Second Hand imac 9.1

holz81

Hi - Have been offered this computer second hand, refurbished, for £100.
I only need to be able to check emails, browse the web and do some word processing.
It has OS 10.11 (el capitan) which I know is no longer supported, but I don't want to be downloading loads of apps etc. so I'm not too bothered.
If it will work for a couple of years, allowing me to do what I need it for, I think is seems like on OK price.
Just want to know if it will work for me, or if it is suddenly going to stop working completely within a few months.
Thanks!

System

It'll work OK and it is one of the Intel CPU based ones as well which is good. It is at least on OS X (10.xxx) so there's plenty of software out there for it to do what you want. Apple don't charge for OS upgrades so you may find that if you create an account for the App Store you can upgrade to the latest version of OSX that supports it for free. The built in mail client will be fine, you may want to download and install Chrome though and LibreOffice will work OK too.

Given it is new enough to have the same Intel CPU as Windows machines, those Macs have a thing called Bootcamp that you can use to install Windows on it if it came to it and there's always Linux you can put on it too.

holz81

Thanks- have been reading up about it online and some people are saying it might not be secure- and ideas what they mean?

almillar

some people are saying it might not be secure- and ideas what they mean?

You've answered your own question:

It has OS 10.11 (el capitan) which I know is no longer supported,

That OS is not being updated any more, so any new security problems with it may not be fixed. I'd say it's not quite as bad as running Windows XP. See if you can install a later OS, or if that's as late as you're allowed. Not a fast computer though.

datostar

The iMac 9.1 is likely a mid-2009 model and El Capitan was the last available 'official' OS upgrade. There are fiddly ways to get a later OS on but that means needing the facility to cold boot from a USB Drive and they can't all do it. Also there could be problems with hardware compatibility so all in all the machine would probably be more reliable with El Capitan, which was supported by Apple until Mojave came out in September 2018 so it's less than a year ago. I think it would be much more secure than anything running Win XP. There's a lot of people still running El Capitan on older machines. It was a good reliable OS.

marcarm

I wouldn't use 2nd hand Imac

Not sure how well it would remove the hairs