 It's finally here! We have all the pieces we need to put together our iMac Pro. We've got a new iMac Pro 5K display, we've got a new logic board complete with CPU and RAM that are by the way socketed and not soldered on, so yeah we covered that in part two, and we have the one and only Louis Rossman from Rossman Group! Time to learn how to put together an iMac and as I say you should never learn on your own stuff, always learn on somebody else's. Wait no you're supposed to learn on your own, is that how this goes? Who like me has never actually assembled an iMac Pro, so let's have some fun today shall we? Sponsored of course by Mr. Rossman's favorite tool company, iFixit. The screwdrivers have a very nice personality. iFixit is your one-stop shop for repair tools and guides for pretty much everything under the sun. You can check out the link to their ProTech toolkit in the video description. So Anthony's laid everything out for us pretty much. We've got our fan component of the thermal solution, we've got all the picks and adhesive strips and everything that we should need, we've got their little prop up thing for the do dad here that goes in there and then of course is this your first time seeing an iMac Pro Logic board in person? This is my first time. So why don't you kind of walk us through some of the things that are more and or less obvious? I mean I actually have one right off the bat here. Somebody's getting fired because the RAM is not soldered to the board. For some reason Apple's gone with this weirdo configuration with 5 DRAM chips per side so normally you would have four or eight and the the fifth one is for ECC that's error checking and that's a feature of the Xeon W processor that's in there but why wouldn't they just put all of them on the one side? Why would they do a dual sided DIMM for this? Maybe to get more on a single DIMM. These are just 8 gig DIMMs. Maybe they planned on it but then that person got fired because using too much memory would result in a not efficient power usage. Wait no that was the excuse to use in the Retina. I mean a lot of people have asked like why they might have gone with socketed memory rather than soldering the memory on because we all know that Apple's sort of MO here is making as few components on the board upgradeable by the end user as possible. And the CPU is socketed too. That's another person that's gonna get fired. So I figured it out. Someone at Apple was just like you know what if we want to deliver enough configurations without spending a bunch of money for the sole purpose of making things less upgradeable for the user, sockets make a lot of sense. More than an idea Apple. And if the processor fails you don't have to buy a new board and what's the cost of that board? Except that you do. You do. No way. Apple only sells the logic board as a complete unit. What? With the CPU and the RAM already in it. What if you only have a bad CPU? Because even though they're socketed they still treat it like a single unit. So what happens if you have a bad RAM stick? Okay that one I don't know but I know that when we had to buy the new logic board we had to send back our CPU and RAM if we wanted to qualify for replacement pricing which there's still a chance I heard from our contact who got us this so there's still a chance we can get replacement pricing on it. So you have to send back everything and if you don't send back everything you don't get replacement pricing but you get charged twice the actual price of it which is already four times the price that just shouldn't cost on any other computer. Yes. Well go Apple. So those are the standard SSDs you could buy on Newegg right? I mean in their defense their SSDs do perform pretty well so I'll give them that but a lot of people asked us well what when were you guys opening up an iMac Pro in the first place? It's not meant to be opened. The reason we were opening it was because we wanted to shed some light on the cooling solution that Apple is using for up to an 18 core processor and a Vega 64 GPU. Just looking at it tells us everything we need to know about how much this sucker is gonna thermal throttle and in order for us to take our thermal throttling results and sanity check them this is why we were opening it because we're a review channel and we know that opening up the product is not something that everyone's gonna do but this is a pro product in a professional environment where you you might actually have technicians on staff to help people through both software and hardware issues. It is my expectation that you would be able to user service a professional machine and you would be able to get the parts that you need. Is that an unreasonable thing? I think it's very unreasonable that you expect that you should be able to clean the dust out of it three years from now and it's filled with junk and runs 30 Celsius hotter. When they say that you're not supposed to open it it's not designed to be open. I can understand that to an extent but wouldn't you want to open it so that you can clean it three years from now? Because so many of these old machines they wind up dying when the graphics chips start running 20 and 30 Celsius hotter and this design if you blow compress there and there it's just going to wind up blowing the dust around the machine. Yeah, no here here what we can do is we can kind of we can kind of line this up and this is something that's very difficult to do if you