BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

I would keep your powder dry and wait for the new M series chips reportedly to be released later this year – if you can delay till then.

brabold Loc: Nevada

Just had a similar experience. I decided to purchase a mini Mac with the new Apple chip. The desktop Macs do not have the new chip and no one can tell you when they will have them. Very happy with the new set up. Keeping my 10 + year old Mac would have been a bad idea for me.

neillaubenthal

Wait for the M1 iMac...it is coming soon from all indications. The iMac Pro has been discontinued and the latest beta of macOS has some clues that it is coming as well. You could upgrade...but you got your money’s worth out of an 11 year old machine.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

“Adventures” can be costly if one doesn’t know what they’re doing. And I don’t.

Wyantry Loc: SW Colorado

Great! My 27” 2012 iMac must be getting a little long-in-the-tooth — I can not upgrade to Catalina. But I really like the machine.

I have some questions:
A) Was the “operation” done by OWC? Reasonable co$t?
B) How was it possible to upgrade to 20GB RAM? I thought max. was 8GB.
C) What is the approximate cost of the 480 GB SSD?
(I use a separate USB CD/DVD drive, as internal drive will not play DVD’s)
D) Would you do the modification yourself or recommend OWC?
E) Would you do it again, or purchase newer?

Thank you in advance,
Wyantry

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

I believe the max amount of RAM in that version of the iMac would be 16 GB. In mine, I kept the original 4 GB, and added 8 GB (2 x 4 GB), for a total of 12 GB. I just didn't want to get rid of the original 4 GB.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

There are multipart adapters available, although, to be honest, the only adapter I've added, so far, to my 16" MacBook is the SD card reader.

Most software is downloaded these days.

Boris77

Pre-Covid we had a neat Mac store (Not Apple!) that took in and sold more used equipment than new. I got my mid-2011 Imac there around 2013 and have been happily using it ever since. Unfortunately Apple cheapened their computers by then by eliminating ports and downgrading the sound (I often listen to music while computing). Now the store is gone. You might as well bite-the-paycheck and jump into the new world of fake photographs. The Imac was not designed to be upgraded.
Boris

olddutch Loc: Beloit, Wisconsin

OWC has quite a inventory of used iMacs.. you might as well get a 5K 27' screen. most of these have been refurbished, and some have a boat load of ram..

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Thanks. I checked their site. Prices are about the same as I can get with Apple's "Educational" pricing. Only major difference was that what they had listed included the 10 GB Ethernet, which I have no need for.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

But if there’s no big difference in price, go for the 10Gb. You may not need it now, but if you keep this one as long as the last one, you’ll likely find that 10Gb is ubiquitous in 5 years or less. Look at how fast the transition from 100Mb to Gbit went, and there will be no good way to upgrade the machine.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

By most of my family, I'm a techno geek. But by REAL techno geeks, no. So, please explain to me, because I really don't know, why I would need 10 Gbit Ethernet. What would I be doing that I would need that for?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Sure. Ethernet is the media for both your access to the internet (and the cloud) and to other computers and devices in your home. The speed of that access determines not only how fast you can move data, but how fast access to that data is from any source from the internet to streaming services to cloud storage to devices. At the present, the state of the art for home service is Gbit (1,000,000,000 bits/sec) Ethernet, up from 100 Mbit (100,000,000 bits/sec) just a few years ago. Almost all desktop and laptop modern computers have Gbit interfaces, and data centers have 10 Gbit backbones. But at the current rate of change, in a few years, 10 Gbit for home use will likely be standard.

Now the question of course arises, what could we possibly use that speed for? The answer are things like 8K (or higher) uncompressed video, the ability to move large files into and out of cloud storage in near real time, etc., etc..
As hardware performance in all areas (cpu speed, memory and storage size, display resolution, etc) improves by orders of magnitude (Moore’s law), SW designs and services evolve to use that performance, and there’s no reason to expect that curve to slow down. Data grows exponentially larger and that implies both larger storage AND the ability to move that data in a timely manner which requires higher speed transport mechanisms to move that data.

The net-net is: buy for the future, especially if you’re going to keep your hardware for a number of years.

HawaiianEye Loc: Haleiwa, Hawaii

The new M-1 powered Macs are certainly faster and less RAM hungry* than previous generations, but Louis Rossman pointed out a serious flaw in the new machines: the SSD is soldered to the MB. As SSD's are wear parts that will malfunction or die after a year or two, especially because the machines use the *SSD as a RAM disk, you could be owning a brick when the SSD dies. If Apple changes its practice between now and the M-2 and implements a pluggable SSD, preferably user fixable it would be worth the wait.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Well certainly SSDs have a limited number of write erase cycles, but that number is determined by the particular SSD technology (SLC, MLC, TLC...), so referring to them as “wear parts” that will die or malfunction after a year or two is impossible to state accurately. I too, wish that Apple would use socketed parts for everything AND make their machines more easily upgradable (one of my main complaints with Apple along with the price/performance which is why I use PCs), but without accurate data on the average number of write erase cycles and the specific SSD technology, this is just fear mongering at this point.

Let’s remember a couple of points. First, the M1’s RAM is located on the CPU die unlike a PC where RAM is located on external DIMMs - it’s either 8 or 16Gb, so the only paging to external SSD occurs when an application or multiple applications exceeds that capacity, which likely doesn’t happen that often. Secondly, Rossman has a long running battle with Apple over “right to repair” issues (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Rossmann), so that has to be taken into account when deciding on the validity of this supposition. Apple M1’s CPU, graphics engine and RAM reside on a single die, so this architecture will have different advantages and disadvantages compared to Intel and AMD CPUs, and only time show how this design holds up in long term use, but we can’t judge it by conventional standards.