iMac and Mac mini repair and upgrades in Horsham, Sussex, the South East, London & beyond.
Mycomputerworks & Macrehab specialists in iMac & Mac mini repair & upgrades
The most common iMac and Mac mini issue late 2012 upto 2019 models.
Upon turning your iMac or mac mini on it’s painfully slow. Sometimes upto 2-3 minutes or more staring at that loading bar, and when it does finally reach desktop for ever and an age to open applications just waiting on that spinning beach ball. Upon calling support you’ve been sent around in circles doing a fresh install of Mac OS to no avail and the same issue of it being just so slow, yet it’s a relatively new machine with a great spec processor, memory and graphics.
The answer is really quite straight forward. When Mac OS High Sierra final update 10.13.6 was rolled out it had a surprise in store.
Apple had changed the way that the internal hard drive’s formatting (filing system) works from what was ‘JFS’ to ‘APFS’.
This new APFS format was designed with much faster Solid State Drives – SSD’s and NVME drives. Apple kept shipping imacs and Mac mini’s with the old hard drives installed up until 2019.
With OS High Sierra the issue wasn’t so noticeable as it was quite a light weight operating system compared to what was to come with OS Mojave 10.14 and upwards. With many changes to Mojave from previous OS’s and many additions puts even further stress on the old mechanical hard drives. Then when OD Catalina 10.15 came out the situation was exasperated further with more additions.
The answer is that your Mac needs upgrading from these old mechanical HDD’s to a nice fast SSD which is 10x faster with no moving parts, thus your Mac runs cooler and more efficiently. At Mycomputerworks & Macrehab we will clone your existing drive to the new SSD so you pick up where you left off without loss of data or needing to re install your applications and so on. In the exception that your HDD is so degraded it may not be possible to clone, but we will be able to transfer your user profile – Things such as Documents, Pictures, Music, Desktop and so on. In this instance you will need to add your settings back in such as setting up Mail, installing your applications etc.
Having cloned your HDD to the new SSD we now need to gain access. For a late 2012> iMac the proceedure is to gently cut around the screen edge with a specialist tool which cuts into the adhesive strips holding the screen in place. Once this has been achieved the screen can safely removed, and works started after having removed old adhesive from the case and screen. We will service the mac clearing out all fluff and dust from the interior. Then the HDD will be removed and the SSD fitted. New, genuine adhesive strips will then be put in place ready for the screen to be re connected and offered up to and sealed in place.
Once all is back together we will then optimise Mac OS for the new SSD to take advantage of all it’s capabilities and a nice extended life time.
We can also upgrade your iMac’s memory to 32GB RAM if required. This can be done on some older Mac mini’s too before they started shipping them with the RAM soldered onto the logic board.
Not local to us? Arrange to post it in to Mycomputerworks & Macrehab and once complete we will post it back to you, fully insured.
To book yours in email us at hello@mycomputerworks.co.uk call 01403 263007 or Whatsapp us on 07935 235681