don't actually open it up and have a look at it. So if you were to blow dust or if you were to blow air through through this very thoughtfully designed baffle here so that you don't get as much noise from the fan I guess which is neat. If you open any of these that are more than three years old I would be surprised if the fan even spins just based on how much dust are in here after a few years so you would want to open it just to be able to blow it out and you can't do that in this machine so it makes sense that somebody would want to open this not if not now then a few years from now if they want it to last at least and Apple wants it to last right? Is there anything about this main board that should that makes it special? It does have a GPU built right into it which is either a feature or a drawback depending on how you look at it. It's a good board it has it to some extent it has four Thunderbolt ports, four USB ports, ether and 10 gig LAN. It does use the same USB C muxing that the touch bars did and I remember with the touch bars when I tried to use a third-party dongle rather than the original Apple dongle it didn't work and the original Apple dongle was like 80 bucks. I mean this Aquantia chipset to buy a card with this on it is about a hundred bucks. I can understand how if it comes with a graphics card and it's specifically custom designed for this machine like I could see how this board would cost yeah like I would say this is a solid $800 $900 board. Okay cool but not $4,000. What? That's how much the non-replacement pricing is if you break the the warranty void if removed seals on it and when we priced out the iMac Pro we actually found that compared to a an apples-to-apples PC with a Xeon Double E like trying to get feature and performance parity it was actually pretty darn similar so it's only when you want to try to get a replacement part and you don't have the untouched by non authorized technicians like yourself pricing that you really get owned rammed yeah sure that's yeah like the you know more PG PG yeah I didn't think I'd bring this guy on and he'd be the one toning my language down. The entire machine it's not necessarily that much of a ripoff considering the form factor that you get in it and when you do actually price it with a display that's for a PC that would be equal it actually isn't a terrible deal spec wise it's just if you ever have anything go wrong with it ever then you're really screwed. I do think that Apple could do more to design things not to fail and when you look at this cooling solution the inability to clean out the dust you look at the 500 watt power supply like this to me is common sense stuff when I initially set out to build a computer there's not a whole freaking lot to it these days it's like putting together Lego you got your form factor which Apple does a great job of you got your acoustics and you got your thermals that's step one of building a computer make sure that it's not gonna overheat and it's not gonna be super loud oh and don't use a crappy power supply so that it doesn't blow up in two years. I'm just surprised by the heatsink because I know that in many of their machines they focus on it being quiet which is a good thing they wanted the machine to not make noise but if you want it to not make noise you would want a larger heatsink not a smaller one and what they've done with a lot of the newer machines they took the 2013-14 design which is actually a really nice design except the fan just doesn't turn on for another 20 seat okay so should we get started then they get to figure out that I don't know how it goes together yeah I know now now neither of us looks like an expert yeah I know so I've done I've done an iMac 5k but I've never done an iMac Pro like in terms of disassembly and reassembly have you done an iMac 5k no oh really last time I reassembled an iMac was 2012 or 13 most of what we do is liquid damage repairs but you got to be pretty special to spill water on here yeah like water typically goes down not sideways you'd have to be drinking water over a bare board sitting on a table or you just fountain it into your iMac and hope it falls through this rain or someone has to say something really funny one thing that sucks with this form factor at least for the older ones is that if you want to replace the hard drive you have to remove the screen to get to the drive and the screen cable is short so when people take the screen out they don't realize that they have to hold the screen on their chest they don't do that they just take the screen out like this they wind up ripping the screen connector right off the board okay so do we want to put this no you know I mean no just up it should be okay right well hold on a second because we've got we've got brackets in here called like Wi-Fi and stuff so I want to make sure that we're that's this has even it though right that's one thing that I have to say I love about Apple they're wireless it's just they're the only ones that I'm aware of that do a three by three by in in a notebook because everyone else is using the mini PCIe standard that is just not physically large enough to do a three by so this looks like some kind of sense for the power supply I guess okay so hold on we probably got to put this put this lead in oh okay that one comes around as well okay this guy's blocking you hold on hold on oh that's lifting up some kind of cover that probably serves some kind of