I need some technical advice from one of you IT boffins out there. I have an Apple iMac, approximately 12 years old, which runs incredibly slowly. There is still plenty of memory on it, and very few apps. To be honest I hardly use it, but when I do it is excruciatingly slow. We’re talking a good 10 minutes to boot up, every app takes an eternity to load, and the cursor whirrs interminably during the simplest operations. It’s been like this for a good few years. I have assiduously kept up to date with each OS update, but each time it seems to get slower and slower.
I should add that I have zero technical knowledge. It’s made of grey metal with a black plastic screen is about as detailed as I can get.
Anyone got any ideas?
How much RAM do you have? On some Macs it is a fairly simple upgrade to increase it (I did it myself) and it can bring a big improvement in speed.
Yes I did mine. Takes 15 mins tops
Crikey, now you’re asking. I’ve checked system report and it says I have bank 0 with 4GB and bank 1 with 4GB. ECC is showing as disabled (whatever that means) but the memory is upgradeable. Elsewhere I am using 169GB from 1TB available.
Going to 16GB should help. Hard drive usage won’t affect speed too much unless it is completely full.
Cripes, 8 gig on a Windows machine would also reduce it to a Windoze machine.
While my technical knowledge is also at minimal levels, it seems to me that a 12 year old Mac running the latest whizz-bang, all-singing, all-dancing iOS on 8GB RAM will be somewhat arthritic. Definitely start with a RAM upgrade to as much as you can squeeze in and go from there.
8GB of RAM should be enough to be able to boot up normally.
Slow performance like this is often due to the processor overheating and therefore throttling its performance to keep cool. This usually points to a problem with a cooling fan – either it’s failed or failing, of the airflow is being obstructed by dust, hair and other debris.
Another possible cause is a failing hard drive.
Swap the hard drive for an SSD. Looks like you only need a 500gb drive which are cheap as chips these days. If that doesn’t speed things up enough it’s probably just that 12 year old performance is all you’re going to get
Have you been updating the operating system etc? Apple has previous for deliberately slowing off kit down with software updates.
If you decide to upgrade the RAM and hard drive, you could do worse than use Crucial.com. You download a scanner which will tell you what upgrades you can put in and where. Once you’ve got an SSD there is another piece of software to enable cloning your hard drive to the SSD, which can then be swapped. I’ve done several MacBooks and the only extra I needed was a USB to SATA cable to connect the SSD to the Mac during cloning.
Incidentally, I’m surprised that you’ve been able to keep updating the OS as my older laptops reach a point where they won’t run on the next version.
I had a 2012 Mac mini that I used as an iTunes server, backup server etc. which has the same issues – boot up is okay, but its very very slow to open apps etc, even though there is basically only iTunes running.
I determined that it was the hard drive that was the bottleneck – I replaced the 5400rpm drive with a “Fusion Drive” (basically a HDD with built in SSD) that I had from work (I used to work at Seagate). It improved the performance.
That said, I recently retired it and replaced with a new one.
I have a 2013 Mini which I need to update but it’ll be a messy upgrade as I’m going to move to a Windows machine so I can’t quite face don’t it for now.
I have a 2014 Fiat 500. I don’t think it needs updating yet. It already has windows.
Ah, yes: but is it a hard drive?
A Fiat 500’s pretty crap as a RAM raider I’d have thought.
I have one of those big desk top macs. I mainly use it for zoom/team meetings but there is stuff on it and yes the endless rotating wheel is a tedious business.
It stopped accepting upgrades sometime ago.
Thanks for the responses. I may consider upgrading the RAM, but anything more complicated is likely to be beyond me. My choice of preference would be to go back to Microsoft and invest in a budget all-in-one PC.
Don’t do that. Get a bottom-of-the-range Mac Mini (£599), a 27” monitor for £80 or so (LG/Phillips/Dell/whatever), a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo for about the same (eg Logitech). You’ll be amazed.
Or buy a refurbished 3 or 4 year old i5 Dell desktop on eBay for about 300 quid.
Loads of them out there, all corporate leased machines at the end of their lease period, all good for another 10 years+ of sterling service. Mine’s a 9th generation i5, has 64 gig of RAM and has a 1Tb SSD, running Windows 11 25H2.
