Value in old iMac machine?

[JTK]

A family member asked If I could try to sell this for them. I figured I'd ask here before I went the facehole marketplace route or whatever. It's an iMac 20/2.4 desktop I guess you'd call it? I know zilch about iMacs. It works and has original install discs. The body of it is aluminum and it's HEAVY so I'd hate to ship it.

I also would rather not watste time and effort if it's just 'recycle bin' material.

Appreciate any input.

 

[Bottom_Feeder]

Need more specific info and a pic would help. Some of that stuff still has value due to usability, sometimes due to nostalgia. All depends if you can find someone who wants it.

 

[UG_Passat]

Call it "Vintage" and you can justify an inflated price

 

[skyactiv]

The best thing you can do for them is ask if the hard drive has been wiped and do it if needed. An old 4:3 iMac isn't worth the effort to sell. Linux thoughts, whatever. Wipe the drive and donate to a VOA.

 

[UncleDave]

find out what model year it is by looking at "about this mac." then look on eBay and see what they are going for.

Probably make a fine browsing/ ,music ,machine for a long time.

Or run VM ware on it and load windows or run bootcamp and windows.

 

[uc50ic4more]

Call it "Vintage" and you can justify an inflated price

Vegan and organic

 

[JTK]

It's a 2008-09 model best I can tell. Stock specs/pics are here. This one has little visible wear. No scratches/dings.

iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 20" (Early 2008) Specs (Early 2008, MB323LL/A, iMac8,1, A1224, 2210): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.4 20" (Early 2008). Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

everymac.com

 

[bunnspecial]

Unfortunately, the C2D Macs are kind of at a low point now. They mostly max at OS X El Capitan, which is several generations old now, and are hot and slow for the amount of computing power from them. They also have low memory ceilings and some other handicaps.

I paid $75 for one about a year ago.

 

[Hall]

I also would rather not watste time and effort if it's just 'recycle bin' material.

Tell them to donate it (after wiping the drive). It's worth less than $100... eBay has (75) listed for less than $90.

 

[bunnspecial]

As a side note, around this time last year I set up a couple of Macs of this vintage, both desktops and laptops, for family members who suddenly found themselves in need of computers(and in quantites unheard of). They're not the greatest in the world, but with El Capitan and a built-in webcam, they served admirably as Zoom/Google Classroom/whatever machines so kids could finish out the school year(and families with a couple of children didn't have to juggle 3 people needing one computer at the same time.

 

[y_p_w]

Unfortunately, the C2D Macs are kind of at a low point now. They mostly max at OS X El Capitan, which is several generations old now, and are hot and slow for the amount of computing power from them. They also have low memory ceilings and some other handicaps.

I paid $75 for one about a year ago.

I still have my 2007 "Santa Rosa" MacBook 2.2 Core 2 Duo. I had a spare SSD and cloned the drive and installed it. Not that it was terribly useful, but it was just a little project to do. The polycarbonate shell has cracks, but it works. I maxed it out at the advertised 4 GB, although I heard it technically can operate with up to 6 GB.

I can't really use it for that much. A lot of my favorite websites just don't work. Anything requiring security won't accept it. But it's still nice to have around. Back when I got it, they just went to the faster front-side bus. And it was really odd because Apply only sold it for about 4 months before they switched to the next version. And the way Apple generally worked was that as soon as the successor was on the market they immediately pulled the predecessor.

MacBook "Core 2 Duo" 2.2 13" (White-SR) Specs (Late 2007, MB062LL/B, MacBook3,1, A1181, 2200): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the MacBook "Core 2 Duo" 2.2 13" (White-SR). Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

everymac.com

Man I spent money on upgrades over the years. It was also fun because it was easy to swap the memory and drive. I experimented with different speeds (PC2-4200 or PC2-5300) and capacities for memory to see how it got configured. I thought I was doing well with a 200 GB 7200 RPM Hitachi hard drive, but then went bigger with a 1 TB one.

 

[Carmudgeon]

Probably not worth trying to sell.

I'd agree that they can be a surprisingly useful web machine, provided they're fitted with an SSD, which is not difficult to do, and have max RAM.

I've seen them in motel lobbies in the past few years serving just that purpose.

OS support ended with 10.11, but later versions can be patched up to 10.15, though I don't know how well it works.

The problem with software is that the latest browsers have higher system/security requirements, though something like Firefox ESR is still in range.

It's the type of machine I'd stick where there is an extra space to watch how-to videos on YT, or boot into Windows to run a parts catalog or something of that nature.

Of course, it would also function perfectly fine as a jukebox, and other local tasks.

 

[bunnspecial]

OS support ended with 10.11, but later versions can be patched up to 10.15, though I don't know how well it works.

You've poked a bit of a sore spot with me on that, even though I know it wasn't your intention.

I know the guy who puts those patchers together. He's a genuinely good guy, incredibly intelligent, and he's done some crazy circuit level repairs and CPU swaps for me. With that said, he's bowed out of the patcher game from my conversations with him.

C2D machines could function fairly well up to about macOS 10.13. I say this from first hand experience with running several patched machines.

At 10.14, Apple started requiring a new GPU instruction set called Metal. When this became a requirement, it rolled a whole lot of systems-basically anything introduced before 2012-off support. The 10.14 and 10.15 patchers largely function with no graphics acceleration, or limited acceleration that's kind of pieced together from drivers, and are miserable to use. Aside from that, there are a lot of hardware incompatibilities that crop up in specific systems.

