Get your shovels ready: it's time to bury old iMacs

(Image credit: WeDesing via Shutterstock)

Apple is planning to make several 2013 and 2014 iMac models obsolete by the end of November, which means it might be time to bid a fond farewell to some old favorites. The scrapping comes after a slew of product launches from the company this year, including a new Mac Studio and Studio Display, the iPhone 14, and updated iPad Minis - plus a couple of new MacBooks as well.

In a memo obtained by MacRumors, Apple will be making the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac that launched in late 2013, the mid-2014 21.5-inch iMac, and the Retina 5K 27-inch iMac from late 2014 obsolete on November 30 this year. This means the products will no longer be eligible for any repairs from Apple, nor will you be able to order any replacement parts for them.

According to the tech giant, products are considered obsolete if Apple has stopped distributing them for more than seven years. A list of all the now obsolete products can be found on the website if you dig through their support page.

Analysis: Consume Consume Consume

So, what does this mean for those of us holding onto our precious, vintage machines? Will your Mac immediately shut down on November 30 and turn into a heavy table weight?

Nope! You’ll be fine, the now obsolete Macs will just stop receiving security updates and become closed off from any major software updates Apple has in store. Black Friday is right around the corner, so if an upgrade is something you’re looking for now is the best time to go looking for early Black Friday deals on Macs and Macbooks.

Seven years is not that long ago, and it’s a bold move to label technology that hits this mark ‘vintage’ and ‘obsolete’.Despite Apple’s culture of churning out new versions of the same technology every year, not everyone can afford to upgrade their kit that often. This consumerist mindset that encourages us to buy and replace in a loop on an almost annual basis leads to a surplus of e-waste that ends up in landfills in third-world countries.

If Apple made their products user-repairable - in the same way PC users can upgrade parts of their machines when new components are needed - we would see wider support for older technologies. In our view, people who can't upgrade their machines, or want to hold onto them from an environmental or sentimental standpoint should not be punished.

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison. Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place. Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook's Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).