Hello Mac! Goodbye Mac?
Earlier in the week, I happened to be idly browsing the marketplace on Facebook (literally the only thing I keep that festering shithole of a site around for), and found someone selling a full iMac for fifty bucks (AUD) because it needed repair. The seller thought it was from 2012, which is interesting because that just slides under the cut-off for what’s supported by Catalina, so it’d have a couple of years of security updates left on it at least, so I went to have a look at it.
The issue was just that she’d tried to format it, it got confused, and couldn’t download the install media (some error like “a required file could not be downloaded” or something, I neglected to write it down), and needed install media created. Lacking another Mac to create it with, she was stuck. It came with the wireless keyboard and the “magic” mouse (which, if I was extremely lucky on eBay I could get my fifty bucks back for them alone, hence I really couldn’t lose money on it unless I bought it and did nothing at all), so I bought it.
Brought it home, and it turns out it’s actually a mid-2011 iMac instead… bummer, that means it won’t support later than High Sierra (it came with El Capitan), so it more or less probably won’t get security updates past about September of this year. I built the El Capitan install media per Apple’s website. I then struggled for a bit getting it to boot, having to use the bless command to manually set it to boot from the command line because the “Startup Disk” program refused to acknowledge it, but I got it booted and installed. Upgraded it to High Sierra, and then started checking it out.
2.5GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB beyblade hard disk, not a lot else to mention about it. It’s the mid-2011, “12,1” iMac, specifically the a1311 2824. What to do with it? I probably don’t want it, because I can’t keep it long-term… I only use Macs for work, and for work I really shouldn’t be using something that’s unsupported, so it makes sense to get rid of it now while it’s still worth something. I can probably get around $300AUD for it, maybe, if I put it on eBay… but I really don’t want to try ship something like this. While pondering about it aloud on IRC, a friend who’s local to me suggests they might be interested in it… so sometime in the next few weeks if I go out that way, I’ll take it with me and pop in for a visit before I do anything with it. Otherwise, I’ll likely try to move it on in the next month or so, because I don’t think I need it long-term.
It’s fast enough, I just really don’t have a use for it outside of work, and security update support is huge for me… if it was 12 months newer I could probably keep it for several years.
I did take a look out in the shed to see if any of the laptops I’m not using would have RAM that fit it, alas they don’t.
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