Second Hand Macs what you need to know

Second hand Mac pitfalls

Macs are expensive we all know this and customers may be looking for a way to get more for their money however shopping for a second hand Mac is a rather complicated affair. Where you must consider the age of the machine, components age, and even the battery use, sometimes it is a better value proposition to pay the same cost for a brand new Mac instead of trying to buy a second hand Mac, yet if you got this far lets examine the parts that need to be considered.

Hardware Problems

Older components can have a mired of potential issues, when you buy a Mac second you should be aware of those issues which may arise when buying a second hand mac.

• Software incompatibility - Some applications will not be able to run not only because of the lack of the latest Mac version, but also because of the lack of actual hardware to handle the instructions needed by an application.

  
  

• Random Access Memory - Temporary storage location for running applications and other data, many older Macs may have DDR3, which is quite old, you can still get these RAM kits but they are close to being deprecated, Macs from the past also can have has little as 4GB of RAM which is definitely no enough in this day and age, especially for anything meaningful.

• Battery - Macs can have battery issues if purchased second-hand lithium ion batteries and Li-PO, both have a limited lifespan as such that is determined by cycle count, after that count is close to it's end of life will become unable to hold a charge.

• Unified Memory Architecture - Older Macs many of them come with smaller amounts of RAM and it was only recent Apple finally decided to up the baseline memory to 16GB at the baseline, 8GB models can still be found in the wild for some people 8GB is enough, however you should think about the kind of workload you plan on running on the Mac, this will help decide if you need more than 8GB.

Cost

The reality is some people often sell Macs for more than they are actually worth, there is a misconception that Macs "age" better than PCs this just isn't the case Macs are the same depreciation in performance and cost as any other hardware, as such it might actually be cheaper to buy the newest model in the long run. For example a Mac with an I7 might be $800 when you could save the money for a little longer and get $1500 Macbook air with an M4 and it will absolutely obliterate an Intel second-hand Mac in performance and in battery runtime.

MacOS Major Versions

Mac based machines not unlike windows share a type of versioning system that defines the major releases and minor releases. Major releases often have code names associated with them, those code names correspond to major version numbers, they often accompany a security patch and additional features with each release, so if you want the 'latest' features a Mac should be within it's service period which is the amount of time you'll receive updates. Put simply if you buy a new M4 Macbook Pro now, it will receive major version updates for approximately 7 years after date of release. The major versions currently used by MacOS are the following and in order by year release and relevance.

• Sequoia v15

• Sonoma v14

• Ventura v13

• Monterey v12

• Big Sur v11

The lowest version many apps will support currently, any other versions below version 11 will result in not even application updates. If you decide to purchase a much older Mac you do so at your own risk, although that risk is lower than a windows machine it is still a risk so you need to be very aware of that fact.

Why is version restriction done?

The reason for version restriction is typically market segmentation, where Apple wants the latest and greatest features available only to the new Macs currently in the active ecosystem, and also because some new MacOS features require the newest versions oh hardware to maximize both performance and security, for example Sequoia lead to a quite a significant increase in demand of required performance over previous MacOS versions, this would the introduction of dedicated NPU features as well as others, and Intel chips are reaching complete EOL (End of Life)

MacOS Minor Versions

Minor versions are often not important for things like features but sometimes they are contained within minor versions are things like bug fixes, security updates, and general improvements, security updates are often critical for Mac users if they need, continued security improvements, Those minor versions also often contain the information XProtect uses for malware remediation and GateKeeper identification. Both very important components to protect you mac from malware and potentially malicious software.

Risks with Second Hand Macs

Purchasing a second hand mac comes with two unique risks one is the lack of security patches for some older versions of hardware for Macs, and therefore should generally be avoided, the second problem is applications will eventually stop being updated for older versions of MacOS this means if you use an older Mac, it will be limited in not only major version updates minor but also major version updates for the applications running on the Mac, the MacOS version currently that application compatibility becomes a major issue is MacOS Big Sur or Major version MacOS 11, for now this version will run most applications and the applications will continue to be updated now and into the future however at any point this is likely to change, so be weary of that potential risk. Avoid Macs which cannot be upgraded to Big Sur 11, preferably choose a Mac which still receives system upgrade and security patches. Macs from 2019 and above are preferable however you can get away with Macs running from 2015 which support Big Sur v11.

Other options with second hand Macs

Linux and Windows if it is under consideration is an option for a Mac, windows can run on a Mac but again, there is many considerations to deal with when running windows on a Mac, and that is for example Windows 11 requirement for a TPM specifically 1.2V TPMs most intel Macs lack this TPM, running windows on the newest Apple silicon is also a problem because Apple Silicon is based on ARM based CPUs boot-camp is not available under Macs so running windows on a ARM based Mac is not possible, on Intel based CPUs it is still possible but Apple Silicon based Macs which are also known as ARM based chips. The other choice is to use a Linux distro which is compatible with either a Intel based processor x86-64 processor or to use a distro with ARM compatibility, a lot of distros are now officially compatible with the ARM processor of Macs so this can be an option in future if you no longer receive security patches anymore. Linux can give a Mac a new lease on life, by giving you the ability to continue to use a Mac without needing MacOS.

the only real alternative is to use something like CloudPC provided by Microsoft.

Running Windows or other OSs on MacOS

From within MacOS you can run windows based applications and run other operating systems and that is either through Parallels OR Microsoft 365 PC Cloud. The former is effectively a type 2 hypervisor, simply put it virtualizes your hardware to present to a software based install such as that which is found in a Windows, Linux or other operating system this common "communication layer" allows for it to emulate windows based hardware as far as the OS is concerned this is a windows based computer. It should be noted that virtualization does incur a penalty on performance and not all virutalized applications will behave as intended.

Microsoft Cloud PC is exactly what is describe using the capabilities of cloud computing by providing an IaaS(Infrastucture as a Service), PaaS(Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) fully integrated solution, providing a windows based system

using Microsoft 365. CloudPC includes all the critical windows applications you may need allowing you to continue to working on your favorite applications with minimal disruption.