Maika (2:51)
Hello and welcome to this spooky episode of Hands On Tech. It is October. Happy October to you. And today we are kicking things off with a question from a lovely listener who wants to know what to do with some old machines. Let's take a look at this question from Lori. Lori writes, I have had many Macs over the years and I need to get rid of them safely. Some are as old as the G3 and G4 and G5, and one is an iMac 2013 that just stopped working one day. I know I could remove them the hard drives from the towers, but the imac is closed. Is it secure to send the imac to Apple to recycle? Or will they even take it? How about the older Macs? Are the tower cases worth anything? Should RAM be removed? If the computer starts, should I erase the drives? Thanks in advance for your answers. I really need to clear up some storage space and those old computers are taking up a lot of room. This is a great question and also coming from our discord pal. Hello, Laurie. Thank you so much for asking this question. So love this question. And it's something that I think is important for anyone to kind of take a moment, look around and go, you know, I've really been holding on to this and I realize I'm not going to be doing anything with it, so why not get rid of it? When it comes to machines that are still in working order, I always recommend if you aren't planning on holding onto it yourself, looking around for local programs for donating older machines, there are often lots of opportunities, perhaps at your local library, perhaps at a local school, where these machines could be taken and repurposed. And so that's something to bear in mind. But when you've got machines that are so old that it's kind of like, okay, this is getting into junk territory. You should first and foremost understand that most of the devices that come from Apple, Apple will take back for recycling. It's a little hard to find this page because you are looking at, and I'm going to explain in a moment a different page and going, wait, so this is also the page where I find the recycling stuff? Yes, if you go to Apple's trade in page, that's@apple.com shop trade in, we'll have a link in the show notes. You could also probably do a Google search for Apple trade in or a web search for Apple trade in and you'd find it. And you will see that the last option because it shows iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, Android. The last option is recycling on this page. And when you click on that, Apple will ask you what it is that you're trying to recycle. You tell it that you are trying to recycle a computer in this case and it will then provide you with an option to recycle it by giving you a preview paid shipping label. Now here's what's important to understand about this. When it comes to recycling old tech. Apple actually has a company that it works with called eri, which is Electronic Recyclers International. And ERI is the company facilitating these electronics recycling options. But here's what's great about it. According to eri, it's the quote most certified ITAD company in North America. That just means it disposal, getting rid of those devices and has lots of compliance. And in fact ERI is responsible for recycling medical e waste and all, you know, businesses, all sorts of stuff. So working with eri, you are working with a company that has certifications and continues to be certified in you being able to send off your stuff and not worry about the data. That said, that said, I can understand having the little bit of anxiety that sending it off with data intact could mean that somehow your data is pulled from it. And so there are ways to go about taking care of that. Before I get to that though, I do want to quickly mention something that I've heard come up quite a bit with people getting new phones and you know, new phones every two years, every one year, in some cases every three. Whatever it happens to be, you get a new case each time, right? For that device. Apple via that same mechanism, that trade in page where you go to recycling will also take old cell phone cases, old iPhone cases. So if you have old cases that you're no longer using, they're no longer part of a phone anymore. You've traded in the phone, but the case is still there. Apple will take those by way of ERI and have those recycled as well. So bear that in mind. There are lots of options for tech recycling, as I mentioned, even Android devices that you may not be able to get a trade in value for but would be something that could be sent in. I have used this process before and it was very easy box it up myself and put the little label on there that they provided to Me sent it off. I think it was UPS if I remember correctly. And all good to go. So let's talk about what it means when it comes to your 2013 iMac. You said it won't start and if you can't get it to start so you therefore can't erase it yourself, some options for you, you could take it to a local computer repair shop and have that shop remove the drive and then give you the drive. They can be opened. And so that could be something that you do. That way you have the Dr. Either choose to erase it yourself or you can keep it as a backup. Another option I've linked to in the show notes or we will link to in the Show Notes. Apple or I mean not Apple, but iFixit's guide for a hard drive replacement on an intel iMac from 2013, it's not really that much of a difference whenever it comes to this for it to be the 21.5 inch or I think the 27 inch at the time because the basic process of what you were trying to do is going to be the same. So if you wanted to, Laurie, if you felt up to the task, you could follow along with this hard drive replacement guide up to the point where the hard drive is visible and available to you. You take out the hard drive and you handle it from there, however you choose. You know, whether you put it into another machine or you go about erasing it or destroying it, completely physically destroying it, however you need to do that to be able to gain access to that. But again, I mentioned that you can send it to Apple as is because those recycling partners are required to handle data destruction properly and you know, have a, have that sort of backing of these different certifications when it comes to data destruction. For the G3, G4, G5 power Macs, if they do start up, yes, go in and erase the drives first. You can boot from the os. You can use the install disk if you need to, to use Disk Utility to perform a secure erase. So that's taking things a step further. Instead of just doing the base erase process, it actually is going to write data to the drive and that data is just kind of zeroing out everything that's on the drive. For Mac OS 9 and earlier, you can use a utility that it comes from Norton called Wipe Info. So that's another option for you as well. And then because these drives are so old and there's not much data on them, it's a little bit faster than you have with your modern machines of trying to Erase the data on a terabyte of hard drive space. You can also, as you mentioned, open up the tower, pull open the side panel, take the drives out and then physically destroy them. Keep them as backups, whatever you want to do with the drives, that choice is up to you. But you have better access to those. If you like what you heard and you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well, subscribe to Tech News Weekly. Every Thursday, I talk with the journalists making and breaking the tech news.
