The Apple Core

More Apple teardowns: Fall 2009 iMac & Magic Mouse

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The crack engineers at iFixIt are at it again. Yesterday I posted their teardown of the new "unibody" (a.k.a. poly) MacBook which revealed a relocated Bluetooth antenna and a larger 60 watt-hour battery. Today's installment includes teardowns of the new Fall 2009 iMac and the mysterious Magic Mouse. Some highlights from the new iMac:

The power supply puts out 25.8 amps at 12 volts, for a total output of 310 watts (365W input, 85% efficiency). That's the biggest power supply we've seen in an iMac.
The GPU and CPU are quite far apart, and they have separate heat sinks leading to opposite sides of the computer. This rather complex feat of thermal engineering allowed Apple to upgrade the iMac to use Intel's desktop line of processors.
The lack of Blu-ray support in this iMac is a bag of hurt. Fortunately, this is a drop-in replacement: http://bit.ly/1sBgRu (Of course, until Apple releases software support, you'll still have to boot into Windows to play movies.)
There is a Wi-Fi antenna leading into the Apple logo on the rear of the iMac. Aside from the ports, this is the only spot on the rear of the machine that isn't solid aluminum. It's quite a clever design, and while it's an obvious place to put it, we've never seen Apple do this before.
This thing is BIG. The desktop processor / GPU need three large fans and two huge heatsinks to dissipate heat.
The new iMac's edge-to-edge glass can slide around. After upgrading the RAM in our iMac, we noticed the glass was slightly out of alignment on one side. You can push it back into place by hand.
There's no direct line from the external Mini DisplayPort connector to the LCD. The signal will need to go through the logic board, so you'll need to have your iMac powered on if you want to display from an external video source.
The 3.06 GHz E7600 Core 2 Duo processor is a LGA 775 Socket T CPU. There are some Core 2 Quad chips that use the same socket, but we don't know if they would work. The i5 and i7 quad-cores included in the high-end 27" iMac use a different socket, LGA 1156 Socket H.

Update: Not to be outdone, Mitsunobu (a.k.a. KODAWARISAN) also disassembled the new iMac. Highlights from the Magic Mouse teardown after the jump...

From the Apple logo up, the entire surface of the mouse is covered with capacitive touch sensors.
The mouse uses a Broadcom BCM2042 Advanced Wireless Keyboard/Mouse Bluetooth Chip.
There's not much Aluminum in the mouse; we weighed just 10 grams. That's compared to 37 grams of plastic and 47 grams of batteries. Nearly half the mouse's weight comes from the two AA batteries.

What? No Mac mini teardown yet? Slackers...

posted by Jason D. O'Grady
October 22, 2009 @ 8:47 am

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