Welcome to Boardsort™ - Learn - Sell - Profit -

My understanding is that colored motherboards are graded lower because they are, with a few exceptions, lower quality motherboards. But surely the blue and black iMac motherboards don't fall into this lower-grade category, do they?

First. Post a photo. Most iMac boards will fall into laptop. The current, iMac Pro is laptop of high telco depending on specs.
Mac mini is small socket or high telco, depending on model and specs. The vast majority of Power Macs with their PDS sockets are large socket.
That mostly negates the subject. The oldest DOS and System era macs also have a primary large socket board.

I assure you it’s not Boardsort who is at fault here. This is an industry wide problem. Their broker/buyer sets colour sorting.

I have a small bin of gaming and workstation boards I’m sitting on because of the change. I’ve discussed this with them more than once. There’s just not much they can do about it. Sadly the industry in general has its hands tied by the brokers.
In reality it’s a screw job. A quick search through buyers world wide will show nearly all use lower rates for coloured boards. And nearly all are inflexible on it. It’s a way the brokers/refiners can streamline the process and make a few extra bucks at the same time.

Beyond Mac, this sadly includes some of the extreme boards like Gigabyte and Asus with more than a pound of copper in them. ASR and ROG with all the gold contacts. And Media Light a/v servers with their copper mesh and gold flashed everything.

This is an extremely sore spot for me. I hate it. But it is what it is. And it’s not Chris’s fault.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Thanks for all the information. I assure you that assigning "fault" or "blame" as to why colored boards grade how they do was not even remotely part of my thought process here. I fully understand that Boardsort has to grade material according to a higher power (i.e., their buyers).

I did not post any photos specifically because this was just a general inquiry for the moment (I don't have any on hand at the moment). I really only asked now (without photos of specific boards) because I was told by a supplier to expect another 200+ iMacs to be delivered to me this week. I had taken apart 70 of them a few months ago that weren't resellable as whole systems, and all of the motherboards went into my "general circuit board" bin for my buyer that pays a flat rate for mixed boards. Seems a bit of a waste now if I can ship them to Boardsort as laptop grade. They're about a pound each!

Thanks again. I appreciate the reply!

Nah, it’s a topic that bothers me a lot. That’s all.

iMacs are fairly easy to class by general premise.
Power based they’re large socket.

Lux has a round board and goes as high telco in the soldered version. Laptop with a removable cpu card. I believe the 15” is the only one soldered.

Intel
The smaller iMacs will all be laptop class. The larger ones fluctuate a bit. The sub-20” iMacs are nearly all laptop board. The 20, 21.5, and 24 inch version have four (at least) different mount layouts and sizes. Boards can be small socket or laptop.

The 27” is a bit of a fluke. The higher end boards are small socket because of the expanded size of the layout to increase thermal performance. The lower end ones are all laptop.

Apple’s tendency to use the blue foxcon boards is great for consumer And not so much for the scrappers. They really are high end boards

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Circular post reference!

Is this one of those high-end boards that gets classified as low end because of it's color?
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=22289&p=45753#p45753