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Apple Launching Pilot Program Allowing Repairs of Soon-to-Be Vintage Mid 2011 iMac in United States

I have my 2011 iMac booting from a thunderbolt connected SSD. It is still plenty fast for most of my needs. I will run it until it dies. I like using the display with my MBP, so it currently serves two purposes. When it dies, I will probably just get a ~32 inch 4 or 5k display for the spot.
 
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walnuts said:
I'm no expert, but I did replace the hdd with an sd. From what I understand, everything newer than this used adhesive to connect the screen/glass combo to the body... was this really worse than having to break the old adhesive and reglue every time?

I will say that the damn screws next to the magnets were a real pain.

Edit: sorry... ninja'd. I guess you all get used to the adhesive!
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Yeah, the thing is... cleaning the glass/screen is an imperfect "Art", where applying fresh VHB 3M strips is much more a science and precise. We'd get 2 to 3 informed iMac customers per week saying "hey my screen is dirty under the glass can you clean it again?" When the glass became bonded to the display, that stopped.

I'd show you some tricks for how to counter the effects of those magnets by the screws, they're annoying but nothing is worse than the rear housing repair :p
 
I've worked on a couple 2011 iMac's both 21.5 and 27". Between OWC and iFixit, they are maintainable with very little expertise. You can even create your own DIY fusion drive without too much difficulty. Magnets holding it together was as genius as the magsafe MBP plug... both technologies abandoned for some reason. I've worked on a 2013 iMac 27" and found it to be more of a pain using the pizza cutter and guitar picks, and then having to clean up all the adhesive before applying the new double-stick tape. Plus, the stupid hinge problem in the thin iMacs... that was a real pain to fix with an after-market metal "washer" to hold the springs in place. Luckily, I could work on both without breaking anything or hurting myself. I appreciate the thin iMacs having faster/better guts, but why did it have to be thin? Portability? From the operating sitting position, I don't see a difference in depth, and they occupy the same space on the desk. I'd be elated if they went back to the 2011 design with upgraded internals, maybe more hard drive options, a better video card, better cooling... anything that would make use of the space. But hey, I'm no Ivey. What do I know?
 
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matamoris said:
These are still great and very capable machines, especially when they are upgraded with an SSD.
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My 2011 iMac is my daily driver desktop when I’m not gaming. Although the process to upgrade the iMac SSD sucked, the SSD gave the machine new life.

I tell people with older Macs who complain about their Macs being slow that 99% of time it’s the HDD. For most general tasks you simply don’t need the high end processors any more. SSD and sometimes RAM makes the largest difference.
 
It's funny, at work we've been trying to phase out those older ("fat", we like to call them) iMac in favor of the newer slim models because in our experience they've just been plain unreliable. Usually the hard drive conked out just after the warranty expired.

Meanwhile the slim iMac models have been pretty much rock solid and we've had *zero* failures of any sort with them even as they've aged.

Sure, we can replace the hard drives with SSDs but our users are clamoring for 5K displays anyway so we've used that as an excuse to retire the older machines in the department.
 
Blackstick said:
Right on with the 2012. VHB adhesive strips aren't bad when you've got the pizza cutter and replacement strips from Apple, a minor inconvenience... but cleaning the glass is always a hassle if you're a perfectionist - a few Genii gave it a "wipe fast and don't look back unless the customer mentions it" mentality... that wasn't me.
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I am about to upgrade my parents' mid-2007 iMac to an SSD, I have never opened it up, but will try to keep the dust out.
 
I used to hate the idea of all-in-one as being more difficult to deal with problems but over the past 2 years have really come to like the 2011. You can get them now for under 400 in good condition used with the base 4gb/500gb configuration and easily bump it up to 32gb and HD to whatever you want. I've even replaced the dvd with a bluray

with just a tiny bit of patience and coordination they are very very easy to crack open and upgrade. the only thing thats a pain is getting the logic board out to replace the battery and add a second hard drive.

the only thing that bugs me is usb2 not 3, but not a dealbreaker
 
My 2011 iMac was the worst Apple product I've ever owned in terms of reliability. The closest Apple store is 3+ hours away from me, and they would never let me ship it. While under AppleCare this was what got fixed.
  • LCD Screen
  • Logic board
  • 3x Graphics card
The SuperDrive also only reads but doesn't write, but this always passed their diagnostics tests which was annoying. Now it's sitting with a dying hard drive.

All my other Apple products since 2004? One logic board replacement on my old PowerBook.
 
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Blackstick said:
I worked as a Mac Genius from 07-2014, 2007 to 2012 iMacs are a pain to fix as a baseline... and then to add insult to injury, once the repair is done, you've got to clean a display in a dusty Genius Room with a silicon roller and basically pray that a speck of dust doesn't settle in the air bubble between the glass panel and the display... almost impossible.

