MacOS high Sierra memory upgrade

What model year and display size is your iMac? Likely not user upgradeable but without any data about you own we can’t say emphatically.

MacTracker says that for an iMac (27-inch, Mid 2010), the official RAM limit is 16 GB, and the actual RAM limit is 32 GB. MacTracker carries 32 GB kits for that machine:

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/iMac/2010/DDR3_21.5_27

The question then is – if your Mac already has 16 GB of RAM, do you need 32 GB? Have you looked at the Memory Pressure graph in Activity Monitor while running a typical workload? Your Memory Pressure graph may well be showing Green.

If your internal startup drive is a mechanical hard drive, it may well be the biggest bottleneck. Unfortunately, on that Mac,

• Replacing the internal hard drive is difficult
• The internal SATA interface runs only at SATA II speeds (up to 3 Gbps), not SATA III ones (up to 5 Gbps)
• The USB ports only run at USB 2 speed
• Even if you start up from a FireWire 800 SSD (using a drive or enclosure from OWC), this will only give you steady performance, not the speed people associate with SSDs on Macs that have faster interfaces

Pretty sure. 😎

Apple iMac "Core i7" 2.93 27" (Mid-2010) Specs

FWIW, the only 2.93 GHz Core i7 iMac was a Mid 2010 21.5" or 27" model. It can't be upgraded past High Sierra 10.13.6 so there's really no point in trying to add memory or install a new hard drive.

rkaufmann87 wrote:

So then comes question, why would anyone want to spend money on an almost 14 year old computer?

A 27-inch Mid 2010 iMac can boot (or dual-boot)

• Snow Leopard – the last version of Mac OS X that can run Mac OS X / PowerPC-only applications
• High Sierra – the next-to-last version of macOS that can run 32-bit applications

So if you wanted a machine to run legacy applications – say, Aperture, or iDVD, or games whose vendors never bothered to update them – one of those Macs would still be useful for that.

That 27" screen is also large enough to be useful for word processing and Web browsing even in 2023.

So then comes question, why would anyone want to spend money on an almost 14 year old computer?

if Dialabrain is correct and I’m sure he is that money would be much better spent on the 2010’s replacement!

But still it's a 14 year old computer, hardly worth spending a nickel on. I was an avid Aperture user, when it was announced it was end of life many many years ago, I moved on as have most ex Aperture, iDVD, and other old app users did. It wasn't that I did not like Aperture, I was an ardent supporter however I also know that trying to live in the past is simply a waste of time and effort. Simply put, you can try to live in the past, however the inevitable always catches up.

Correction. Only a 27" model.

I believe ya!

lol I know.