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Level 1

4 points

Slow iMac

My and my son's brand new iMacs, out of the box, are slower than either our iPhone 7s or our ancient MacBooks. After hours of frustration, compounded by working and schooling remotely, for months, we went around and around, hours on the phone with Apple Support, with safe boots, zapping pram and activity monitoring and scrupulously closing browser tabs, nothing. I think now that the real issue is the hard drive, which is frankly obsolete, and which I didn't even check because since 1986, I have been a devoted and trusting Apple user.

Can we solve our issues by purchasing inexpensive SSDs as our boot and application drives, keeping files on the iMac hard drive and the cloud?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 29, 2020 8:53 AM

Best reply

rkaufmann87

Level 10

140,682 points

Posted on Oct 29, 2020 8:59 AM

I suspect you bought base model iMacs that have glacially slow 5400 RPM hard drives and only 8GB of RAM. If you bought them directly from Apple within the past 14 days you can return them for any reason. Then repurchase a 21.5" model with a minimum of 16GB of RAM (32GB is better) and the largest SSD you can afford.

If you cannot return and repurchase please buy one of these https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-envoy-pro-ex-thunderbolt-3 and connect. Then use either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner and clone the internal HD to the new SSD. That will make the machine MUCH faster and at least tolerable.

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Slow iMac

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