purpose here hold on okay it covers coils yeah covers things that you shouldn't touch I guess let me see if I can kind of guide you in here stay out cables you really go ham like it's funny because I get a lot of flack for just kind of like going for it with stuff oh yeah but as far as we know this board works so please do be very careful no pressure why did I fly him in for me to do this for me so I could learn there we go now we're now we're getting in there there we go bada-bing okay all right so it's like being a dentist it's like say okay do we want to screw it in first maybe or no we just want to see if it works before you screw it in it's bad luck to screw it in before you see if it works so my thing is I don't close the panel first but I I'm willing to screw in a board I'll put in at least a couple screws because I don't like I don't like motherboards sliding around on standoffs oh yeah can I put in two screws okay stressing out here one thing about working on a PC like this that legitimately should require certification and legitimately is dangerous for the average person is the fact that it has exposed it is on the capacitors on their power supplies no there's no no no there's nothing that goes on here it's just like this that is extremely dangerous you could die this this is nothing this is no tongue-in-cheek haha Apple or anything like that just I've never actually seen another finished goods product like this with an exposed power supply like that and as far as I can tell the only reason they've done it is so that they can use the cooler unit here to cool the power supply without it having its own fan which would because of the thin form factor be quite small and therefore whiny I'm surprised they didn't put at least some sort of cage over it that happened to be grounded so that if the somebody was going into let's say clean their fan they don't do that this is one of those things where I like to joke in my videos but I would not want to touch that and there is a good chance of somebody opening this and actually hurting themselves even if it's unplugged yeah because those capacitors will stay charged for a long time after a long time sometimes months or even years you don't mess around with that stuff now actually on the subject of these things being exposed a lot of people have asked us what exactly happened because the way that we showed our iMac Pro failure was in the form of like a reenactment because obviously the camera wasn't rolling while we while we dropped the display yeah those sparks those after-effects drawn sparks very real I know we deceived everyone I believed in you up so what actually happened was when Anthony was removing the display he bridged something in here and it caused a spark which startled him and caused him to drop the display that was what actually happened and because the spark was on the motherboard that's why from the very beginning we have deceived no one we knew we definitely had a broken display but we knew we also possibly had a dead motherboard and therefore by extension a dead power supply actually the spark was off the power supply wasn't it so you know what's funny a shield would have prevented all of this a shield would have prevented how interesting so sorry the spark on the power supply so you know when you short out a power supply you can kind of kill almost anything downstream and because on this particular machine the power for everything runs through the motherboard it was probably gonna burn something on the motherboard before it carried through to something else so that was where our conclusion came from we knew we definitely had a dead screen because it was cracked we knew that we potentially had a dead power supply and a dead motherboard but that our other components probably worked with that said I've seen a lot of shorts occur in my day that have not resulted in dead hardware or I've seen them partially fail like oh well now you that USB port doesn't work anymore if you send 12 volts to the 5 volt rail your machines dead if you send 12 volts to ground you just saw a big spark but it's nothing that's gonna actually kill it wow you know those viewers are right this is really complicated because I mean the whole thing like oh these are it's like a supercar you saw those comments right it's not designed to be you know taken apart and put together and I'm kind of like well then how does Apple you know take it apart and put it together because they can they just wouldn't work in me so here's another thing that would definitely require training the screws for the power supply and for just generally mounting the motherboard are threaded the same as far as I can tell but they should not be confused because the power supply ones have these washers on them and they are actually designed we were talking about this off-camera how does the power supply connect to the motherboard it's actually through screw screw connections here so these ones with the little kind of mark next to them that looks like a little oval shaped mark those ones use the silver screws and then everything else uses the black ones that is a bit of a trick and you would need to be very careful with something like that oh not that one these two that moment when you bring in like a celebrity repair technician and it turns out maybe you should have gotten a real repair technician you know yeah in all seriousness though this is not very difficult is it just takes