Over the holidays I did some tinkering. I bought two 2019 iMacs, took them apart, replaced their two hard drives, CPUs, and RAM and then put them back together for resale. How’d I do?
Purchase
First, someone sold a 2017 as a 2019 and I had to return that. I purchased two 2019s on eBay for a total of $2900. One was a deal at $1300 and then other had a better GPU and was $1600. Then, I purchased top of the line parts to upgrade. i9, WD Black 2TB NVME, WD Black 8TB, and 128GB of RAM. I learned that this may have been overkill. The hard drives are expensive and I don’t know if anyone really needed that pricy 8TB one. And maxing out the RAM would probably only be needed just a handful of people and they would probably be going for a higher end machine. So I ended up selling some of the RAM I bought.
iMac x2 = $2900
i9 x2 = $700
2TB SDD x2 = $650
8TB HDD x2 = $500
64GB RAM = $220
Tools = $100
Total cost of parts = $5070
Repair
The repair took around 10 hours total. I watched youtube videos to make sure I did everything correctly and didn’t forget any screws or anything. I wouldn’t recommend doing this as a first job, maybe not as any job since breaking anything would mean no profit. At each step I was frightened that I would break something. And I’ve done similar things before.
You start by removing the tape that attaches the screen to the body. Break the screen: $500, yank the mic cord: no more mic, break something else, maybe you lose the entire computer. After getting to the inside of the machine you can unscrew parts until you can access the parts you want to replace. Another tough part was removing the processor. It is held in by a really tight metal piece which you have to apply lots of pressure to put back. Then you have to clean all the goop and replace the processor without snapping any pins.
Conclusion
I sold the first one for $3000 on eBay. After shipping and fees that came to around $2700. Selling other parts that I replaced from the two machines net me another $350.
I couldn’t sell the other one for more than $2500, so I kept it. Normally I would lower the price to whatever it takes to sell, but I was in the market for a computer, so now I have a beast of a machine for $2020. It holds all my pictures and a backup of them as well. Hopefully this will last me a decade and can be my kid’s computer as well.