I have an old iMac from a friend that had a dead harddrive that I was able to replace pretty cheaply and has worked fine ever since, though it's topped out at an old OS.
I got another iMac from a neighbour suspecting it may be a harddrive issue as well, which could be an easy fix.
BUT, with both of these stopping at much older OS's that don't get updates any longer and won't run more modern programs, the question came up today...
Would there be any upside to doing so? Could a newer OS be installed and used, for instance?
The thinking was if the OS's aren't updated or security patching anyway, there's no difference if we jailbreak the computers and they then don't update or security patch as a result.
But is that even a thing? If so, any drawbacks I'm not seeing to doing this (or more to the point, having someone who knows what they're doing do it)?
I will warn you if you want to connect an Apple account please make a fresh one for these because weird things can happen when "unsupported" devices are on your account. It caused my friend a ton of headaches
@reay yeah it was causing all the other devices to get logged out (hard lockout for weeks -- Apple support told him he had to wait it out), unable to use purchased software, etc
I’m just trying to figure out a workaround for having another Mac that works flawlessly — it’s outlasted a number of Windows laptops we’ve had — but which has of course been designed to be obsolete years ago. I don’t think that first one that was brought back to life with a new harddrive will even run Garage Band, as crazy as that sounds.
Really good computers are still WAY less useful when they can’t run certain remotely recent software.
I have heard reports of people successfully installing unsupported newer OS releases on older hardware manually. There are limits, of course.
I'd suggest searching for your specific hardware paired with the first OS to drop official support then work up from there. From the Apple menu go to About this Mac and look for something like "iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2015)" for your hardware. In that specific case the oldest OS to drop support is MacOS 13 Ventura. See https://www.macworld.com/article/673697/what-version-of-macos-can-my-mac-run.html
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