What's my iMac worth? A seller's guide
Ask ten owners what their iMac is worth and you get ten guesses, most anchored to what it cost new. The resale market ignores that. It rewards a short list of specifics — the silicon behind the screen, what the storage is made of, and whether the front glass is unmarked. Here is how a specialist buyer reads an all-in-one.
Smaller and newer usually beats bigger and older
The instinct says a 27-inch machine must outrank a 24-inch one. On the used market that is often backwards.
The 24-inch iMac runs Apple Silicon — M1, then M3, then M4. It boots current macOS, stays near-silent under load and has years of software support ahead of it. The 27-inch 5K line ended on Intel. That 5120 x 2880 panel is still gorgeous, but the machines behind it run hot, their support runway shortens with every macOS release, and many shipped with storage nobody wants.
So a tidy M-series 24-inch typically sits above an Intel 27-inch of the same cosmetic grade. One strong exception: a final-generation 27-inch with an i7 or i9, a real SSD and a generous memory tier still has a following among people who want screen area for video timelines or code. Earlier 27-inch machines, and any on a mechanical drive, land further down.
Storage type is the widest single swing
Three things could be inside, and the gap between them is enormous.
Pure SSD. Flash throughout: quick, durable, no moving parts. What every buyer wants, and standard on the 24-inch and the iMac Pro.
Fusion Drive. Apple’s hybrid: a small flash cache — often 24GB or 32GB — stitched to a 1TB or 2TB spinning disk as one logical volume. When either half fails the whole volume goes with it, and on machines this age that is a question of when. Buyers price the risk in hard, which makes a Fusion Drive the biggest drag on an otherwise decent 27-inch.
Plain hard disk. The non-Retina 21.5-inch models and older 27-inch base configurations. Painfully slow on a current macOS release.
Capacity stacks on top of type. 256GB is thin for anyone editing photos or video, 512GB is the comfortable middle, 1TB and up earns a real premium — and no 24-inch owner can add to it later.
Memory, and which iMacs let the next owner add it
This is one of the few places where the older machine wins.
The 27-inch 5K models have a memory door on the back below the power inlet — four SO-DIMM slots, no tools, no adhesive. The next owner can take an 8GB machine to 32GB or 64GB cheaply, which softens the penalty for a low factory spec, though a well-loaded one still sells for more.
The 24-inch is the opposite. Unified memory sits on the chip package, soldered permanently — 8GB or 16GB on M1 and M3, higher tiers on M4. What you sell is what that machine has forever, so 16GB and above carries a clear premium over the base configuration. The Retina 21.5-inch models are soldered too, which is why a base one is a hard sell.
The panel is the machine
On an all-in-one the display is not a component you swap on a Tuesday afternoon. The LCD is bonded to the cover glass and held in with adhesive strips that must be cut and replaced. A 5K display assembly plus the labour to fit it approaches — and on older units exceeds — what the whole computer is worth working. So a cracked screen sends an iMac towards parts value instead of trimming a slice off the top.
Damage short of a crack still counts:
- Coating wear. The anti-reflective layer on earlier Retina machines can rub away in patches, leaving smeared bright areas.
- Delamination or dust. Marks that sit behind the glass, where no cloth reaches.
- Dead pixels, backlight bleed, image retention. Visible to anyone inspecting it, so all priced in.
Photograph the screen twice: powered on with a plain white window, and powered off. The dark screen reveals scratches a lit one hides, and honest photos get you a figure that holds.
Activation Lock decides whether it is a computer or a parts machine
If Find My is on and the machine is tied to your Apple Account, nobody can erase it, reinstall macOS or resell it as a working iMac. Locked machines get bought as parts, and the gap between those two figures is the largest avoidable loss in this guide.
Before it leaves you: System Settings → [your name] → Sign Out, then confirm Find My is off. Apple Silicon and T2-equipped Intel machines can then run Erase All Content and Settings; older Intel iMacs need a wipe from Recovery. If that is unfamiliar territory, leave it — we talk sellers through it at collection.
The extras that move the number
- The stand. A machine ordered in the VESA-mount configuration never had one, and a standard machine that has lost its stand is awkward to sell on.
- Colour-matched keyboard and mouse. The 24-inch shipped with a Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse in the machine’s own colour. A matched set lifts the figure, and the Touch ID keyboard from the four-port models lifts it further. Mismatched white peripherals do not.
- The power lead. The 24-inch uses a colour-matched braided cable with a magnetic connector into an external brick, and on some models that brick carries the Ethernet port. Not a cable you can pick up anywhere, so a missing one is felt.
- The box. Worth having, though we collect in person rather than ask you to pack a bonded glass panel.
The iMac Pro is a separate market
The iMac Pro is not a fast iMac; it is a workstation in a Space Grey shell. Xeon W silicon at 8, 10, 14 or 18 cores, ECC memory, Vega graphics, all-flash storage. Value tracks core count and memory tier above all else, and the Space Grey keyboard, mouse and trackpad are collectible in their own right — mention them separately if they are still in a drawer. It carries a T2 chip, so the Activation Lock rules apply.
The two columns that matter
| Lifts it | Drags it down |
|---|---|
| Apple Silicon — M1, M3, M4 | Intel, and the further back the worse |
| Pure SSD at 512GB or more | Fusion Drive, or a spinning hard disk |
| 16GB or higher on a soldered machine | Base 8GB with no way to add more |
| Clean, evenly lit, unmarked panel | Cracks, coating wear, dust behind the glass |
| Signed out of your Apple Account | Activation Lock still active |
| Matching stand, keyboard, mouse and lead | Missing stand or missing magnetic power cable |
| Original packaging kept | Nothing to protect the glass |
Reading your own spec
Two minutes gets you everything a buyer needs.
- Apple menu → About This Mac. Model name and year, chip or processor, memory, serial.
- More Info → System Report → Storage. A Fusion Drive shows as a logical volume built from an SSD plus a hard disk; a pure SSD shows one NVMe or flash device.
- Graphics/Displays in that report confirms native resolution — 5120 x 2880 on the 27-inch 5K, 4480 x 2520 on the 24-inch, 4096 x 2304 on the 21.5-inch 4K.
Getting an accurate figure
Send four photos — the machine head-on with the screen lit, the same view with it off, the rear and ports, and the About This Mac window — plus a line on storage type and anything faulty. That is enough for a firm offer rather than a range.
Current indicative buy-back bands by model sit in the iMac price guide. When you are ready, sell your iMac and we will price it against the live Apple resale market. Free collection across the UK, paid on exchange, every machine wiped on intake.