• dankm@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Forget colour. That generation iMac was incredibly repairable compared to today’s Apple stuff. Two screws on the back panel and the whole internal tray slides out. Every major component’s immediately accessible. And all repair parts were available.

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Though, with the caveat that the computer stuff is integrated with the CRT which stores a potentially deadly high voltage for quite a while after being unplugged. Which doesn’t mean it’s not repairable, it certainly is especially by an independent shop with trained technicians, but it was still very clearly not meant to be repaired by the user with no prior experience. IIRC there were older Macs with integrated monitors that had the computer parts more or less separated from the monitor parts, which were comparatively safer.

      Mind you, this carried over to fairly recent iMac models, because up until the M1 iMacs, they had their power supply as just a bare PCB right beside the motherboard with no separate enclosure, and modern switched mode power supplies also have capacitors that store deadly voltages long after being unplugged (as in, higher voltages than from the wall, they step up the voltage before stepping it back down which allows them to use more energy efficient components). While there’s a lot to dislike about discrete power adapters for everything, they are definitively safer especially for people doing repairs because all the dangerous high voltage stuff is self-contained and separate from the actual device itself (and allows you to very easily replace the power supply with zero disassembly).