about five minutes should an Apple authorized service provider like is there any justifiable reason why they shouldn't be able to just stock replacement parts for an operation like this and be able to turn a board swap around for a customer in a day the reason that they don't want them to have parts in stock is because they're afraid of them ending up on the open market or on eBay or being resold like that data recovery tool that I had bought for the new touch bar MacBooks I got it from some likely authorized service center that was selling all of them on the side the downside of it is that if the parts are not stocked the customer has to wait one to three weeks to get it in you tell somebody it's gonna take longer than two to five days they just walk out of the store this is an entirely different story imagine for a second that I'm not some youtuber also a celebrity technician you know imagine that I bought this $5,000 machine so that I could run my you know home graphic design business imagine that someone told me this is gonna cost more to repair than I initially spent on it how does that make any sense the thing that made me most furious was the people acting like that argument made any sense that a machine could be a total write off when not every component of it was dead and no broadcast facility is going to allow that any sort of recording studio any sort of video or news editing room they expect that there be virtually no downtime they're gonna have a machine to swap in a place and they expect to be able to repair this because they're using it for real work not to mention for a reasonable price I expect when I buy a replacement piece of something whether it's a car or a vacuum cleaner that if I were to buy every piece of it and assemble it myself it should cost a little bit more but I don't expect that if I were to buy all the pieces as replacement parts that the machine would cost literally double even if I'm putting it together myself that doesn't make any sense anyone making the argument that Apple can't sell it to me for for cheaper because they've got to make money their business is clearly not doing the math because if Apple couldn't afford to sell me this board for around a thousand dollars then they couldn't afford to build this computer I think I do stoned this one so the the Wi-Fi thing is also a little bit tricky you got to slide it into four little notches on this shield right here SD card area thing card reader is over here somewhere so it's over here somewhere oh it's to hold that that dude that in I've done worse okay let's not turn this into a competition of which of us has done worse because that's not gonna be that's not getting the Thunderbolt circuit on fire we were talking about credibility earlier you know that's not gonna help either of us the thing is sometimes I'll have I'll read out the letter that somebody sent in with their machine so they'll know okay he's working on mine and then when I'm streaming it they'll see like me saying okay this is just for Thunderbolt but screw this I just think the side of my own go wink wink wink and then he'll get a call later saying excuse me was that my machine that he just ripped the Thunderbolt USB and Wi-Fi circuitry off and then I'll have to explain to him no he's joking he's gonna put that back when he gets it to turn on and then I'll like walk over to me and say did you stream knocking all that stuff off you watch these videos before you sent it here you must have been explained like you know what you're getting it's not like it's false advertising so this is like me and my wife like I'll make some sort of like really offensive off-color joke and I'm just like hun I mean we were dating for six or seven years before we got married you knew what you're a you knew yeah video when people watch the live streams of their stuff getting fixed I can only imagine how stressful that is because of the show that I put on for it what you're saying everything you see on TV is not you know an accurate reflection of real life you put on a show no way I think the real takeaway here is that if we can handle this Apple's store probably could have handled all right let's see if we get fans been it may not actually do that there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff wired into the display not just oh we did we're done yeah so I can go put the panel back on that's the whole point fan spin that's what was broken fan spin so this is the one actually like special thing that you need and it's a part that I fix itself if you were to take apart and put back together an iMac Pro other than that you just need like a screwdriver a couple of Torx bits nothing nothing really special like you'd be surprised how many repairs you only really need a pretty basic tool kit for this is the hardest part of this repair actually is finding the proper adhesive and this goes back almost 10 years with this stuff is that if you can open it up you can it's it's putting it back together that's difficult because if you try to if you just go to Home Depot and try to find adhesive that fits it's just gonna fall right out oh they sent two just think they knew who they were I fix it does sell really good adhesive tool kits for these machines I'll say well no I was saying they sent two they clearly knew who they were dealing with yeah expected me to screw it up once we brought up the guide for putting on the strips you really don't want to screw