iMac A1418 Upgrade

Hi guys! Today we are going to be working on an iMac that is perfectly fine.

So why is it here today with us? Well, it’s time for an upgrade. This unit’s performance and specs are pretty good. This computer is a late 2013 A1418 iMac with an I5 processor 4th generation. The RAM is eight gigs, and the storage has a one terabyte conventional spinning hard drive.

Why upgrade?

This is a great unit that probably performs well, and you probably have a nice performing unit at home, but, hey, why not bump it up a little bit. Let’s go for a little more high performance.

On this unit here the upgrade is a little complex because on this late model iMac, the screen or LCD and the glass, that you see depicted above, are adhered with double-sided tape, and that has to be removed carefully.

You can see we use this little, let’s call it pizza cutter, tool. With this tool, you kind of go around patiently and take your time. You have to be very cautious not to break that screen because these screens are expensive. When you do get it separated, you have to be really careful with the flex cables behind it to make sure that you don’t yank them. We’ve seen this before, where someone attempts this repair, and then they’re not paying too much attention and they just pull the screen off. They forget there are flexes back there and are not careful. You have to have experience with this because the screen could flip over or the unit could flip back when you pull the screen off, that weight can cause those flexes can rip off, which is now a bigger problem.

What will be new?

We’re going to change the hard drive because remember; this has a conventional hard drive. We’re going to put a one terabyte SSD so that right there is going to dramatically increase the performance of this unit. We will bump up the 8 gigs of RAM, which is pretty good, to 16 gigs. This unit only has two slots, and you could see them barely in this picture here.

We’re going to remove the two fours and add two eights. That’s what we’re going be doing here now. You’ll see that to upgrade the ram, they’re behind the board, so the board has to be removed to do that upgrade. This makes it even more complex. Most of the 27 inch iMacs will have the removable ram on the back with a little cover, and those have four slots. Therefore, the upgrade is much easier on those units. On this one it doesn’t, you only got two slots, and they are under the board. The board has to be lifted off to get to it.

We are going to add RAM, upgrade the hard drive, and install the operating system. We are going to start it fresh and install the latest version of Mojave on this unit.

That is what’s going on here today at PC 911.