I read just thinking that Vulpes.
You can get a Windows 11, core i7, 16gb refurb Dell machine on Amazon nowadays for £120 or less. We buy them for the office and they are absolute workhorses.
I had an old slow Windows 7 Intel i3 laptop with a 5400rpm hard drive and it would regularly grind to a halt. I swapped the HDD for a SSD and it sprang into life, and is still in regular use, at least a decade later.
So I’d suggest a bit more RAM but mostly a SSD. I used a free drive cloning software, so I didn’t need to reinstall anything (until, years later, it had to be upgraded to Windows 10).
Er, SSD? Round our way they’re a self-drive van hire company.
Solid State Drive. Effectively a massive memory chip, in a HDD-shaped box, and lots faster than a spinning hard disk.
Years ago, someone described the physics of reading a hard drive as “flying a helicopter an inch above a football pitch and counting the blades of grass”.
I used to work for a hard disk manufacturer and I couldn’t explain how on earth they manage to fly a read head nanometers above a disk to read the data – I still think it’s all magic. The new technology “Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording” (HAMR) is even more voodoo shit – they use a laser in the head to heat up the bit so it expands and is large enough to write data to……
Now, I could bore you for hours on the electronics – PRML read channels etc etc (mind that is also a bit if voodoo – Partial Response Maximum Likelihood” – basically we guess what the data is !!
A 12 year old mac is getting on a bit. It won’t accept the newer macOS versions and so won’t (or soon won’t) allow you to use a secure browser, making it somewhat limited for general use.
It is possible by some jiggery pokery to get old macs to update to an OS they are not supposed to, but I’m thinking this is not the solution for you.
Having said that, I suspect the actual issue with your machine is the hard drive failing.
Exactly, that’s my problem. Also other things are starting to stop working, such as Spotify. Trouble is, the spec of that Mac Mini was so good it’ll be a shame and a real pain to move from it.
The specs of the new Mac minis are still good – and they are smaller and still relatively cheap.
I am thinking of replacing mine (12 years old), it still works reasonably (I expanded the RAM a few years ago). The new basic M4 model costs $799 plus tax here (16GB memory, 256GB storage), more advanced “Pro” models plus extra storage/RAM can run to well over $2000, I have watched a few YouTube videos and it seems the cheapest model will probably suffice for 99% of normal tasks. So at that price, it would appear to be something of a bargain.
I read somewhere they don’t have all in the ports – thunderbolt etc. I haven’t checked though TBH.
It does have Thunderbolt (3x), but it’s Thunderbolt 4 which is the USB-C connector and not the old MiniDisplayPort connector (the square thingy) that was there for Thunderbolt 1. I think this is an industry spec for Thunderbolt, not and Apple thing.
They have dropped Lightning connectors because, as you know, Thunderbolt and Lightning is very very frightening.
Arf. Ta!
(Can’t help muttering “Galileo, Galileo”)
“Galileo, Figaro”
Magnifico
O
o
°
.
@Boneshaker
You sound like you have a similar level of competence to me.
Buy a new one.
I had similar problems with my old iMac during lockdown. I got a new hard drive fitted which gave it a new lease of life up until the end of last year. But, as already mentioned in the comments, I got to the stage where it couldn’t take any of the newer OS updates. These machines have built-in obsolescence.
As I mentioned in another thread, it is possible to run the latest macOS on some old machines. I’ve got Sequoia running on a 2015 iMac using
https://opencorelegacypatcher.net/
I like mac minis these days though. My main M2 mini does everything I want. The M4s must be fantastic and they are cheaper.
The only real issue is getting a suitable 5K monitor to match the mac resolution. 4K will work but it’s not the best. There are very few options 5K monitors though.
An idea from a long time mac user, before doing anything else. It might be that you have a corrupted ‘plist’ (preference) file somewhere.
1/ Boot the mac up, and using Disk Utility, check that the disk has no problems.
You can boot it in ‘Safe Mode’ which turns off anything that isn’t part of the system. Hold the Shift key down on the keyboard on boot-up to do this, and keep it held down until it tells you it is in Safe Mode. It might seem a bit slow, but you can access all the System tools.
I can add more, but try the above if you haven’t.
Plist or the permissions are wrong for something.