This channel features repairs and restorations of all kinds of random electronics, appliances, lawnmowers, and anything else I might find on the side of the road on trash day. Also be sure to subscribe to my other channel "The Guitologist" to see detailed repairs of guitars and amplifiers.
My main macbook pro is one from 2012, i run Monterey on it, still supported! Apple cutted my model off at Catalina, but with Opencore Legacy Patcher, i can run the latest and greatest macos version on my ancient dinosaur with descend enough performance! But yeah, their imacs aren't good computers; and i do mean those intel ones, the M series imacs don't get quite this hot! I own a 2008 iMac on which i run mojave, only 4gb of ram limits the versions i can install on it.
I am sure that just replacing the thermal paste (you used far too much!) and fastening the screws (loctite thread locker might help keeping it stable) should have fully fixed the computer. All that hole drilling is not necessary.
18:12 You can update, ive done it myself with three older imacs, from 2010, and 2009, and 2012, just using OpenCore patcher. After that, even officially updates from the setting menu is going just fine, also the applestore.
Ive bought 2 imacs from 2010 and 2012, and upgraded with ssd, these machines are running just great!! With opencore ive updated to the newest MacOs Sonoma!!
Drilling holes or cutting big holes into the case defeats the effective cooling! Your iMac is a hot air chimney! Feeding cool air at the bottom exiting at the top. Yes! You had a few problems! Loose RAM stick and screws on the GPU heat sink. I would have cleaned the heat sink fins on both sinks and applied some fresh thermal paste. Don’t go to far with the pastes! It’s not quantity, it’s coverage. A thin (the thickness of a single sheet of tissue paper) is all that’s needed. Over doing it makes a mess and depending on what you use can mess up the little SMD components on the carrier bd. Also install a good thermal monitoring app so you can keep an eye on things.
To be fair the 2011 iMacs have a terrible GPU failure rate. It's a wonder it's still going. I fix and upgrade a lot of iMacs and if someone calls about a 2011 iMac I will try my best to convince them not to throw money at it. Any other model of aluminum iMacs, yes. Install an SSD. Put DosDude's Catalina Patcher on it or OpenCore Legacy Patcher and get it up to the most up-to-date OS that you can.
One of my regular customers purchased a new iMac a few months ago, replacing an older 2010 model. I helped him set it up and transfer documents, apps and stuff from the old one to the new one. All fine so far. He also wanted me to wipe and reinstall the old iMac before donating it to his grandchildren. That's where the challenge began. Downloading an older Mac OS (Catalina or older) for that machine was impossible. Running Internet Recovery failed. Managed to make a Mac OS High Sierra USB installer stick from an Internet Archive download, but it just threw an error when starting the installer process. Until I found out that the date had to be set to 2018 to circumvent some expired certificate. Did that and managed to complete the installation. PS: Linux Mint Cinnamon is the primary OS on my laptop. I've got Windows 10 too, mostly for recording and stuff that requires Windows.
There no way a corporate company would lie..how dare you!?..I'm not shocked AT ALL..I'm surprised you are brad...but they care about our environment..😂
You can install mac os catalina or monteray on them, just upgrage the gfx card. It is mxm standard so some geforce cards can be flashed for mac and work great. The only problem here was the gfx card. Macrumors has long threads on upgrading 2010and 11 imacs with newer gfx cards, wifi bluetooth modules and even xeon cpus.
It probably would have been better to make that opening past the fin stack for the CPU unless there's something directing the air through just the fin stack. You want that air to go through the fins instead of potentially around it in order for them to dissipate the heat more effectively.
Sooooo... When you go to the 'Genius Bar' they have a screen you can look at, on it is a pdf witha flowchart diagram which always leads to "This is a logic board fault which we can replace for £600 or we can sell you a new iMac today for just £1,200 if you trade this one in!" Invariably its a thermal issue, if you get lines down the screen or it won't switch on then its capacitors that need replacing which isn't difficult, just get 'Low ESR' types and you're golden. Thanks for making this video,, more people inthe non-techy world need to know about this stuff Brad! :o)
those screws are quite tight from the factory, someone has had the heat sink off before. when you start cutting gd holes in the case, you lost me brother. do some research before you get out the dremel.
apple makes well designed and engineered products, you are wrong about that. their genius bar service is spotty, and they dont build them to be repaired. i have plenty of beefs about apple but they make good computers
The lines are caused by the htz chosen. I saw you need to put on 50 htz not 60. That should help the lines. Also camera setting is in menu to lighten or darken images. Also you can switch to color on the camera too.
