TR Forums

Hi All,

My wife's iMac (mid 2007) is starting to have issues, and between the OS running like hot garbage on 3GB of DDR2 and the power supply seemingly developing problems, it's probably getting close to new machine time.

Hate letting things go to waste, and the built-in iMac display sure is nice. I've done some googling awhile back to see if anyone had posted much in the way of instructions for converting the panel to standalone. If I recall what I read correctly, the primary issue is that it would require some type of power and/or signaling converter that don't really exist.

Anyone here ever give this a try, or look into it enough to confirm if it's a lost cause?

Thanks!
db0

You can probably find the model on https://www.ifixit.com where they show disassembly photos of pretty much any Apple product. Most likely the display has a ribbon cable of some type, the hard part is you'd need to find an adapter that converts the ribbon cable into something you can plug a GPU cable into.

Looking at a random 2009 model iMac it looks to be even more complicated with two LED signal cables in addition to a displayport ribbon, if your model requires separate backlight cables then it might not be possible.

Sadly my experience with an old G5 taught me that Apple is expensive, bespoke, proprietary crap and Apple seem to spend effort ensuring there is no spares market.

Under warranty, your minor issues are solved by taking it to a store and Apple giving you a completely new one.
Out of warranty, screw you. BUY A NEW ONE.

(I had a similar thought of tyring to reuse the panel in a 23" cinema display but getting spare parts was a totally futile waste of my time).

What you're trying to do is called target display mode and it doesn't seem to be supported on that model.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Sadly my experience with an old G5 taught me that Apple is expensive, bespoke, proprietary crap and Apple seem to spend effort ensuring there is no spares market.

Under warranty, your minor issues are solved by taking it to a store and Apple giving you a completely new one.
Out of warranty, screw you. BUY A NEW ONE.

(I had a similar thought of tyring to reuse the panel in a 23" cinema display but getting spare parts was a totally futile waste of my time).

Ah, the G5.
Why don't you tell us more about your extremely contextually relevant experience with Apple products?
Maybe something about the Lisa?
Seriously, wtf posseses people to randomly barge into any Apple related discussion and immediately show off the full extent of their stupidity?

I was given a nearly identical iMac a few years back. It had what turned out to be a dying hard drive, but this manifested in strange ways, and was difficult to diagnose. Replacing the hard drive involved popping open the shell and removing the screen panel (among other things). It was more work than any hard drive replacement should be, but there are online guides which helped alot. I remember it running Snow Leopard quite well with a 2Ghz C2D and 2GB, so if yours is performing poorly, maybe something similar is going on.

Assuming it's even possible, I don't think trying to repurpose the screen panel is worth your effort. If you don't like seeing things go to waste, I would give Memtest86 a run overnight, and then try a clean install on a new hard drive. You might find it miraculously fixes your problems.

windwalker wrote:

RAaaaaaage

If you can source links to the parts the OP needs (you'll struggle) please be my guest and prove me wrong - everyone wins.

iFixit is more than enough proof that if Apple didn't want it to be servicable, it won't be servicable.

You're going to run into two problems:

Power. The power supply for the iMac supplies the panel's requirements for the panel driver electronics, TFT, and backlight. You'll have to accommodate that.

Driver hardware. If Apple incorporated the panel driver on the Mainboard (or do they still call it a Logic Board?), as I suspect they did, then you're out of luck. I suspect, once you remove the power supply and Mainboard, all you'll be left with is a backlight and a TFT panel.

Look at it this way (positive spin time): If you ever do a project from scratch using a microcontroller, where you need a display, and want to do all the work yourself, for fun, instead of just using a standard interface to an external monitor, you already have the TFT panel. Apple buys their panels from standard suppliers -- OK, they occasionally have a custom feature; but, you should be able to find the signaling spec based on the part numbers.

Or, maybe you can find someone on Ebay that needs spare parts for their iMac.

The Egg wrote:

I was given a nearly identical iMac a few years back. It had what turned out to be a dying hard drive, but this manifested in strange ways, and was difficult to diagnose. Replacing the hard drive involved popping open the shell and removing the screen panel (among other things). It was more work than any hard drive replacement should be, but there are online guides which helped alot. I remember it running Snow Leopard quite well with a 2Ghz C2D and 2GB, so if yours is performing poorly, maybe something similar is going on.

Assuming it's even possible, I don't think trying to repurpose the screen panel is worth your effort. If you don't like seeing things go to waste, I would give Memtest86 a run overnight, and then try a clean install on a new hard drive. You might find it miraculously fixes your problems.

Good general advice for sure, but not applicable in this situation. Hardware has already been tested good (aside from the PSU starting to develop issues). Not sure how much experience you've had with the abomination of an OS that is "Mavericks", but it is a bloated, Vista-esque nightmare. I have it installed on one of my work systems - an i7 Mac, and it was slow to the point of being borderline unusable until I bumped it up to 8GB of RAM and threw an SSD in there. Let's just say it doesn't run all that well on a C2D with 3GB of DDR2 on the wife's iMac.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in. Pretty much what I unfortunately suspected. Hope she's willing to go with a PC at this point.