Third party guides to identify your Mac

You can always plug in your serial number where requested to in http://www.apple.com/support/ 's search engine. However, sometimes this doesn't give you enough feedback. For those you may need the following websites and tools:

http://www.apple-history.com/

- * eBay
http://www.macspeedzone.com/html/hubs/specs/emac/emac.shtmlhttp://www.macspeedzone.com/html/hubs/specs/emac/emac.shtml




http://www.everymac.com/
and their Machine ID guide which offers a system profiler and/or open firmware method of determining a machine's model name based on Apple's standard.

http://www.designedinca.com/http://www.designedinca.com/




You can also use the Wayback Engine
to search for Apple spec pages such as http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.htmlhttp://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html
to see earlier versions of that page.

Mactracker is a popular software download, available here:
http://www.mactracker.ca/ and it includes the same machine ID that Everymac has.




- * Note, the eBay guide is not an endorsement to buy from there. Far from it. You have to be extra vigilant on auction sites not to be ripped off. Meet the person and make sure they have the original software discs that came with the Mac. If in doubt, please ask on the board to make sure you get the correct discs. Without them, you can't test your hardware, you could potentially be in a license violation of the software, and won't get certain software that wasn't bundled with the retail version of the operating system, such as indicated by this tip:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1490798&tstart=0

Appleworks, games, and Classic were also all bundled with various Macs.

Classic capability is outlined in this user tip:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7044505&#7044505

Furthermore, auction sites can often result in being ripped off and never getting a working product. So test it before buying.

This is the 1st version of this tip. It was submitted on a May 16, 2009 by a brody.