User-serviceable — for some users, at least
The Bondi Blue iMac was designed to be relatively easy to open to upgrade both system and video memory. Doing so, however, wasn't what we'd now call a simple matter — it involved setting the iMac face-down on a pad or fluffy towel, removing its bottom, popping off a few cables, and sliding its guts out on a tray.
No, this isn't a scene from Jaws, it's the underside of the iMac (click to enlarge)
Popping off the bottom of the Bondi Blue is a simple matter of removing one screw, then grabbing hold of the handle and pulling off the cover. It's after you free that cover that things get a bit wonky.
If those look like video and serial cables, it's because they're video and serial cables (click to enlarge)
To free the system tray after popping off the bottom plastic, you first need to remove a pair of power cables — one for the drives and another for the rest of the system, including the fan — plus a video cable that leads to the CRT, and a serial cable that leads to the infrared sensor.
After you've disconnected the cables, you grab the system tray by its top plastic handle, lift — and wiggle and coax a bit — and it slides up and out.
The iMac without its CRT or plastic shell (click to enlarge)
Once out of the iMac, the system tray reveals itself to consist of two main areas. in its boxy flat front live the CD-ROM drive and the hard drive, with the former siting on top of the latter. In the tilted rear section lives the logic board and all its computing goodness
One thing you can't immediately see when looking at the system tray is the lack of hefty boot ROMs. The iMac was the first Mac that used what was called the New World ROM — meaning that after the machine booted from a 1MB Open Firmware ROM, the 3MB Mac Toolbox image was loaded into RAM from a file on the hard drive. Previous Macs had the Toolbox and boot routines in a hardware ROM.
Inside that lightly toasted cage (top center) resides the CPU and system RAM (click to enlarge)
When the system tray is propped up on its CR-ROM foot, it's easy to see the cage in which lives the CPU daughtercard and SO-DIMM RAM slots. A simple clip holds the cage's lid in place; removing it allows you to also remove the CPU's heat sink — which sits right on the chip with no thermal paste — and expose the little guy himself. Or herself. Whatever.
Next page: In the chips
COMMENTS
Sooo close
You so nearly got through without your inner fanboi escaping but fluffed it at the end:
"I'm surrounded by the guts of the personal computer that saved Apple, arguably jump-started the internet age, helped kill off the floppy, and brought translucency to everything from George Foreman grills to Rowenta Surfline steam irons."
Jump-started the internet age? My arse. I'd love to see any accurate statistics you may have for the number of people who first experienced the internet or first had the internet at home on an iMac. I'd be prepared to make a healthy wager that the true figure is vanishingly small.
Helped kill off the floppy I can't really sit still for either. Yes it helped but so did about a billion other factors. Claiming the iMac was significant is like trying to take credit for keeping the worlds trees alive because *I* produce CO2. The iMac is way down the list behind CD-R, CD-RW, freefalling drive prices, USB memory sticks, software bloat etc.
You probably deliberately left out the 'i'. We're into our second decade of marketing wonks insisting that anything can be cool if you put an 'i' in front of it. Shoot them, shoot them all.
Translucent everything - oh yes, that's thanks to the iMac for sure which is a marmite thing in itself but you should have highlighted the bigger truth I'd credit the iMac with. It started a revolution in design. We see attempts at aesthetically pleasing design in the most mundane of items these days from cheap radios to phones to, well, you name it. Nothing in a poorly designed or plain beige box stands a prayer. Much as I dislike Apple the iMac deserves a beer for that so here's one.
@Christian Berger re: 56k
It's all comparative.
If you had moved up from 1200/75b/s, through V.22bis, V.32 and V.32bis, then V.90 was fast.
If you were using it for commercial use, then it was almost certainly the upload speed that was your issue, as it was asymmetric and the upload channel was a fraction of the download speed. IIRC, if you did V.90 modem to V.90 modem directly, you could only get 33.6kb/s anyway. You needed something like a DS0 setup, which could directly inject digital signals into the phone system, to give you the 56k download speed to end-users.
Most home users mostly downloaded data, so this was not a big issue.
Don't compare your 20Mb/s ADSL line, or even channel-bonded ISDN with what home users had available at the time, because ISDN was far too expensive for home users to consider, even the 'reduced-cost' Home Highway that BT tried to sell.
At this time, nobody did large mail attachments or video, and you left P2P running for hours or days if you were using it. Web sites were still mainly HTML, with only fairly small GIF images. You also did not have flash video adverts or java or javascript apps at all. Most pages were fairly static, and eminently cachable, so we got what we though was a good service at the time.
I wan my whole household (several computers with thin-wire Ethernet, and then wireless as it became available - we're a techie household) on a dial-on-demand 56K modem for several years, until BT got round to upgrading our exchange to ADSL.
Best Selling?
The best-selling computer of all time is the Commodore 64 - by a significant amount.
There's a tendency amongst both Apple execs and fans to re-write history in their favour - Commodore had the best-selling computer ever with the 64, and the first colour DTP machine with the Amiga.
Win95
I'm sure we all remember Bill Gates' and his hilarious on-stage USB "demonstration".
Whatever the bitter and twisted anti-Apple-tards might post in these articles, Apples resurgence redefined the PC industry - and that's why *every* major tech company is now scrambling to keep up with them.
A pint for Mr Jobs.
@Andy Christ
Windows 95 shipped with MSN preinstalled and I daresay other PCs shipped with AOL or other apps preinstalled. So a good few PCs doubtless existed way before your "first personal computer to ship that was ready to connect to the internet in seconds" that did exactly that.
Of course maybe Apple bragged they were the first, but it wouldn't be the first time they made baldfaced lies in ads. See also claims about the Mac being the first 64-bit OS, the fastest PC ever etc.
