Travelling with your iMac and perturbed by the fact that it won’t fit in your carry-on luggage? No problem: You can just take a hacksaw and chop off the offending stand. Then simply reattach it at the other end and hope that Jony Ive or his successor doesn’t stop by for a quick spot-check.
That’s the horror movie scenario that Kirill Zakharov, head of design at Unsplash, recently shared on Twitter about a trip overseas by a friend of his dad. Apple fans reacted with the shock you might expect!
My friend’s dad had to bring an iMac abroad. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in his carry-on. So he had to improvise. pic.twitter.com/x5LdQc407s
— Kirill Zakharov (@kirillz) January 14, 2020
The reactions on Twitter to the iMac massacre were, unsurprisingly, pretty… well, Twittery. “Breathe,” Zakharov himself posted. “I don’t think that’ll be covered by AppleCare,” reads another response. “Mac: it just works until you take a hacksaw to it,” is perhaps my favorite.
Is it possible to remove the iMac stand any other way?
Interestingly, the Twitter feed descended into a discussion of whether it is, in fact, possible to detach the stand from an iMac. Back in the day, the stand used to be easily removable from the iMac.
However, as Apple has slimmed up the iMac in the past decade it removed the ability to easily remove the stand. According to an Apple tech support employee I spoke with, the company “doesn’t advise” people to try and remove the stand on iMacs newer than 2012. On the newer slimline iMacs, you can’t remove the stand foot on an iMac without a complete disassembly.
One alternative is to get the VESA mount version. But this still isn’t an easily retrofittable piece of kit.
Do I think this means that it is physically impossible to remove the stand? No. If you’ve got the skills of the folks at iFixit, I’m sure you could remove it for travel. But for everyday folks? The dude who sawed the stand off his iMac may actually have come up with the most user-friendly option. Aside from, you know, buying a MacBook for travel.
Am I wrong? Is there something obvious I’m missing about this picture? Is the lack of easily removable Mac stand a win for form over function? Should Apple change this in its next-gen machine? Let me know in the comments below.
