Apple adds 2019 Retina 4K iMac to vintage list
Juli Clover reports for MacRumors this week Apple has added my beloved 2019 Retina 4K iMac, the 21.5” version, to its list of vintage products. Vintage products are characterized as those “Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago,” the company says in its support document.
“Products are added to the vintage list five years after they were last distributed for sale, and they’re moved to the obsolete list at the seven-year mark,” Clover wrote on Tuesday. “Vintage products can be repaired at Apple Stores and by Apple Authorized Service Providers if the parts are available, but that’s not guaranteed. Devices that are obsolete are not eligible for repair and Apple no longer makes repair components.”
This news makes me a little sad and wistful; until this past January, I’d used this machine—specced with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD—as my main computer since getting it home in July 2019. Almost 7 years of faithful service. The value proposition was incredible, and I’d love to know how many hundreds of thousands of words I churned out on that thing. I built Curb Cuts and my portfolio site on that machine. (Fun fact: I still use the Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad and Magic Trackpad, both with Lightning, that came with the iMac because why not? I have a USB-C to Lightning cable permanently attached to my XDR, and it works great. Lightning is still useful!) I know those in the Apple community raved about the larger, higher-res 5K 27” model, but I thoroughly enjoyed the smaller one. It was a great computer.
Nowadays, I’m living the laptop-as-desktop lifestyle. I have the 14” M2 Pro MacBook Pro from 2023 connected to the Pro Display XDR I got for Christmas last year. I love the monitor in all its 6K, 32” glory, but miss having the iMac’s onboard mic and speakers. Likewise, I don’t love the laptop on my desk only because I don’t move it around. I feel like a more “sedentary” Mac like a Mac mini would be better, but as it stands, I’m likely soon to get a Thunderbolt dock or something through which to neatly route my rat’s nest of cables. Spec-wise, my MacBook has 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. The biggest quality-of-life upgrade has been moving to Apple silicon on macOS, which I’d purposely missed out on for the most part because my trusty old iMac was chugging along so well and still receiving software updates.
