I have offered and am organizing an entire room/ofc of an friend who passed last year. His career was teaching photography. Needless to say this is a major task. I found this out yesterday when I spent 1/2 day starting to sort through stuff and his wife told me he never threw away anything. Fortunately that included every box his cameras and lenses came in.
I called KEH and spoke to a women in the resale buying dept. I wasn’t happy at all with her help and made an excuse to get off the phone. Very different from 6 mos ago when I called about this same thing.
This being said I am open to any and all suggestions everyone may have. I offered to help as my friends wife of 54yrs is in her 80’s and hasn’t a clue about all his gear.
I appreciate your advice.

Generally speaking, I have to pose the rhetorical question, "Is making any upgrade to my current Intel Mac a worthwhile long-term investment at this point?"

The answer is, it may or may not be, depending upon which Mac I have, and how long I intend to keep it, and whether the upgrade will pay off over that term.

We now have Apple's M1 System on Chip processors in a Mac Mini, MacBook Air, 13" base MacBook Pro, and an all-new 24" iMac. Each is amazing in its own right.

A new wave of MacBook Pros, a larger iMac, a high-end Mac Mini, and a new Mac Pro are undoubtedly in the pipeline. All of them will include more powerful Apple SOCs and other goodies.

I am currently saving for a new machine. Which one it will be is yet to be determined, because I want to see Apple's next wave of SOCs before spending any money.

I assume you are working with a vendor such as OWC or iFixIt to get a kit of case opening tools, new seals, and parts you need to crack open your Mac and perform surgery... Swapping out the hard drive or fusion drive or existing SSD requires cracking open the case very carefully and using a "pizza wheel" or guitar pick-like tool to split the foam tape. Then there are quite a number of tiny, fragile connectors to dislodge (camera, antennae, monitor, etc.). Then you get to disassemble the innards. OWC has step-by-step videos for nearly every iMac model. iFixIt has Dozuki guides for the same disassemblies. I used both when swapping out memory and drive in my Late 2013 21.5" iMac.

Yes, while in there, I would max-out everything. Maximize RAM. Change the HDD for an SSD. The fusion drive, on models that have it, is a virtual drive created from a small SSD and a regular hard disk. So your iMac should have a HDD AND an SSD module. I believe you can replace both, but the folks at OWC can answer with certainty.

During disassembly, be sure you have split all the foam tape, and go very slowly. It is extremely easy to *break* the monitor screen during removal! It is easy to damage the camera at the top of the screen, so work gently around that. The wires to the camera and the screen are not very long, so don't lift off the monitor until you reach in and disconnect them. If you need to remove the power supply, be very careful to watch the video or read the Dozuki guide, because it is quite tricky to get in and out.

It took me about three hours to perform the surgery on my iMac. It was definitely harrowing, but worth it! The machine is like a rocket, compared to performance with just a hard drive.

The one thing you might want to do FIRST is to configure the new SSD before proceeding. My kit came with a housing for my old hard drive. I put the SSD in that, formatted it with Disk Utility as an APFS volume, installed a virgin copy of MacOS, and installed virgin copies of all my software. Then I used Mac Migration Assistant to migrate my user profiles and data (We have five users of one computer, each with a different account).

After all that, I did the installation. That way, the computer booted up normally on the *second* try (I left the screen loose for the first two tries, and was glad I did, because the monitor cable was not secure!). Once you test the machine and know all is well, use the seals from your kit to re-glue the monitor to the base frame of the iMac.

The great folks at Other World Computing can help you with the project. They have helped tens of thousands of us with this. https://eshop.macsales.com

WATCH THE OWC PROCEDURE VIDEO for your model before ordering anything. You'll be glad you did!

Hello Hedgehoggers!
I'm Tom, native of central Penna. Have taken photos since 5 yrs. old. Started on a "brownie" 12 exp. BnW no flash cheapie. I have never owned a DSLR or mirrorless camera, and dont even own a smart phone or a television set. I've shot approx. 21,000 photos in the past 5-6 years (mostly practice). Oh, I did own 2 35mm cameras, but both drowned when I fell into rivers while fishin/takin pix. ;)
I now shoot exclusively with 2 digital bridge cameras; a Fugifilm FinePix w/50X optical zoom, and a Nikon CoolPix P900 w/83X optical plus digital zoom beyond that. I know little of stuff like mm's, extenders, holograms, ISO etc. What I DO know is that these cameras are well suited for what I do, and I think they are the greatest invention since the microwave oven! LoL
I like wildlife, Nature and landscapes, and God provides me with incredible/awesome opportunities almost weekly. I'm told I have a good eye for composition, but I do very little editing except some cropping with just the photo-edit program that came on my Windows 10 laptop. I hope to attach some random shots here. Y'all seem like a great bunch of people! Hope ya like. Comment/criticisms are welcome. Sorry so long winded. Thanks, Tom