I think I know the answer but just in case. I have a 2017 21.5 inch iMac. I was just putting together an order from Sainsburys yesterday when I heard a tiny click and all went dead. I’ve done all the obvious checks. Does this sound like something repairable and do you think it’s worth doing, or should I just bite the bullet?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Another dead iMac
iMac (2017 – 2020)
When you get the new Mac, you can migrate from the Time Machine backup or the bootable backup if it is a clone of the old iMac.
Transfer to a new Mac with Migration Assistant - Apple Support
When you get your new Mac please follow the simple instructions in Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant, if you do your migration to the new machine will be extremely simple, relatively fast and the new machine will look similar to the old 2017 iMac. This all assumes your Time Machine External Hard Disk was in good working order prior to the 2017 failing.
My guess would be either that your power supply died, or that your hard drive did. I would not advise you to repair that Mac yourself. Just opening it and properly reassembling it is difficult, and the power supply could shock you. By the time you paid a repair shop to work on it, you'd probably be looking at $200+ for a "simple" repair (involving replacement of the power supply or hard drive) – or MUCH more than that if t turned out that the motherboard was bad.
Your 2017 Mac can't update past Ventura – which will fall out of the "most recent three" in just a few months when Apple releases macOS 26 (Tahoe). I'm guessing that it also has either a slow mechanical hard drive or a slow 1 TB Fusion Drive. (For a lot of late-era 21.5" iMacs, the startup drive was their biggest Achilles heel.)
That might argue for replacing the machine, e.g. with
You'd upgrade the CPU, macOS, and your startup drive all at the same time.
Let me give you some foot for thought: a 10 Core Mac Mini M4 with 16 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD with a 32" LG 4K monitor w/speakers is $1418 US w/tax which is $650 less than a similarly configured new 24" iMac.
Monitors can get as low as ~$100 depending on size, quality and other specs. My 32" LG w/speakers cost me $334 from Amazon.
If you take out a Fusion Drive, you break it. You might be able to put the hard disk mechanism into an external case, and erase it, so you can reuse it. But some of the data on a Fusion Drive exists only on the SSD. If you want to transfer your data safely to another computer, you will make at least one full backup of that Fusion Drive before taking any action that would erase or split it.
FWIW, anything is repairable, whether you want or should pay for repairs is up to you. Your Mac is eight years old, so you should think about a replacement.
Yes, a Fusion Drive. I’ve decided to give in and get a new one and see how much software I lose. I have a Time Machine and bootable back up so I have my fingers crossed for them.
when my imac died I followed a guide to open it, and took out the harddisk and put in an external enclosure and the drive itself still worked
Opps! That should be food for thought.
21.5-inch iMac (2017) power failure during online shopping
