The new 27-inch iMac 5K arrived today quite unceremoniously, and we took no time jumping right in, opening it up, and voiding the warranty so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
Here’s what Apple has to say about their newest offering:
Now you can hear what we say about it. But first, here’s what’s in the box…
27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display
- Standard glass
- 3.8GHz 8-core 10th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz
- 8GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory
- Radeon Pro 5500 XT with 8GB of GDDR6 memory
- 512GB SSD storage
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Magic Mouse 2
- Magic Keyboard – US English
- Accessory Kit
So, let’s join Matt without further ado as he takes a look inside and checks out the new SSD configuration and storage changes.
27-in iMac 5K (2020) Unboxing
27-in iMac 5K (2020) Teardown
RELATED: Be sure to catch our earlier write-up, MAJOR UPDATE: Apple’s New 27-Inch iMac Goes All Out for 2020 for an overview of what Apple brings to the all-in-one desktop line.
Pretty sad the hard drive is soldered in. I realize it’s SSD, but it still has a limited life. I wonder how long before computers are just completely embedded in a substrate with nothing changeable.
Sadly, a soldered-in storage device that has a limited number of write cycles, is a non-starter for me. Solid-state storage cannot achieve a life expectancy matching the rest of the system, so soldering the chips to the mainboard is just spectacularly bad engineering. Until Apple stops this madness, I will remain on the sidelines, running older systems. If that means I will at some point be forced to move to a different platform, that is exactly what I will do.
Speakers
The rear of the each speaker unit shows, what looks like the cone of a tweeter at what would be the top, and a mid-range speaker in the middle. Inside the chamber there would be a bass, yes. All in, this would be a SIX-speaker setup?
Speakers also look similar to those in the iMac Pro. Same Part Number?
(Thanks for the teardown!)
I forwarded your message to Matt, and this was his response:
Unfortunately, I’ve not torn open the speakers and cannot confirm if it’s a six speaker setup or not.
I can confirm that they are not the same speakers as the iMac Pro. I assume (speculation) that it’s the same as the 2019 iMac.
Not the exact answer you were looking for, but hopefully it helps a little!
GPU is soldered in place? Thanks for confirming CPU socketed.
For the ︎spec’d i7 & i9, Intel says they support DDR4-2933 as well (a gross ↑10% over DDR4-2666). Able to confirm? More importantly, will you consider offering these?
I personally have 2933 and 3200 RAM waiting on my 10-core to show to confirm this.
The is correct, they will support the 2933 MHz. At this time, we have not announced any plans to carry it.
Why, o why, is Apple shipping only 8GB memory in the base 27″ imac 5K? You need real memory for real performance! Even non-power-users can exhaust 8GB.
Many people are glad because it allows them to purchase 3rd party RAM – like memory from macsales.com – much more cheaply than the factory-installed options.
Many thanks! What is soldered or cannot be upgraded by the user and what can?
The SSD is soldered, but the memory can still be upgraded.
I have a Mini. I’ve invested some decent coin in a couple of sweet monitors; I’d love these similar updates to the Mini line real soon. My Mini is just under the line for updating to Big Sur, so I’m out of luck there without getting new hardware.
I might also wait for an Apple Silicon Mini; I’m in the dev program and have the Apple Silicon preview machine now, and… whoofah… this thing is fast.
I just can’t do anything except MacOS development on it at the moment, and 99% of my (new) work for the foreseeable future is on mobile.
I’m doing a port from mobile to desktop for a “control center” version of one of our apps, and it’s going well. Also learning SwiftUI while I do it. I bounce back and forth between my current Mini running Catalina and the DTK running Big Sur.
Sorry, that was supposed to be in response in the main post. No idea how this happened. (sigh)
Do you know if the full line of 27″ can be RAM-upgraded? I know in previous series (certainly the 21.5 and I thought the base 27) the RAM wasn’t upgradeable.
Yep! We have verified that all 2020 27-inch iMacs have a memory door on the back and will support up to 128GB.