Okay, so I am trying to upgrade the display on my late 2012 mac, is there any thing that would prevent me from buying a retina 21.5" panel and putting it in my 21.5" non-retina iMac?
Earlier Mac models
There really, really is no way to do what you propose, Apple or non-Apple notwithstanding.
The logic board electronics that drive the Retina display are radically different than the non-Retina display. You would need a completely different Mac — different logic board, different GPU, different power supplies, different everything. They don't share the same memory. They don't share the same enclosure. They don't share the same anything. The only components that can be reused are its keyboard and trackpad.
Accomplishing a Retina display of that size was a technological breakthrough at the time. Nobody else had the ability to do it, so Apple had to invent it. The marketing video is here: iMac with Retina 5K display - Design - Apple but the WWDC presentation went into much greater detail. Watch them and you'll understand.
There really, really is no way to do what you propose, Apple or non-Apple notwithstanding.
The logic board electronics that drive the Retina display are radically different than the non-Retina display. You would need a completely different Mac — different logic board, different GPU, different power supplies, different everything. They don't share the same memory. They don't share the same enclosure. They don't share the same anything. The only components that can be reused are its keyboard and trackpad.
Accomplishing a Retina display of that size was a technological breakthrough at the time. Nobody else had the ability to do it, so Apple had to invent it. The marketing video is here: iMac with Retina 5K display - Design - Apple but the WWDC presentation went into much greater detail. Watch them and you'll understand.
I don't know about the discrete GPUs in those old iMacs, but if I remember correctly, the integrated GPUs in the Ivy Bridge CPUs did not originally have the ability to drive 4K displays.
Intel came out with a driver to allow the iGPUs in those CPUs to drive a 4K display, but the driver wasn't of much consolation to many PC owners. Even with the driver, the processor lacked the horsepower to drive a 4K display using a single iGPU output. A computer had to be wired to use two of an Ivy Bridge CPU's iGPU outputs to paint one 4K display – "which unfortunately [made] it so [that] most existing Ivy Bridge systems [weren't] able to drive the higher resolution panels."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6270/ivy-bridge-gets-4k-display-support-in-october
If you could build a new custom logic board to wire two iGPU outputs to a 4K panel – no easy feat, and a definite way to blow the cost of the project completely out of the water – and you could get macOS to recognize it (good luck with that!) – you might find that you were not terribly happy with the speed of that old CPU/iGPU. Driving a Retina display is like driving four non-Retina ones. Some of the first Retina Macs had performance issues around pushing that many pixels, and here you'd be trying it with an older CPU/iGPU.
Other issues are that a 2012 "Franken-iMac" would
At some point, you say, "It's not worth it. Time to buy a current, or much newer, machine that will have updated *everything*."
All of the above. One would be that there would be different logic board / GPU hardware. AFAIK, Apple has never provided a means to allow for this type of "upgrade."
I would think you basically have three choices:
The only thing that would prevent that is the fact that it wouldn’t work.
The cost of the panel would be more than the value if the iMac
I'm not sure if we're allowed to talk about stuff like this, but is there an non-apple way to do it, even if it's really janky, id be pretty cool. I don't really need it that bad though, so if not, it's fine. (not sure if my eyesight it just bad or something but I can't really see that big a difference between 1080p and Retina)
Late 2012 iMac...
Built-in Display:27" 16:9 WidescreenNative Resolution:2560x1440
2nd Display Support:Dual/Mirroring*2nd Max. Resolution:2560x1600 (x2)
Details:*This model can simultaneously support two external displays up to 2560x1600 via Thunderbolt.
Details:This model is equipped with two Thunderbolt ports. Thunderbolt is backwards-compatible with Mini DisplayPort-equipped displays as well as adapters that are compatible with Mini DisplayPort (DVI, VGA, dual-link DVI and HDMI). It also can support other peripherals that use the Thunderbolt standard, which pro
I'm not sure if we're allowed to talk about stuff like this, but is there an non-apple way to do it, even if it's really janky,
You are correct in that we cannot here. Apple's playground—Apple's rules.
I suggest you do a web search for "mac mods" There a number of private sites devoted to "outside the box" ideas.
Is it a driver thing, a cable thing, why wouldn't it work?
Okay, thanks!
Is it possible to upgrade the display of a 2012 imac?
