop systems on the market allow swappable RAM and quick upgrades to everything from graphics cards to internal storage, Apple's use of soldering and how its devices are fashioned not only break the warranty if you tinker, but are often not worth the trouble.

[dennisw]

Is this a joke? Not a very easy upgrade at all. Doable but only if you have a free day to d!ck around and skill enough to put it all back together correctly.
Just don’t lose any tiny screws.

[ReignOfError]

I replaced the 500GB drive in my 2010 iMac with a 2TB drive, and the (dead, but I never used it) optical drive with a 500GB SSD boot/applications drive. It gave the little dude a new lease on life and will allow me to get at least another couple of years out of it. It was a non-trivial effort, but probably a little bit easier than the current generation.

I can upgrade from an i3 to the i5, but only dual-core. Power limitations. The SSD did a lot more for performance than the processor upgrade would, so I’m not in a particular hurry to crack it open again and swap the CPU.

At work (Windows IT), we’re getting SSDs in everything new and swapping them into everything we re-stage between users. It’s the single best upgrade you can make.