Discussion
I wanted a cheap iMac for the garage and found a late 2013 21.5" 2.9Ghz one on the bay with a duff hard drive for £70 that came with the little keyboard and early magic mouse, as I needed to open it anyway to change the drive it seemed rude not to upgrade it further. From a combination of Amazon and E-Bay I ordered:
- 2 X 8GB SODIMMS, random name (MotoEagle
) - £16.50
- 1 X Crucial BX500 500GB SSD - £28
- 1 X Used Intel I7 4770 Processor - £30
And a no name screen adhesive kit with the pizza cutter opener for £8.
Took about an hour and a half to strip it all down and build it back up, it's a bit fiddly to pull it all apart but nothing too tricky. Used internet recovery to get it onto Catalina and then OCLP to install Sonoma.
Total cost £144.50 and it runs REALLY well! Like really, really well. Quick to open stuff, snappy and responsive, does all the animated background stuff in Sonoma really well, boots quickly etc. etc. I can't actually get over how entirely usable a sub £150 iMac actually is...
I'm sure if you were wanting to do some proper serious stuff on it you'd find it wanting and the 750M graphics are obviously outdated, as is a 1920 X 1080 display (even if it is sharp with great colour) but £150!
So if you want a cheap Mac for the kids or use in the garage I can highly recommend a bit of modding/upgrading on a ten year old one! It will likely end up working far better than you thought
- 2 X 8GB SODIMMS, random name (MotoEagle
) - £16.50- 1 X Crucial BX500 500GB SSD - £28
- 1 X Used Intel I7 4770 Processor - £30
And a no name screen adhesive kit with the pizza cutter opener for £8.
Took about an hour and a half to strip it all down and build it back up, it's a bit fiddly to pull it all apart but nothing too tricky. Used internet recovery to get it onto Catalina and then OCLP to install Sonoma.
Total cost £144.50 and it runs REALLY well! Like really, really well. Quick to open stuff, snappy and responsive, does all the animated background stuff in Sonoma really well, boots quickly etc. etc. I can't actually get over how entirely usable a sub £150 iMac actually is...
I'm sure if you were wanting to do some proper serious stuff on it you'd find it wanting and the 750M graphics are obviously outdated, as is a 1920 X 1080 display (even if it is sharp with great colour) but £150!
So if you want a cheap Mac for the kids or use in the garage I can highly recommend a bit of modding/upgrading on a ten year old one! It will likely end up working far better than you thought
Edited by poppopbangbang on Tuesday 17th September 22:14
Sounds great, agree these are fantastic things. I had a mid 2011 iMac from new and after adding 8GB RAM for £35 it was still comfortably doing everything I needed when compatibility issues (software) with phone and work forced a change in late ‘22. Aside from that it’s still working fine and has double the internal storage of its replacement. And an edition of Office that didn’t need yearly subs to put your docs in the cloud.
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