Buying Used iMac 2015: What to look at?

[Appledoesnotlisten]

Hi iMac crowd,

After 15 years of laptops I have decided to try out whether iMac is a good fit for me and am buying a used one on craigslist. My reasoning is that even if I don't like it, I can quickly resell it with a small discount as it's a 2015 model and price is not that bad. If I really like it, I'll just keep it.

I am thinking about this 5K 2015 model and have 2 questions:
1) Can I buy an external SSD and use it exclusively instead of the HHD?
2) What should I look at when buying the device?

Thank you!

 

[||\||]

I have a similar model and, yeah, you can boot externally. I recommend these Thunderbolt drives (if you can find them), but USB 3 will work as well. The Thunderbolt drive supports TRIM and will have internal SATA read speeds (500mb/s). USB 3 does not support TRIM, so it will slow down over time. Still much, much faster than the original HDD. The Transcend Thunderbolt drives are ok, but much slower than the Monster Digital SSDs. If you want TRIM, go there.

I opened up my 2015 model recently, and it's not really that hard at all. You need an $8 tape and pizza cutter combo to remove/replace the screen and a torx 10 driver. An extra hand to help hold the screen wile you undo to the monitor cables helps. 20 minutes and you're done.

I don't have much to look for. Maybe check the uniformity of the screen. If you have some sort of application that reads SMART data, you can put it on a flash drive, check out the HDD, and get a sense of how much use it has. Imacs are sealed units, so not much to look at.
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Oh, and up that memory. 8GB gets eaten up quickly on those 5k screens. They really need 16GB if you are doing anything other than basic stuff like Web browsing, watching video, or using office apps.

 

[toneofark]

I ordered one last night myself. It has a 1TB Fusion Drive, so I'm going to wait and see how that works out. But I already ordered RAM so I'll be running 32GB from the start.