Attached is a picture of our iMac teardown, and a few pictures of our building exercise for iPad holders.

 

Teardown summary and thoughts:

The main challenge we faced in tearing down an iMac was finding the Torx screws needed. We discovered that Apple meticulously crams everything into a tiny case, and this makes is relatively hard to disassemble. Lots of foil was lining the internal components.

List of parts we took out: RAM, Neodymium magnets, foil, LCD screen, speaker housings, fans, power supply, cd-player, hard drive, heat sinks, motherboard, stand, stand bracket, ON-button, chassis, and mac plastic housing.

We discovered a few things:

1) The suppliers that Apple uses for some of their internal components have different construction standards/conventions – some used Philips head screws.

2) The parts for the mac were made using A) Injection molding, B) CNC, and 3) Stamping