I've been eyeing Jon Marsh's measurement setup a bit and had been wanting to upgrade mine to something moderately mobile and quite flexible. The first purchase was a rolling toolbox in place of the cart Jon used. I felt having the drawers for tools, cords, wires, crossover bits and baubles, and other stuff would be handy. Of course, it's kind of heavy, but rolls pretty well anyway.
Next step was acquiring a computer. So I could go with a couple options, like using some parts I had to make a new one, purchasing an older work laptop from the company I work for, or buying a new computer altogether. I ended up choosing option 3b - I bought my wife a new 16" Macbook Pro and hers had been causing her a bit of trouble. Trouble with computers doesn't slow me down so I inherited her 2017 Macbook Pro. When we were chatting, I also talked her into letting me have her late 2014 27" 5K iMac too. Score!
I elected to use the iMac first for a couple reasons. (1) it has a really nice screen worth taking advantage of. (2) since it uses desktop hardware instead of laptop processors it's probably faster anyway. Only downside is the ports that are present - no USB-C in 2014. I'll figure that out later, but the first step was getting this thing working better. It came with a 1TB 'fusion' drive (basically 1 TB hard disk plus a 128 GB proprietary 'blade' flash storage device) that was getting slow with a very old install. Here it is in its new home.
Naturally, my first inclination was to skip past the whole 'reinstall' all the software and jump to the step where I 'reinstall' all the hardware. So I cut off the screen.
The older iMac design was superior in my opinion, but it would have resulted in a thicker body than these 'newer' screen allow. The old design - the one that still had an optical drive - used magnets embedded in the screen to hold it on the frame. You just needed a couple suction cups and could pop it off. Carefully of course - there are wires inside. The 'modern' design is glued on, hence the little blade tool in the photo above. So I got that off and the interior was exposed.
What you might notice is the Seagate 1TB hard disk sitting right there. What you can't see is the 'blade' flash drive. That, unfortunately, required a bit of surgery. Here is the left speaker, by the way. They take up a fair chunk of the interior.
Next step was acquiring a computer. So I could go with a couple options, like using some parts I had to make a new one, purchasing an older work laptop from the company I work for, or buying a new computer altogether. I ended up choosing option 3b - I bought my wife a new 16" Macbook Pro and hers had been causing her a bit of trouble. Trouble with computers doesn't slow me down so I inherited her 2017 Macbook Pro. When we were chatting, I also talked her into letting me have her late 2014 27" 5K iMac too. Score!
I elected to use the iMac first for a couple reasons. (1) it has a really nice screen worth taking advantage of. (2) since it uses desktop hardware instead of laptop processors it's probably faster anyway. Only downside is the ports that are present - no USB-C in 2014. I'll figure that out later, but the first step was getting this thing working better. It came with a 1TB 'fusion' drive (basically 1 TB hard disk plus a 128 GB proprietary 'blade' flash storage device) that was getting slow with a very old install. Here it is in its new home.
Naturally, my first inclination was to skip past the whole 'reinstall' all the software and jump to the step where I 'reinstall' all the hardware. So I cut off the screen.
The older iMac design was superior in my opinion, but it would have resulted in a thicker body than these 'newer' screen allow. The old design - the one that still had an optical drive - used magnets embedded in the screen to hold it on the frame. You just needed a couple suction cups and could pop it off. Carefully of course - there are wires inside. The 'modern' design is glued on, hence the little blade tool in the photo above. So I got that off and the interior was exposed.
What you might notice is the Seagate 1TB hard disk sitting right there. What you can't see is the 'blade' flash drive. That, unfortunately, required a bit of surgery. Here is the left speaker, by the way. They take up a fair chunk of the interior.
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