Running a 2008 iMac in 2021

Can a 13 year old iMac still be useful in 2021?

We've had an early 2008 20-inch iMac here at Cupertino Classics for a while now but in standard form it'll run macOS 10.11 El Capitan and no higher.

With 4GB RAM and the original 500GB Hard Disc the performance is, ok, but we thought we would give this Mac a new lease of life with an SSD upgrade and an installation of Catalina via a patcher.

SSD upgrade

The iMac's internal hard drive connects via SATA2 meaning it has a max transfer rate of 3 gigabits per second. At this speed it won't trouble a modern SSD that's SATA3 compliant (6 gigabits per second) so we sourced an inexpensive 128GB SSD drive. Following the excellent iFixit guide we swapped out the old hard disc in our iMac for our new SSD.

Catalina installation

Using our Catalina Patcher USB Installer we booted from the USB drive and firstly formatted the new SSD drive using HFS+ and then installed and patched Catalina without any issues.

Rebooting the iMac after installation completed the Catalina installation successfully.

Life after the upgrade

Although we are only running 4GB RAM in the iMac (it can support up to 6GB), it performs remarkably well and the 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor is powerful enough to run all of our favourite apps including:

• Adobe Creative Cloud

• Slack

• SourceTree

It's no rocketship but the brilliant 20 inch display is still a pleasure to use.

Conclusion

The 2008 20 inch iMac can still perform admirably well given an SSD upgrade and a patched installation of Catalina. We've had daily use since the upgrade and everything is working well. These old 2008 iMacs are still relevant here in 2021.