In this box is what I think is the worst Apple product you can buy.
It's not expensive, but it's overpriced.
It's new, but it's outdated. If you're not careful surfing through Apple's online refurbished store, you might think
that this $890 iMac is a great deal.
But I don't think it is. Which is why I bought it. I want to see just how bad of a product Apple still thinks is okay to sell to you.
I've always been fascinated with Apple's refurbished store.
It's a place where you can find discounts on new and not so new models of just about
any Apple device if it's in stock. And despite being refurbished, Apple treats them with the same warranty and return policy
as new devices. So it's a 21.5 inch iMac from 2017.
It's got a 2.3 gigahertz dual core 7th gen Intel chip that is actually for laptops.
There we go. One terabytes of hard drive space.
And yes, that is spinning hard drive space. And because this has a laptop hard drive, like it has a laptop processor for some reason,
it only spins at 5400 RPM, which is the slowest.
Let's see how this thing performs. I'm really curious.
Screen looks perfect. The old iMac.
All right, let's plug this thing in.
The sweet smell of a new computer.
New old computer.
It genuinely does smell. If we had smell vision, that'd be great, but we don't.
Let me explain why this iMac exists. In 2015, Apple upgraded the screen on the 21.5 inch iMac to a 4k panel, which is great,
but that also upped the price. And Apple still needed a computer to sell to schools.
And so what they did is they created a cut price version with the existing 1080p screen.
So in 2015, it had a really slow processor from a MacBook Air and then this one slightly
better in 2017. Oh my God, this is taking forever.
I didn't put a stopwatch on, I should have done that.
This is a pretty bad experience, but at least we didn't have to pay more for an overpriced
RAM upgrade or a fancy screen, only to be in the same boat.
I had the option between three, which all share the same problem, a spinning hard drive.
There is no SSD at all.
These drives ran at the glacial pace of 60 to 80 megabytes per second, hence the slow
boot. If you want one of these older iMacs, I recommend paying the $40 extra and getting one with
an SSD. Or if you need more space, there's one with a Fusion drive.
And of course, external hard drives are always an option too.
It's so slow. This is crazy.
This iMac took four minutes to boot. A M1 Mac mini, by comparison, takes only 30 seconds.
Installing Microsoft Office took just under 10 minutes.
And on an M1? Well, that's only three and a half minutes.
Because oh, yes.
The models that come with an SSD, so that would be a Fusion drive model or one with just an
SSD, they use an M.2 slot for the SSD.
But this one just has the SATA port for the HDD and no M.2 slots.
So even if you wanted to upgrade an SSD alongside the hard drive that's in here, you can't.
You have to replace it with a SATA SSD in a two and a half inch enclosure.
I can't hear anything.
Oh no, there it is.
So I'm starting to wonder if this computer is refurbished at all.
I mean, just look at the sheer volume of choices from recently discontinued models.
It really makes me think that the refurbished store might be the place where Apple sells
its old stock. Take the iMac Pro, for example.
That was discontinued last March, and yesterday when I last checked, there were 66 options
still available. Oh, now there's only 19.
That's weird. Anyway, with all the anticipation for an iMac with the M1 Pro and Mac's chips incoming,
I don't see how there can be much demand for these.
Now, to confirm my hypothesis, I tried to look at this iMac's hard drive history and
the total hours it ran for before we started using it is about 186, which is a little over
a week. More interesting still is that according to the serial number, this iMac was manufactured
in 2017. So is this the same hard drive from that time?
Did somebody buy this and use it for a week and return it?
Was only the hard drive replaced? It's kind of hard to deduce what sort of life these refurbished Macs have had.
If only computers had odometers. New or not, there are some funny listings in here, like these $40,000 plus Mac Pros.
They are configured with a preposterous and unsellable 1.5 terabytes of RAM and 4 GPUs.
It's a lot of power and a lot of money, and that's with a 19% discount compared to when
it was new. Another open question is who's going to spend almost $3,800 on this 27-inch iMac, which
is otherwise a base model except for the 128GB RAM upgrade?
That's silly, especially since you can still buy a base model and easily upgrade the memory
thanks to a little door on the back. Doing so with a kit bought online would save you over $1,400, plus you can sell the RAM
it came with or save it as a backup. There's a whole slew of these with too much RAM.
But what if you actually want to get a good deal from Apple?
Well, you don't have to look far. An M1 Mac Mini is $589, adding an equivalent Mac layout keyboard, a Bluetooth mouse, 1080p
screen, external hard drive, and a pair of speakers together is only a couple dollars
more than our worst iMac.
With more cables to manage, it's not going to be quite as clean and as beautiful of an
install on your desk, but it will be much, much faster and last much longer.
What also makes this iMac such a bad deal is that in the refurbish store, Apple doesn't
believe in depreciation. I tried to find one of these on the used market and I found one for $550, which is closer
to how much this computer should cost if it had an SSD instead of a spinner.
If you venture into the Apple refurbish store, what you need to make sure you do is read
the tech specs and know what they mean, because Apple will sell you something over-configured
and practical or just slow.
And you don't want to be caught with a bad deal when you're thinking you're getting a good one.
That's not to say there aren't any good deals in the refurbish store.
There are. And I want to see just how good a deal we can get in our next video.
So get subscribed for that. Thanks for waiting for this Mac Address to load.
If you've experienced the massive speed increase of an SSD upgrade, give this video a like.
And if you have a computer in your life that still boots from a spinner drive, why not subscribe?
I'm wondering what you think is the worst deal in the Apple refurbish store.
Put the specs and the link in the comments below.