Mac Studio teardown reveals a surprisingly fixable computer that could be felled by dust

Date:
Thu, 24 Mar 2022 17:58:27 +0000

Description:
The Mac Studio certainly does better than many pieces of Apple hardware when it comes to repairability.

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Apples Mac Studio has been given the teardown treatment by iFixit, and the results arent half bad, although there is a sticking point in terms of the cooling solution and concerns around dust accumulation therein.

As iFixit makes clear in its write-up , there are impressive elements to the design of the Mac Studio, and also some disappointments, leading to an
overall repairability score of 6 out of 10 not great, but a decent effort, and a higher mark than many pieces of Apple hardware. Some particularly positive noises were made about the ports.

So, what were the main downsides here? System RAM cant be upgraded as its integrated with the M1 SoC , of course, but if youve been following the chatter around the Mac Studio, youll likely know that despite Apples insistence that the storage is not user upgradable, weve heard that it might just be .

What iFixit found was that despite there being an empty slot for another drive, they could fit that second drive, but couldnt get it working. So, that was a no-go.

What iFixit could do, however, was to swap the existing drive out and replace it with another. That was a like-for-like swap, mind, and what isnt yet clear is if its possible to fit a bigger drive, and thus upgrade in the future.
Time will tell on that score.

The iFixit team also found that the Mac Studios cooling system is built
around a huge heat sink, accompanied by a pair of fans. The teardown experts worry here is how the Mac Studio will tolerate possible dust build-up, and to quote the site, its gonna be a heck of a chore to clean this out every couple years, potentially. Analysis: Dust, anybody? No?

While the drive upgrade situation may seem disappointing given that our hopes were raised by the aforementioned speculation, the ability to swap out the existing drive and fit a (same size) replacement is certainly much better
than nothing. Its clearly useful if the original drive was to fail (but note that doing this involves some fiddling around using Apple Configurator to do
a DFU restore to reset the drive).

As for the potential dust issue, well, it does seem like a valid concern on the face of it, but then again, the fans may not have to spin up all that much, so any intake could be kept to a minimum. Certainly in our review , we found the Mac Studio to be very quiet even when pushed hard so unless youre really hammering the PC constantly , those fans may not actually be that active at all. The design and overall thermals certainly seem solid in that respect. These are the best Macs and MacBooks you can buy

Via Engadget



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/mac-studio-teardown-reveals-a-surprisingly-fixa ble-computer-that-could-be-felled-by-dust/


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