After countless failed attempts over the past two years (both by myself and by apple tech support) I've finally given up any hope of getting my 2019, 21-inch iMac to run at a reasonably fast speed. It's constantly hanging up, lagging, and crashing. This is despite numerous software reinstalls. In fact, it runs more slowly and has more problems than any version of any Mac, MacBook Pro, or iMac that I've owned in more than twenty years. It's been such a disappointment that I am gun shy about buying a new iMac to replace it and wondering if anyone has any advice.
About to abandon my 2019 iMac
- Thread starter Highwire
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Cory Cooper
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Hello and welcome.
Some of the 2019 iMacs had a 5400-rpm 1 TB drive, which is actually a slow 2.5" notebook drive, not a desktop-class 7200-rpm drive. It could be starting to fail, which would cause the issues you are having. Also, third-party RAM can cause those issues as well.
Have you tried connecting an external drive and installing macOS on it? That would bypass the internal drive and help narrow down the issue. Also, if you have added third-party (non-Apple) RAM, do you have the original Apple RAM that you could reinstall?
C
Some of the 2019 iMacs had a 5400-rpm 1 TB drive, which is actually a slow 2.5" notebook drive, not a desktop-class 7200-rpm drive. It could be starting to fail, which would cause the issues you are having. Also, third-party RAM can cause those issues as well.
Have you tried connecting an external drive and installing macOS on it? That would bypass the internal drive and help narrow down the issue. Also, if you have added third-party (non-Apple) RAM, do you have the original Apple RAM that you could reinstall?
C
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That’s a fairly new model. Let me guess… your internal drive is a hard disk, not SSD. Your model came with either a 1 TB 5400 rpm hard drive, or a 1 TB fusion drive, or SSD.
If this is true, consider getting an external SSD to use as your system disk. Your Thunderbolt 3 connectors should support some fast third-party SSDs. Depending on the amount of memory, get a larger capacity SSD the less memory you have. If you only have 8 gibibytes of RAM, I recommend getting a 2 terabyte SSD, at least.
This model is capable of running macOS Ventura.