All iMacs now leave you an empty PCIe SSD slot to use if you don’t go in for the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrade, but it’s still hard to get at. iFixit Just one day after Apple quietly refreshed its iMac lineup with Intel’s new Haswell processors, the teardown artists at iFixit have pulled both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models apart to see what makes them tick. One of our chief complaints about last year’s 21.5-inch iMac was how difficult it was to upgrade, and that remains true of this year’s model. You can still access the computer’s two RAM slots if you’re brave enough to attempt the teardown process (which includes tearing apart and replacing some foam padding), and Apple has included an empty PCIe slot on the base model where last year’s model only had an empty spot on the system board. However, the low-end iMac’s use of Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPUs means that it uses one of Intel’s R-series CPUs, and those CPUs only come in a soldered-on ball-grid array (BGA) package. The 27-inch model proves a bit easier to upgrade: it still has four user-accessible RAM slots, still leaves people who opt out of the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrades an empty PCIe slot to use, and still uses a socketed Intel CPU for those of you who want to take the trouble to upgrade that component yourselves after the fact. Both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs were also confirmed to be using triple-antenna (3×3:3) 802.11ac configurations, meaning the iMacs will be capable of the standard’s maximum theoretical transfer speed of 1.3Gbps where the 2013 MacBook Airs used a two-antenna setup capable of 867Mbps speeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model
Blackberry released a statement on Friday saying that it expects to report an operating loss of almost $1 billion in the coming days. According to The Wall Street Journal , Blackberry overestimated the number of new phones it would sell and is facing an “inventory charge of as much as $960 million and a restructuring charge of $72 million.” Specifically, the company said that it would likely report a loss of $950 million to $995 million for the second quarter. Earlier this week we reported that Blackberry was planning to lay off up to 40 percent of its employees, taking the company from 12, 700 full-time employees to about 7, 620 employees. The WSJ reported today that 4, 500 people will be laid off, lower than earlier estimates. (Is that a silver lining we see?) The Canadian company also reported today that it only sold 3.7 million smartphones in the last quarter, most of which were older phones. To stem the bleeding, Blackberry said that going forward, its “smartphone portfolio will transition from 6 devices to 4; focusing on enterprise and prosumer-centric devices, including 2 high-end devices and 2 entry-level devices.” As Quartz writer Christopher Mims wrote , it’s probably too late for Blackberry to turn around its share of the enterprise market given the latest moves made by Apple and Samsung to get their hardware into the hands of businesspeople. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments 
