Unable to turn on my 16 year old iMac

16 years in computer years is way older than I am. No wonder it gave up the ghost. Give it a rousing Irish wake and recycle it. As noted earlier you can take it into any Apple store for recycling. You'll have to sign over ownership to Apple while you're there.

NOTE: keep your keyboard and mouse as you'll need them if you get a Mini or as spares if you get something else that come with keyboards and a mouse.

If you're concerned about your user data you can open the Mac and remove the drive. Don't worry about getting back together completely as it's destined to be recycled. You can connect the drive to an adaptor to get the information off of it. If you have Time Machine backups for it then you can just destroy the drive any way possible.

If you're considering a new Mac consider the following: a 10 Core Mac Mini M4 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD with a 32" LG 4k monitor w/speakers is $1418 w/tax which is $650 less than a similarly configured new 24" iMac. You can save even more depending on the size and features of the monitor you get. I opted for 32" monitor as I wanted more screen real estate.

Just some food for thought.

motorat wrote:

I bought this iMac 21 inch new 16 years ago and for the first time it's totally dead. Won't power on at all. I checked the power outlet and it's good and try plugging the computer in other locations.

Check the power cord on the back of the iMac to make sure that it has not come loose.

I wholly concur with the others that a 16-year old Mac is a great candidate for retirement, but if you really want to try to troubleshoot it, I created this user tip for just that purpose:

Mac Basic Startup Troubleshooting Steps - Apple Community

You can take it to an Apple Store, Best Buy or Staples and have it recycled.

The oldest 21.5" iMac is the iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2009) released in October 2009.

It can run anything from Snow Leopard (the last Intel version of macOS to support Rosetta 1) to High Sierra, and so might be useful for running old 32-bit Intel applications, old PowerPC/Mac OS X ones, or importing DV digital video from a MiniDV or Digital8 camcorder. But you can't even run current versions of Firefox and LibreOffice on it.

Also, you might pay for one repair (e.g., failed power supply), only to have another issue (failed hard drive) pop up. A 15 to 16 year old hard drive might start to fail at any time, even if it is still in good condition now.

Unless you really, really need to preserve stuff that new Macs don't support, it may be time to recycle it.

Apple Stores will recycle it for you.

Easy, Apple has free recycling programs in most countries. The cost is ZERO and they will recycle the computer responsibly, to find out about it please click Apple Recycling Programs

You are correct, however there are some users that refuse to listen to logic and sensible solutions. Sometimes they simply prefer for reasons of their own to try to revive very old technology. To many of us this does not make any sense when there are less expensive and more sensible solutions easily available. So we have to leave these users to either learn on their own or to continue to chase windmills.

The likely cost of repair would not be worth it for a 16 year old computer.