KEY FINDINGS
• We tip the Studio on to its back and inspect the base, hoping to find a way in. A strip of air vents borders the bottom panel, and at each corner we find a round rubber foot, concealing a Torx screw. The two on the front corners are of the extralong variety. As manufacturers continue the fight against visible screws, we’re OK with this solution—it’s certainly better than gluing the entire thing shut. Screws jettisoned, the heavy bottom cover still holds on by way of several clips. So, we apply a little suction power to yank it free. • Pulling the back cover off reveals a myriad of components. There’s a strict order of operations here. First out are two fans, but they remain anchored by wires with hidden leads. That midframe will have to come out before we can proceed further. As we lift it away, it brings an attached speaker out with it, along with a third wire tethered to the motherboard. • Finally, we have access to some guts—this Studio is chockfull of ’em. But we need to delve deeper to see if it has the glory. We start with the high-powered half of the hybrid storage: a standard, removable, 64GB SanDisk Z400s M.2 SSD. And on board we find two SanDisk 05466 032G 32GB NAND flash storage modules, and a Silicon Motion SM2246XT SATA III 6Gb/s DRAM-less SSD controller. • It’s time to return to that huge 28-inch glass display. Gulp. Unsure what kind of adhesive lies in wait, we throw down a pair of iOpeners to soften it up. Many swipes of the iMac opening tool later, and we’re ready to call this glue the in-between. It’s not the overkill tar of the Surface Pro, but it’s also not slice-it-down-the-middle clean iMac adhesive. It’s in between. A bit of a struggle, but not impossible. • Repairability Score: 5 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair). The base is easy to open and home to several modular components—including the standard SATA hard drive and M.2 SSD—that can be replaced without disassembling the display. The entire display assembly can be replaced as a piece, without dismantling the display or the base. The RAM, CPU, and GPU are soldered to the board, and cannot be upgraded. You may want to think twice about that 8GB configuration. A few components embedded in the display (buttons, front sensors, and speakers) would be difficult to replace if they failed.