[bsimpson]

There was a magical window at Google where you could be issued an iMac Pro 5k. (To this day, the standard issue monitor is still 1440p.)

~9 years later, there are a lot of people still using it as their main machine, waiting until we get kicked off the corp network for lack of software support.

[bombcar]

Was that one of the ones that could do "target display mode" and become a monitor for another machine?

[bsimpson]

Nope - they removed that feature, so now come the end of the year, they're all e-waste.

It feels really stupid to have to throw away a perfectly capable machine with 64GB of RAM in 2026.

[testing22321]

Tons of people pull the 5k iMac apart, gut the insides and install a driver board to run the screen. For a few hundred bucks you get a wicked 5k screen

[Zanfa]

Did exactly that a while ago to salvage the nano texture panel from my 5k iMac. It takes a bit of research to figure out the correct driver board for the specific panel / peripheral combo, but the build process itself was pretty straightforward and it works like a charm.

[bzzzt]

Can you share any experiences with the driver boards? From what I've seen it looks a bit janky with wires sticking out of the old iMacs chassis and a very old school on screen display. Is the driver board stable? No overheating or signal issues?

[Zanfa]

I went with the T18 board since it’s passively cooled. IIRC it could also do PD through USB-c, but that would require additional cooling and I just don’t trust noname Chinese manufacturers to do that correctly anyway, so I typically have it hooked up via HDMI. So far it’s been perfectly stable, without any issues. I think there might have been a small addon board to be able to use full brightness as well. There’s a built-in retro display monitoring menu, but I haven’t had a need to use it really, most configurations work from Mac OS, including color profiles and brightness control.

For cables, my iMac had an opening in the back for RAM sticks, which I popped out and wired all cables through. I mounted the driver board on a piece of plexiglass so that most of the ports are accessible directly to the RAM opening. For power, I use a regular third party power brick I had laying around, though some people have reused the iMac’s original power cable with an internal power supply.

Honestly, the hardest parts were identifying the correct driver board and gluing the front glass back on after assembly.

[spopejoy]

Throw asahi on it? I have access to one of those beasts and am considering it ...

[bsimpson]

It's Intel - you could run any Linux.

Unfortunately, I don't know that Linux handles the bespoke 5k graphics. Moreover, our corp Linux distribution is only certified for particular devices. Even if the screen worked, you wouldn't be allowed on the network, which is the whole problem with Intel support being dropped in the first place.

[darkwater]

Serious question: why are they doing this if they've been marketing BeyondCorp for years now? Why is corporate network special then?

[benlivengood]

Beyondcorp protects communication between trusted devices. The work to maintain a trusted hardware device of a particular model is high; CVEs occur constantly and sometimes you have to rely on the vendor to provide microcode (even if you get the source to review, they may be the only ones who can sign it, for example) or drivers.

The network connection isn't the main problem, it's every access to a protected system that would no longer trust the device.

[abustamam]

Wait, they throw them away, not sell or give to employees? I feel like as long as the computer is reset, indeed it is stupid to just throw it away instead of giving or selling it to someone who wants it.

[zadikian]

They could resell, but maybe another way to phrase this, tying the screen to the obsolete computer greatly reduces the useful lifespan of the screen. But at that time, DisplayPort didn't do enough bandwidth to have that kind of display externally anyway.

[xp84]

At that time… not that they even allow the 4K present day iMacs to target display. So that wasn’t the reason.

[zadikian]

Oh, that's irritating

[bsimpson]

They recently started a resale program with decommissioned devices.

[retired]

It was removed (or rather discontinued) because the iMac didn’t have an external interface that could push 5K