I've got this very machine sitting in my attic, dead. Second one I had after the first one died, too. Then I bought a 21 inch iMac in 2015 and it died 2 years ago. I bought them cause I liked the small footprint amd sleek look and convenience of no tower. I will NEVER buy another Apple product, they're all crap. I built an Intel based mini ITX console computer in 2015 with a Z170mb and GTX 2070 super gpu and it's STILL RUNNUNG with absolutely no problems. DON'T waste your money on Apple products, they're junk and the new iMacs can't be upgraded, the memory is soldered to the mb. Screw you Tim Cook, or Crook, and your overpriced garbage. and yes, the customer service is even worse. iPhones are also just as bad, anyone that buys Apple shit is a sucker!
I'm with you, Brad re putting Linux Mint on older Macs. This is a way to breath new life into them. I have 4 MacBooks that are running Linux and I've never looked back. Great solution.
yo whats poppin. the only apple product I ever bought was a Ipod classic I believe, the big one. The display gave up the ghost a long time ago, but apparently thats fixable as well.
You should stick with things you actually have knowledge about. The reason they are saying it’s not repairable is it is EOL, they don’t have parts anymore. You’re a moron😊
LOL I turn my old macs into linux machines as well. Apple fails to support their updated software on old machines so out they go and Linux replaces it.
The tiniest amount of "Loctite thread locker" for the small screws that will loosen up ... like what can be picked by the tip of a needle. If you have an extra free 5V connector somewhere inside, just screw an external fan to extract hot air from the computer.
It has reached the age where it is no longer supported. Timed out, rotate out of supported hardware. As for the customer service representatives there at the apple location, they are paid very little money and have none to practically minimum training. They get updates from company techs on common problems solutions. They get the company line on how to deal with timed out old hardware. The objective is to make sales. You could probably market yourself as a miracle old apple equipment repair man and make a fortune on it. If you cut into apples sales enough so that they took note of you they would probably come to you and try to buy you out. Or eliminate you somehow?...
Apple condemned it because the GFX card is known to fail because of a manufacturing process that turned out to not be solid. Most GPUs from this era, including the Playstation 3 and Xbox360 had this problem and no reballing, reflowing or similar actions are going to fix it, it is a problem with the actual silicon being connected to layers inside the package of the chip. In all likelyhood, the "teenager" at the apple store actually went through the trouble to inspect if it was possibly just something loose or messed up thermal paste. When he/she found out that there wasn't a problem, they hastily put the machine back together and gave it back, assuming that the customer would just toss it and not try to use it after, hence you finding loose screws and parts in it. Not the way to do it, agreed, but they weren't going to make money on it or give warranty so they just wanted their time spent on it to be as minimal as possible. I don't agree with that, but the policy is common in stores and I see why they would do that. Cutting holes in the casing is just a waste of time, effort and design. The thermal design for this mac calls for air to enter in the bottom and there is a big slit in the top for the hot air to come out. If you wanted to increase airflow, you could have simply put one or two small fans in the bottom of the casing blowing air up. Running linux on this might help in a way you don't expect it to help in terms of trouble with the graphics chip. Because stock linux installs don't usually make use of most of the graphics chips capabilities, chances are that you are just not stressing (parts of) the GPU to a point where you see it glitch. In all likelyhood, your graphics performance is not as good as it could be with the proper drivers installed (there are some installers for those, but usually not part of a default linux install) but if it works for you and is problem free, it is a win. I would *not* recommend people to buy these machines, since the graphics cards do fail eventually. Finding replacements that don't fail because of the manufacturing process being flawed for these is hard/expensive and they do not function at all without a graphics card in them. Using them as an external monitor to some machine is also not an option. Sure, fifty bucks is cheap, but they are this cheap for a reason. If fixing the graphics was easy, they would cost a lot more. You may get lucky and get some use out of the one you buy, like the one in this video, but statistically, you would be better off in a casino.
What it boils down to is what you want the computer to do for you. If your a novice user then your homegrown hacks to get it work for you are okay. However, if you are using your computer as your livelihood, then you want a newer machine. Time saved is money saved! Now I write this comment on a 2010 Mac Pro.
