There’s not much economic sense in fixing a decade-old desktop computer, especially when it’s the fancy type with the screen integrated into the body of the computer, and the screen is the thing that’s broken. Luckily for [JnsBn] aka [BEAN] the computer in question was still functional with a second monitor, so he decided to implement a cheap repair to get the screen working again by making it see-through.
The only part of the screen that was broken was the backlight, which is separate from the display unit itself. In order to view at least something on the screen without an expensive replacement part, he decided to remove the backlight altogether but leave the display unit installed. With a strip of LEDs around the edge, the screen was visible again in addition to the inner depths of the computer. After a coat of white Plasti Dip on the inside of the computer, it made for an interesting effect and made the computer’s display useful again.
While none of us, including the creator, recommend coating the inside of an iMac with Plasti Dip due to the risk of fire and/or other catastrophic failure, there’s not much to lose otherwise. Just don’t shove this one into the wall.
Well I don’t know if it’s the best monitor repair (still way better than I could do) but it IS a hell of a “case mod”! You just use the second monitor and let people marvel at your see-thru Mac! Also I think the prefect wallpaper for this monitor would be a picture of the pre-painted internals, shock your friends when you actually display something on your see-thru Mac. Nice job!
Just throw it away.
Gorgeous. NIce piece.
It’s a MAC. It was worthless when it started, and now it’s slightly more useful than a doorstop.
I find media access controllers to be highly useful!
That was a lot of work to turn a perfectly good computer unusable.
“perfectly good computer”
[citation needed]
A 10 year old imac is still capable of running the latest system with an unofficial patch and with an SSD in will out perform the newest base model imac for day to day general use, so it’s defiantly still a great low cost option for many people.
Actually, I find this quite cute. remember, folks: hold the hardware/software against the vendor; hold the behavior of the hardware/software against the hardware/software Macs are great machines, once you remove the nonfree software, beef up the cooling, and apply all of the fixes for the known hardware issues.
This illustrates exactly the reason why I bought a bunch of antistatic gloves with rubber dots on it. First and foremost, I won’t have to wipe the screen down after handling it. Saves a bunch of stress about ruining the screen when using the wrong solvents, or when applying using too much pressure. :)
Why is that? One of our Computers is a 13 years old iMac, first aluminium generation. It’s still working like a charm. The one thing that really boosted it was a HD-SSD swap.The old iMac runs all our office-jobs like a recent computer. And it still looks good. What’s bad with that? Why “worthless”?
OK – it’s not open source, and it’s not overly hacker-friendly. But that simply doesn’t *always* matter in live ;-)
That is a pretty cool mod! Maybe it could be improved by adding a white servo operated retractable “projector screen” behind the display so you can have a more visible picture for normal use, then flip a switch to reveal the guts
Or the servo can be shutter control to hide that dumb white stuff. Why paint it white. Black would have been better.
Macs Fan Control from Crystal Idea will resolve the fan issue. Free.
Awesome work. Nothing wrong with iMacs or Mac OS. If you’re going to use a commercial OS it’s better than Windows. Microsoft could use some adopting of Unix conventions.
I just took a look into my YouTube analytics and saw that many of my viewers came from this place! Didn’t even knew you wrote this article :D
So thanks for that!
It’s an awesome hack, thanks for sharing all the details about it! We also talked about on the podcast a few weeks back: https://hackaday.com/2020/03/06/hackaday-podcast-057-dismantled-lcd-panels-unexpected-dynamometer-a-flappy-pov-and-dastardly-encryption/