Think I got it about 2012. It has 16GB RAM. I converted it to a SSD and it still has plenty of space. It uses an Intel I5 3.4 Quad-core processor that runs OS Ventura 16.3.8.
I am not a power user and the computer runs all the programs I use perfectly. I don’t do any gaming or do any graphic art. I just worry about a computer so old crapping out on me. I-Macs tend to have very long lives.
I had an old iMac that died on me years ago. It wasn’t as old as yours. The screen went dead while I was sitting there one day, poof, gone. Fortunately, my husband is great with technology, so he was able to get the hard drive out, buy me a laptop, and load the old hard drive onto the new laptop.
How are your tech skills, and can you do without a computer for a week or two while you transfer to a new machine?
I do miss the wide screen of the old iMac and the 10-key pad, and I’ve had to buy updates for some of my programs to run on the laptop. I love the portability of the laptop.
My tech skills are very limited! I usually hire help to transfer data to a new machine!
As I remember, I had to load programs I used on the new machine, because programs do not transfer over.
I have plenty of laptops at the office I can take on vacation, but they are PCs. Doesn’t matter for web browsing and picking up e-mails remotely.
With declining eyesite in old age, I could never live without this 27" screen at home.
My husband did buy me a nice widescreen monitor that I could plug into the Macbook and I used it for a while but quit because every time I plugged it in, the icons on my laptop ‘desktop’ would move and rearrange and wouldn’t go back to where they were after I unplugged the widescreen. I got tired of manually putting them back. Never figured out why this happened. Be careful if anyone suggests you can just get a wide monitor for a Macbook.
Used, reconditioned IMacs are easy to find online at reasonable prices from safe resellers. I would recommend purchasing one new enough to have the newer processors, Apple Silicon M1-M4. They will run the newer and newest operating systems the most efficiently, I made the mistake, recently, of getting a newer one that still had the Intel chip. It would run the loaded, newest operating system, but just barely. Very sluggish at best. I had to reinstall an old OS to get decent performance. Spend the extra two or three hundred and get one with the never generation chip.
Guess I would tend to hold on. Keep your stuff backed up if there is anything you care about on it.
I did have a 24" iMac from 2010 that my son left behind wow what a boat anchor. It was stuffed with 32 gb of ram and I hoped to set it up with Linux for late wife. However she expired and after getting it de-bricked I hauled it, still with MacOS on it. You know these beasts are hell to work on, so I don’t mess with the hardware.
Anyway it seemed to me to be power hungry. Not only that, but it had a tendency to boot itself and that is totally unacceptable as MacOS is UNIX and it should run about as long as it has power. I gave it to the Salvation Army. So my suggestion is keep it as long as it is working…
Short answers:
#1 Yes, replace. You are getting behind in macOS updates and there are security vulnerabilities. A dozen years is a long time not to replace a computer.
#2 If not #1, then backup, backup, backup.