Robin’s iMac started giving her the Beachball of Death, hanging up on almost everything she tried to do with it. I used to be a hardware tech support guy and systems administrator, so I am the official Castle Frostbite IT department. In that function, I diagnosed the iMac and suspected that the hard drive was failing.
$90 for a repair kit and two hours later, the iMac has been rejuvenated with an SSD. I also gave it a thorough interior cleaning while I had the screen off. It’s not a terribly difficult repair with the right tools—the hardest part of the operation is to line up the strips for the new screen adhesive and then putting the screen glass back on perfectly aligned because once the glass touches the adhesive, it doesn’t want to move again.
I bought this iMac in mid-2014 and maxed out all the specs when I ordered it. It’s a Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX780, and now it’s faster than it was in its new state because it’s booting the operating system and running applications off an SSD and not the fusion drive it came with originally. For the stuff Robin does with a computer, it will probably last her for another two or three years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of that purchase. One of the nice things about Macs is that they stay useful far longer than their PC counterparts. That useful period is much extended when you future-proof the computer by buying the highest specs you can afford.
That goes doubly for iMacs because they are NOT designed for end-user upgradeability. They have a handy little trapdoor for replacing RAM, but that’s as far as Apple wants you to do things yourself. To get at any interior components, you have to cut the adhesive that holds the screen, pop the whole big glass panel off, and hope you don’t have to sneeze when it’s time to stick it back on.
Still, it’s satisfying to flex the old IT Guy muscles every now and then and Fix a Thing. So much of my day revolves around sitting at a desk and having conversations with imaginary people that it’s nice to be able to get out the special tool kit and engage in some manual tinkering that fixes a problem with a physical object.
Nice. My ~2013 iMac had to go through that a couple of years ago when it became clear it needed more RAM (and a bigger hard drive.) I didn’t know enough to do it myself, but it was a costly job. (and I had to bring it back when the guy forgot to reconnect the wireless antenna.)
Actually, they stay useful longer for even more reasons. We have one instrument here in the lab, a laser energy meter, that logs laser output and graphs it. The software only works on Windows, no Mac software available. After running boot camp and loading Windows, the robust hardware from a 2010 vintage IMac runs circles around the 2016 laptop it’s replacing.
I was never a fan of Fusion Drive. If either disk had a problem, I wasn’t sure if it could recover. Glad to see your surgery was successful AND the patient survived. I swapped out a hard drive in the same generation Mac Mini, that was a Real Pain in the Ass. (And it’s a shame, the Mini used to be the easiest Mac to repair…)