How long do IMacs last?

Hoarsemen wrote:

What is the average life time of a IMAC?

For what purpose?

As modern art or for inclusion in a statuary? As a viable computer? For apps requiring performance? For low-load and low-connectivity users? As a doorstop? As a depreciable asset for taxes?

As a mostly-useful computer, five to seven is fairly typical for many users.

Past that, connectivity and security and patches and software support all start to become an issue. Big Sur support is ~2014 and later, for instance. And older bottom-end Mac configurations can be slow.

Hardware stability and connectivity too starts to be more troublesome past five to seven, too.

Past five or so, hardware performance starts to lag.

And a general suggestion: if you’re planning on running a Mac for five or more years, don’t even think of buying the bottom-end Mac configuration. Aim higher.

Most users get a minimum of 5 years of use before upgrading, however we see many users on these forums that have Macs that are 15-20 years old.

There is always a tradeoff with technology though, you can have a computer that is 10 years old that works perfectly however it is obsolete due to parts not being available, software updates no longer being available due to hardware/software requirements, third party apps no longer supporting the version of Mac OS the user has installed, etc. However this is the case with ANY computer though.

Most users get close to 10 years of useful life out of their Macs. Apple's build quality is second to none so from a hardware perspective I'd say 10 years.

Depends of how you use it...

If you're careful and don't run it at it's limit all the time, they can easily last 10 to 20 years. (The younger the Mac is, the less old it probably will be able to become.

Someday, something will fail. On newer mac, that's more probably the end of it because many parts are soldered on or otherwise non-exchangeable.

My iMac seemed to go dead but has recovered. It's a 2009er, before I had a 2005er until last year. (Used as TV which killed it because of the stress to the GPU)

It is even more probably that a file-format, or something will become totally obsolete. Think CDROM or floppy-discs, or USB 2 etc., which can cause headaches too.

Hi Hoarsemen,

While this is not a guarantee, a Mac should last at least 5 years, and longer if properly cared for.

Cheers,

Jack

Well that depends on usage and requirements. I have a 2007 iMac that works fine, though I would not use it for every day tasks, since its slow, and cannot run the most recent software. I'm sure for email and writing it would still work. For other things maybe not so much.

So the best answer you will get is "depends on usage and requirements".