Upgrading iMac late 2012

[stanza.richi]

A friend of mine has got a 21.5 inch late 2012 iMac with 8 gb RAM and 1 TB HD Sata. This is used by his 12 y.o. child for powerpoint for school. His wife and him doesn’t want to spend a lot of money to buy a Macbook Air or a new iMac and they asked me for suggestions about how to improve the speed of this old iMac.

I was thinking about suggesting a new 512 ssd and a 16 gb ram. What do you think? Is something that could be easily do with this iMac?

Thank you for the replies.

 

[curnalpanic]

easily

Nope, not easily. I believe the late 2012 has neither user accessible RAM or hard drive. So you would have to cut it open, do the upgrades at put it back together again, adhesives and all. And then there is the risk of breaking something during the process of course. However, if that is you in your avatar you may have the steady enough hand to do it.

But if you managed to at least replace the spinning rust, and install a modern macOS using OpenCore it could work.

If RAM is enough (and remember Apple still puts 8 GB in new Macs), an external SSD could be an easier option.