Should I Buy?: iMac i5 2.7GHz (Late 2013)

[vacafrita]

Hi everyone! I'd like some advice on whether to purchase an iMac Core i5 2.7GHz. This is the Late 2013 model, model number iMac14,1. I believe it's still for sale at the Apple Store.

I currently have an old Mac Mini (late 2012, Core i5 2.5 GHz, 16 GB memory) and it's starting to get REALLY slow. I'm a lawyer and work from home sometimes, so I'm no "power user"--I'll typically have Firefox with a dozen tabs open, a few PDFs in Preview, several Word documents, and maybe a Pandora station or iTunes playlist going at the same time. Even with this load, the Mini slows to a crawl, with the pinwheel appearing every few minutes.

On paper, the specs for the iMac don't seem that much better than the Mac Mini, but its Geekbench scores seem to be a decent improvement. More importantly, I may be able to get a great deal: My work has one of these iMacs sitting in the storage closet totally unused, and my boss has no idea what they're worth, so I may be able to buy it off him for a few hundred bucks.

Should I pull the trigger? Does this iMac still perform pretty well? Or should I just save up my money for a decent top-of-the-line one?

Thanks so much everyone!

 

[Truefan31]

If u can get it for that deal go for it. I have one and love it. I did go with an external boot ssd drive for faster performance.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hi everyone! I'd like some advice on whether to purchase an iMac Core i5 2.7GHz. This is the Late 2013 model, model number iMac14,1. I believe it's still for sale at the Apple Store.

I currently have an old Mac Mini (late 2012, Core i5 2.5 GHz, 16 GB memory) and it's starting to get REALLY slow. I'm a lawyer and work from home sometimes, so I'm no "power user"--I'll typically have Firefox with a dozen tabs open, a few PDFs in Preview, several Word documents, and maybe a Pandora station or iTunes playlist going at the same time. Even with this load, the Mini slows to a crawl, with the pinwheel appearing every few minutes.

On paper, the specs for the iMac don't seem that much better than the Mac Mini, but its Geekbench scores seem to be a decent improvement. More importantly, I may be able to get a great deal: My work has one of these iMacs sitting in the storage closet totally unused, and my boss has no idea what they're worth, so I may be able to buy it off him for a few hundred bucks.

Should I pull the trigger? Does this iMac still perform pretty well? Or should I just save up my money for a decent top-of-the-line one?

Thanks so much everyone!

To be honest that just sounds like your hard drive is slowly dying. Replace it with an SSD and that mini will be better than new.