iMac Project ii

#writing 11.12.22 #ipadpro #luke #imac #upgrade

The upgrade weekend is in progress!

Luke and I gathered at her house to tear the machines down.

in real time it’s 2pm. Actually its 9:45pm and we’ve completed the two upgrades.

To summarize this all started with a Woot buy.

I think of [Woot!}(https://www.woot.com) as a modern day version of Fingerhut. Refurbs, excess inventory. You can find it all at Woot!. The thing is that Woot feels like an all day casino. The deals don’t last, and you miss out if you sit around thinking about it.

When Woot posted their $169 deal for the MC813LL/A I was excited to be at the moment of a perfect rock bottom. At sub $200 the MC813LL/A which to the layman is better known as the 2011 Apple iMac 27" i5 4GB RAM 1TB HDD Silver, presents a great buy. All isn’t perfect. There are absolute downsides to this buy, it happened to us, but there is also upside.

I should also note that it is my intent to have Luke write this with me. The goal in this exercise is less “he said, she said” and more “writers room overlay”. I don’t know if this ultimately ends with this one voice, or if there are two. PS11.12.22

Downsides -Both of us suffered hardware defects. My unit came with a dead fusion driver and also it looks like one of the fans has a auditory patina about it, which I noticed but attributed to a nearby fish tank. Once I got it to Luke’s shop We could hear the fan. I decided to keep the iMac despite both these issues, vs getting my money back. i recieved a partial credit towards repair they suggested. Luke’s unit came with two goofball sized dents. One dent on the rear, the other on the corner. She also has about 2% burn in on the corner of her display.
-High Sierra is the last supported macOS for this computer. It still gets security updates but you gotta be ok with High Sierra or downgrading to one of the five previous macOS versions that the MC813LL/A will support. -Non retina display. It would be another three models before Retina would arrive in the form of the “BT0/CTO aka A1419” -A machine this old is the digerati equivalent of an old German car. Parts will be coming to end of life. You will be repairing this computer. You’re in luck though. While this is no Dell Dimension, and you could use an extra pair of hands, tear down is mostly straight forward. The folks at ifixit have a pretty good breakdown of how to get it in to it. The comments section is worth looking at, though you should always try to weight out feedback, while you determine how you’ll go about breaking into the box. We did use the “prop your lid with two Bic pen” technique. This worked best for us. Our biggest issue was the first step which is removing a cable connected to the display. This is your blue or red wire bomb moment in breakdown. The first cable took a little more than 10 minutes, but we weren’t watching the clock and you have to go slow. -Even if you don’t have to upgrade or repair your unit a partial tear down does give you a chance to assess and manage dust build up. unfortunately you have to go through the same initial disassembly to do this. In my estimation if you crack a computer open once, you really always end up going back inside of it again. -The last downside is that when you purchase a computer like the MC813LL/A you are wrestling with obsolescence. If you find use for a computer which is one not advancing in functionality, often times doesn’t share feature parity with your other devices, and could have some features crippled over time. And I also forgot the very last downside, which is how it seems many great machines do everything well but the internet. Whoever thought that would be what made a computer irrelevant; some ol’ internet shit.

Upsides -The MC813LL/A running High Sierra appears to be fully able to access all current apple iCloud features. -The MC813LL/A comes with a super drive, an SD card reader, three usb a ports, FireWire 800, dual monitor display, is upgradeable to 32gb of ram, and has 802.11 a/b/g/n support -The screen while not retina is rich and gorgeous. -Even though the iMac went on to a much slimmer profile, the MC813LL/A has aged well in its industrial design language.

Why: Paul

In addition to what I paid for the iMac I also upgraded the dead hard drive to a Samsung Electronics 870 EVO 2TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-77E2T0B/AM) and also 16GB of Ram via OWC 16.0GB (4 x 4GB) 1333MHz 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM PC3-10600 CL9 Memory Compatible with iMac (OWC1333DDR3S16S). Both came from Amazon for an additional cost that was greater than what I would ultimately pay for the iMac. That’s 248.34 + $130 for a total of $378.38.

I didn’t have to do either hardware upgrade to not still feel a boost in performance from the older less powerful iMac I was replacing. And to be clear I would never have bought a MC813LL/A online for $378.38. One might say that it makes no sense that I’d build one either and shell out the same amount of money. Sometimes it does make sense though. New ram, a top of the line hard drive and most importantly a high spec “top of its game” slice of computer history.

There are moments in Apple Macintosh hardware where a really remarkable piece of hardware is let out into the open. Every time Apple makes something it is “Our best X yet” and that is true, and sometimes that thing they made stands the test of time. Regardless of how much life I wrestle out of this computer it is very exciting to have it.

Original post for the iMac project https://thisisthenew.me/blog/6sjt8k36b9bp22zg8zbkbzppchzge9