I thought I would share my experience using and evaluating my new (used) imac which I bought from Mac of All Trades for $499. I have 90 days to return it, so if anything to check comes to mind let me know.
As advertised, it's in excellent shape. Except for some nicks and smudges it looks new.
I already had a Matias Quiet Pro keyboard, which the Mac refused to recognize until I installed USB Overdrive. Another strike against Matias.
Migration Assistant took from one to two hours. I was reluctant to use it because I didn't want to bring over any "bad files". In fact, after the info transferred I decided to move it into a second User account. So I'm trying to figure out how to merge these accounts or how to pick one over the other. I started updating the built-in account. After using migration assistant, I started using the transferred account as the default. Moving information manually might have been a wiser move. I even emailed Mac of All Trades to see if I could restore the factory settings for this Mac but they said no. They were surprisingly ignorant and unhelpful.
Last night I noticed a 4x4 inch or so yellow smudge on the monitor. I haven't seen anything like that since the TV my folks used to have in the 1980s or 1990s that would get those burn-in spots which came from, I think, my brother and me playing video games on the TV. Colored spots would show up, then disappear.
But it's much better having software from my old Mac than trying to download software from the Apple store, which I find almost unusable. As I have in the past, I went through the Apple ID cha-cha, which included iTunes and the iTunes store. Absurd. Trillion dollar company, indeed. The only software I had to pay to upgrade was 1Password. There's a company that's gone from great to terrible. Unbelievable what they make you go through. It's a good product but steep at $65 for the standalone, nonsubscription version. If there's an alternative that doesn't make you jump through hoops, get it.
The biggest obstacle for me is getting used to the small text. The display defaults to 1920 x 1080. Although there are other choices (1600x1900, 1344x756, 1280x720), they are unusuable because at those sizes the text is very jaggy and disproportionate. I thought Windows was bad with this problem, but Mac has it too. I have to wear glasses when I read and use the computer, but the text is still too small. I wonder if 3M makes some kind of magnifier. I found options to enlarge screen text on the desktop and I have Tinker Tool though it doesn't seem to have worked. On Firefox, I had to override web pages and use my own text preferences, which I ususally don't like to do. I still found myself clicking the plus sign to enlarge the screen.
