iFixit

Ever wonder what was behind that monolithic black display? Here you go: 27" of display-less iMac. (Actually, we're pretty sure the 27" measurement is completely meaningless now that the display is gone.)

Notice how the stand is pivoted fully upward. Without the added weight of the LCD panel, there's not nearly enough force against the spring to maintain the normal neutral buoyancy.

The hard drive occupies the center of the unit, while the optical drive and fan are clearly visible on the right.

Two T10 Torx screws hold the hard drive in place.

Once they're removed, the hard drive easily pivots up and out of the system.

The 27" iMac ships with a 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA hard drive (Apple offers an optional 2TB drive for an additional $250).

There isn't really room in here for a second drive, but you could certainly swap this one out yourself. You could hypothetically install an SSD, but this seems like such a good a media computer that it would be a shame to limit it to current SSD capacities.

This + that = easy Time Machine internal backup!

Disconnecting antennas and removing the AirPort Card.

A single T6 Torx screw secures the standard PCI-e wireless board to the custom board it's mounted on.

Even after removing the silver EMI shield, it's challenging to read the main Wi-fi chip. It's an Atheros AR9280.

The two identical chips near the antenna connectors are SiGe Semiconductor 2593A20 power amplifiers.

A few screws later, and....

The power supply is out.

• Oooh, pretty colors!
• Both the blue and red parts are capacitors. Unfortunately they didn't have enough markings on them for us to identify their capacitance.
• Their Capacitance is 27.5 for both reds, the one blue against the board is 15, and the other two visible blue ones are 20. (all in micro-farads)

The power supply puts out 25.8 amps at 12 volts, for a total output of 310 watts. That's the biggest power supply we've seen in an iMac.

The Bluetooth board is in the corner of the computer, grounded to the case. We began the removal procedure by disconnecting the blue antenna cable.

The board is one of the few components held in place by a T8 (as opposed to T10) Torx screw.

This may be the most underwhelming component in this iMac, the 8x SuperDrive.

The fact that there is no Blu-ray drive in here is a bag of hurt.

C'mon Apple, iMacs in 2005 had 8x SuperDrives. The SuperDrive just doesn't seem so super anymore.

The good news is, it's a standard 12.7 mm, slimline SATA optical drive. The drive Apple should have included is this Panasonic UJ-135 Blu-ray drive.

Apple lacks software support for playing copy-protected Blu-ray movies, so if you install a Blu-ray drive, you'll have to boot into Windows to enjoy the show.

Apple made good use of the extra available space to include large, quiet fans with lots of low speed blades.

Removing the massive logic board requires two hands. With the RAM cavity opened underneath the iMac try to help pushing the logic board with the thumb towards the upper part (towards the isight camera), to ease the release of the logic board.

Notice how far apart the GPU and CPU are, and how they have separate heat sinks leading to opposite sides of the computer. This rather complex thermal engineering work allowed Apple to upgrade the iMac to use Intel's desktop processors.