I am a member of a Facebook group where nearly everyone installs those patches on their C2D systems that can run newer OSs, and it's an endless stream of problems and things just not working correctly or updates completely killing the install. I've seen people foolish enough(and I know that's a harsh word, but it's how I feel about it) send customers from their shop home with OS-patched computers and have inexplicable problems, or even worse people deploy it on mission-critical computers and get caught when something breaks.

There are folks who make a hobby of making unsupported OSs work. I don't have the smarts to actually do it, but I have a friend who's managed some amazing stuff at it. He doesn't have a lot of real hardware to test on, so in the past I've run-and actually had fun with in a perverse way-patches that he's put together. One of my favorites was running OS X 10.4 on a stock Power Macintosh 8600/200-a miserably slow experience that was more proof of concept than anything, but still really interesting. It's something that has its place, but IMO not in a primary computer.

 

[kschachn]

Yeah, I picked up a 27” i7 iMac at the landfill a year or so ago, someone had dropped it off (laying face down) in the electronics disposal area. I put some memory in it and a new hard drive and I used it for a while as the monitor for my Mac mini. It makes a very good monitor.

But after a while it got tedious to reconnect the Mac mini every time it rebooted so now it's relegated to the basement doing nothing.

 

[PandaBear]

Yeah, I picked up a 27” i7 iMac at the landfill a year or so ago, someone had dropped it off (laying face down) in the electronics disposal area. I put some memory in it and a new hard drive and I used it for a while as the monitor for my Mac mini. It makes a very good monitor.

But after a while it got tedious to reconnect the Mac mini every time it rebooted so now it's relegated to the basement doing nothing.

This is the reason why I will never buy an integrated monitor and machine. I understand laptop needs them integrated for portability but throwing away a nice 27" monitor because CPU is obsoleted and insufficient ram is a crime.

 

[kschachn]

This is the reason why I will never buy an integrated monitor and machine. I understand laptop needs them integrated for portability but throwing away a nice 27" monitor because CPU is obsoleted and insufficient ram is a crime.

In this case it is the GPU that is obsolete and cannot be upgraded. The CPU is more than sufficient and there are four RAM slots.

 

[Hall]

The problem with software is that the latest browsers have higher system/security requirements

That's one thing I meant to say earlier - your web browser could be the biggest concern. They stop updating browsers for certain OSes and 99% of updates are security-related.

 

[dishdude]

This is the reason why I will never buy an integrated monitor and machine. I understand laptop needs them integrated for portability but throwing away a nice 27" monitor because CPU is obsoleted and insufficient ram is a crime.

1680x1050? The monitor is as dated as the CPU.

 

[PandaBear]

1680x1050? The monitor is as dated as the CPU.

It is not the resolution but the quality of how your eyes feel about it. You can have good quality being low resolution or junk high resolution. Apple display are usually pretty good.

 

[Carmudgeon]

You've poked a bit of a sore spot with me on that, even though I know it wasn't your intention.

I know the guy who puts those patchers together. He's a genuinely good guy, incredibly intelligent, and he's done some crazy circuit level repairs and CPU swaps for me. With that said, he's bowed out of the patcher game from my conversations with him.

C2D machines could function fairly well up to about macOS 10.13. I say this from first hand experience with running several patched machines.

At 10.14, Apple started requiring a new GPU instruction set called Metal. When this became a requirement, it rolled a whole lot of systems-basically anything introduced before 2012-off support. The 10.14 and 10.15 patchers largely function with no graphics acceleration, or limited acceleration that's kind of pieced together from drivers, and are miserable to use. Aside from that, there are a lot of hardware incompatibilities that crop up in specific systems.

I am a member of a Facebook group where nearly everyone installs those patches on their C2D systems that can run newer OSs, and it's an endless stream of problems and things just not working correctly or updates completely killing the install. I've seen people foolish enough(and I know that's a harsh word, but it's how I feel about it) send customers from their shop home with OS-patched computers and have inexplicable problems, or even worse people deploy it on mission-critical computers and get caught when something breaks.

There are folks who make a hobby of making unsupported OSs work. I don't have the smarts to actually do it, but I have a friend who's managed some amazing stuff at it. He doesn't have a lot of real hardware to test on, so in the past I've run-and actually had fun with in a perverse way-patches that he's put together. One of my favorites was running OS X 10.4 on a stock Power Macintosh 8600/200-a miserably slow experience that was more proof of concept than anything, but still really interesting. It's something that has its place, but IMO not in a primary computer.

Well, it should be fairly evident that anyone trying to prolong the life of a 13-year old machine with an unofficial OS patch is firmly in hobbyist territory. Replacing the hard drive with an SSD (pretty much a requirement for decent performance with Lion onward) is also not a layman's task.

Since Mojave was the last to support 32-bit apps, there's little reason to go beyond it, amongst other reasons people have avoided Catalina and Big Sur, even with modern hardware.

Like I said, it's still perfectly find as a jukebox or video player (IIRC, it may even be able to handle h.265 files, as long as one doesn't try to scrub), or running typical apps locally. Having an optical drive helps in that regard as well. It can function as a basic web browser as well, so long as the OS and browser support meet security requirements.

There is still life left in it, so it's not an immediate recycling candidate. There are still some who keep PPC machines alive, though that's one line I wouldn't bother to cross.