Apple finally wised up and laminated the glass to the LCD in subsequent revisions like on their phones and some tablets, but damn, what a nightmare.
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Maybe if Apple designed for repairability this wouldn't be an issue. They design for aesthetics not practicality.
 
zorinlynx said:
It's funny, at work we've been trying to phase out those older ("fat", we like to call them) iMac in favor of the newer slim models because in our experience they've just been plain unreliable. Usually the hard drive conked out just after the warranty expired.

Meanwhile the slim iMac models have been pretty much rock solid and we've had *zero* failures of any sort with them even as they've aged.

Sure, we can replace the hard drives with SSDs but our users are clamoring for 5K displays anyway so we've used that as an excuse to retire the older machines in the department.
Click to expand...
We have 2 27” 2014 imacs. Both broke. One hinge, the other the LCD actually quit working so now it has a used Acer external monitor which looks stupid. But we certainly are not going to pay $550 just for the replacement LCD without warranty if we do it ourselves. Nope.
 
matamoris said:
These are still great and very capable machines, especially when they are upgraded with an SSD.
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Yup. It shows that any PC with at least the first iteration of the Core CPUs are good enough for most consumer usage, and the biggest bottleneck is the hard drive. Switching to SSD almost make these machines feel like a new computer.
 
matamoris said:
These are still great and very capable machines, especially when they are upgraded with an SSD.
Click to expand...
Yep, I'm using one right now that I bought used a few years ago…replaced the HD with SSD myself and it is a really fast mac. I'm looking at a new mac but for the geekbench scores, I'd have to spend a lot of money to match this machine.
 
Still using a 2009 iMac with upgraded RAM (32GB), SSD and Bluetooth as my daily driver. Also using another 27" external display with it. I'll finally upgrade from Yosemite to High Sierra soon.
 
I have an intermittent graphics corruption issue on my 2011 21.5" iMac, on the threads created by me on Macrumors people are either convinced this is an hardware fault, or a software fault with High Sierra. Myself, I have no idea still, it hasn't been reproducible enough to do easy testing, other than a reinstall of High sierra from scratch did not help.


Hopefully this is software and will be fixed with another version of High Sierra, but I would think if this was a common software problem with the 2011 models there would be a huge outcry by now.
 
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Blackstick said:
I worked as a Mac Genius from 07-2014, 2007 to 2012 iMacs are a pain to fix as a baseline... and then to add insult to injury, once the repair is done, you've got to clean a display in a dusty Genius Room with a silicon roller and basically pray that a speck of dust doesn't settle in the air bubble between the glass panel and the display... almost impossible.

Apple finally wised up and laminated the glass to the LCD in subsequent revisions like on their phones and some tablets, but damn, what a nightmare.
Click to expand...

Sadly I don’t believe the glass in the more current iMacs is fully laminated to the screen as Jason Snell would indicate with his problems. https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/09/needs-repair-a-5k-imac-with-spider-retention-issues/
 
I bought my 27 inch mid-2011 iMac in mid 2012 with the 256 GB SSD and 8GB RAM options. The only thing that I did was add 8 GB RAM in the two empty slots to bump it up to 16 GB RAM. It still performs like new, the display is better than my eyes and I like having the built-in DVD. For me, this machine is a keeper. I am glad that Apple is continuing to support this model.
 
my Imac will be vintage :(

It's still my main mac use it every day and it's my Plex server, still going strong
 
I am the proud owner of a late 2013 iMac. I say proud, now slightly nervous that it will become obsolete very soon. It runs perfectly and there isn't a PC game in Bootcamp I haven't been able to play - including the latest Wolfenstein!

It is a beast and I can't believe it might be a goner soon :eek:
 
I have a late 2009 iMac 27", Core i7 2.8 Ghz with Crucial SSD and 16 Gb RAM. This was Apple's top of the line back in the day and still screams. The display was replaced under Apple Care years ago, but that is it so far. I run Macs Fan Control to keep it cool. I'll run this until the wheels fall off. I love it.
 
simon-says said:
My 2011 iMac was the worst Apple product I've ever owned in terms of reliability. The closest Apple store is 3+ hours away from me, and they would never let me ship it. While under AppleCare this was what got fixed.
  • LCD Screen
  • Logic board
  • 3x Graphics card
The SuperDrive also only reads but doesn't write, but this always passed their diagnostics tests which was annoying. Now it's sitting with a dying hard drive.

All my other Apple products since 2004? One logic board replacement on my old PowerBook.
Click to expand...

I’ve had all that replaced plus the HDD... at least it was under AppleCare and didn’t cost me a dime so I don’t really complain about it.

This was also the first model with thunderbolt. I’ve been running an external tb ssd for about 5 years and have upgraded to 16 gb of ram, the machine runs fine and I have no intention to upgrade until it completely dies. But I’m also using my 2009 MBP with an SSD, 8 gb of ram and a new battery. ‍♂️
 
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