this up because they're one-time use oh holy crap they've got like eight steps for each strip they really uh they really walk you through the steps there I think I can handle this um makes one of us I ended up picking the side it should be noted that there's not actually that much pressure on you because we are gonna take it apart again for sure to do our iMac Pro repair guide which is what we were trying to do in the first place I'm offended at being in a video with foul language it's so frustrating to me that Apple tries to create this like you know mystique around how difficult these machines are to repair and the really frustrating thing is that it works we had these comments from people who think that it's more than printed circuit boards capacitors wiring and stickers I think like a lot of people have bought into the idea that this is kind of a utopia and in some ways it is you know the software is easier to use it didn't crash as much when Vista was out it looks nice did you want this on clearly I don't watch your videos there are at least 1,000 MacBook airs out there with the adhesive applied like that four and a half stars baby yeah they think it's the utopia so that if some anything goes wrong it has to be their fault or it has to be your fault it couldn't be that I just did something wrong so so people wind up denying their own experience when they have a problem like I remember seeing this one thread in 2011 where so many people were saying you're wrong this machine doesn't run too hot you must have been doing something wrong you must have got dust in it you got a defect you must have been running it too hard yeah and ironically on their own page it says you know 70% faster at video editing than last year's model and all you were trying to do is edit some video oh I screwed it up oh I really miss that's a fingernails no no no hold on hold on hold on I got I got this I got this don't want it folded you definitely don't want two layers of it if it's a little bit ah shoot no that's really bad actually I gave you so much for your application of the first couple and then I screwed up this last one dang it that's karma for you do you want to do the ribbons and I'll hold the screen yeah let's move it closer to the edge yeah let's actually do that now to pretend that we didn't forget to plug the microphone for some reason they use that connector for the webcam on the MacBook so I thought that that was a webcam as a part of the screen by the way for those watching at home this is the smarter way to handle these recessed screws on the cooler you just put them in the rubber grommet first then screw them in it's all going very smoothly yes nothing is broken yet that we know it's best if you have somebody hold the screen while you're plugging things in so that you don't drop the screen or there's always the chest or you or use your chest because it's very easy to drop this that's the manly way yeah you have to have bigger packs than me for it to really work very well I have more man boobs than pecs myself it's good to use your nails rather than on the edge of the connector over here so you're gonna see it's kind of shaped like an L and don't be afraid to just push it in on the edges don't try to push the whole thing in at once that's very difficult and then you can plug in the screen connector without breaking it and we'll try not to drop anything in the power supply this time famous last words moment of truth come on come on over here Brandon I want people to know we're not faking anything there's no reenactments so we got fans been know that we get Apple logo all right that's a good sign I was hoping you do that was a very anticlimactic I'm holding the screen with my my good hand for crash should we go like the top gun the top gun style high five do you know the the high five they do in top gun here you got it you got to go over here this is gonna end with the screen being dropped okay yeah so I think that's pretty much it massive thank you to absolutely everyone who was involved in this thank you to Anthony for breaking our iMac Pro because otherwise we never would have really started this conversation about right to repair and Apple's policies here we would have had no way of knowing that it was going to be so difficult to repair a professional grade machine thanks to our community who really stepped up and helped us out getting this thing fixed for a reasonable price well if we can throw our total bill of materials up here compared to what Apple would have charged us we can do that right huge thanks to Louis Rossman for showing up and helping be reassembled here was a lot of fun thanks to iFixit of course for providing us with the adhesive strips and the tools we need as well as their awesome online guides for disassembly and reassembly of your electronics and of course for sponsoring this third installment of this video series and thank you to you guys for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts just like this one and our community forum which you should definitely join and you buy screens and boards to Apple products on your merch store no you cannot extra for the people who stayed to the end yes we are aware of the serialization process for Apple main boards don't ask any questions but this does work with FaceTime and iMessage and all that stuff don't worry about it but you might run into issues if you were to actually try to just buy a random board on eBay