Absolutely love my 2013, I strapped a Samsung T5 to the stand and installed Catalina on it. Mine boots in 27, seconds and the comp just runs beautiful now. Must do IMO

I bought a 2013 iMac a year ago in mint condition and I'm extremely happy with it. It is an i5 and has 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive, which is plenty for me. It's extremely responsive, runs very smoothly, and it does everything that I want and need it to.

I read your article online. Does this also affect video editing speeds and other demanding applications?

Was there any chance Spotlight was indexing the full hard drive and thereby made it slower?

how that boot in 106sec it is slow because my old MacBook 2008 boot fast and i have on it mac os catalina

Thank! I am glad that I read it before I was just about to upgrade my later 2012 imac to a 2019 imac. Even if we can use an external SDD to improve old imac, what about the compatibility with new Mac OS?

I have a similar tale to tell. I too have a 2013 iMac. It was the top one of the 3 different versions. It came with an i7, a fusion drive comprising of a 128Gb blade SSD & 3TB HD. Upon getting it I added another 16Gb of RAM to the 8Gb it came with. I have been very happy with this machine. Eventually the 3TB HD failed so I switched to booting it from an external thunderbolt 1 SSD. So I’m used to a bit quicker disk access. Fast forward to 2021 and Apple silicon is putting an end to BOOTCAMP so I splurge on what will be the last Intel iMac 27. Again I went for the top model. I added a 1TB SSD & maxed out the GPU. Cost about the same number of dollars as the last one. So actually cheaper in real terms. I’ve also upped the RAM to 32GB of 3rd party memory. After all this, in terms of everyday use, there is no difference in user experience. The boot time is effectively the same. Big Sur if anything feels more sluggish than Catalina. It’s all a bit underwhelming really. So I feel for you man. All these benchmarks count for nothing if you don’t improve the user experience. Im surprised I don’t see more disappointed upgraders maybe everyone waited for Apple Silicon?

I hired a technician to upgrade my iMac from 8GB to 16GB and had an internal 1TB Samsung SSD installed. My iMac boots up fast but it operates slow or crashes sometimes when I use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. One Adobe rep said it's the Intel Iris Pro 1538MB causing the issue and I will need to upgrade to a new iMac. Is there a way to get around this without needing to buy a new Mac?

What's the max ram possible for upgrading?

I own a late 2013 imac and it works pretty good with el captain and 3.4ghz proc and I5; thanks for this video

Hi, can I play Sims 4 in iMac 2013? Thanks!

Can anyone answer me. Does imac 2013 support obs studio?

still the 2013 imac runs faster than many 2020 office Pcs

IMACs are AMAZING. I am still on a 2013 with SSD and it is still awesome.

Wow I can’t imagine having a spinning hard drive now. Even fusion drives are not great. My iMac with SSD boots up in about 12-15 seconds and is ready to open programs up right away with no lag

i was about to order a new imac cause my 2013 was taking as long as yours to boot up but i installed a 2TB NVMe SSD and now it works great. i also upgraded my ram to 32 GBs

The issue are the slow 5400 rpm drives. My family has 2 iMacs (2011 i5 with 8gb of ram and a 1tb hdd and a 2017 with an i5, 8gb of ram and a 1tb hdd) and the new one actually runs slower because of OS X Catalina. Which slowed it down to a crawl. Because the 2011s came with a 7200 rpm hdd, my iMac which cost a 6th of the price boots and runs faster.

i have a 2013 late imac. the one you have, so yeah 1TB hard drive 2,7GHz 4-core i5 and intel iris pro 5200 and its still heating.

Ya when I bought my iMac 27 i7 I had to return it and sent for SSD storage, night and day difference, never tried the Fusion drive, how is it?

Hi John. Found a used 21.5' iMac from late 2013 for around 500 bucks. Does this sound like a good deal?