Sell a Broken iMac for Cash

What a broken 24-inch iMac is worth

A little under half of the working figure. The faulty column in the table above is the guide, and the gap is consistent across all three chips: an iMac M4 quotes around £380 faulty against £850 working, an M3 around £300 against £680, and an M1 around £200 against £450. That works out at roughly 44-45% of working value for a machine that will not power on; a single fault such as a cracked screen or one dead port usually quotes above the faulty column, because the rest of the iMac still works. Your emailed quote is fixed for 14 days and is the price we pay if the iMac matches your description.

Why not lower? Because an iMac fails in pieces, not all at once. A dead logic board leaves a 4.5K panel, a glass front, a power supply, speakers and an aluminium enclosure that are all in demand for repairs. A cracked screen leaves a working board with the chip, memory and storage still on it. Whichever half has failed, the other half is what we are paying for, and on a desktop that half is physically larger and more valuable than on a laptop.

Repairing first almost never pays. An out-of-warranty 24-inch display replacement costs hundreds of pounds, and the sale price rarely climbs by as much as the repair. Sell it as it is. The fault bands for laptops are on the broken MacBook hub, and the working figures for each chip are on the iMac page.

How collection works for a broken iMac

Desktops never go to a Post Office counter. Once you accept the quote we book a fully tracked, fully insured courier to your address on a day you choose, at our expense. Nothing is payable to the driver, and from the moment the box leaves your hands the transit risk is ours: a broken iMac is insured for its quoted value exactly like a working one.

You box it. The original Apple box with its foam is ideal, but it is not required - a double-walled cardboard box with at least 5cm of padding on every side does the job, and a 32-inch television box from a supermarket fits a 24-inch iMac almost perfectly. Pack it upright, screen facing a box wall with padding between, corners braced, seams taped. Two extra steps for a broken machine: if the glass is cracked, tape a sheet of card over the whole front before wrapping so loose fragments cannot shift, and if the stand is loose or bent, pad around it so it cannot lever against the screen in transit. Our desktop packing guide shows every step, and the shipping guide has the rules for what goes in the box. Keyboard, mouse and stand only travel if they are part of your quote, so say in the form what you are including.

An iMac that will not turn on travels exactly like one that does. The iMac reaches us next working day from most of the UK, we inspect it on arrival, and your bank transfer goes out within 24 hours of it passing. If inspection finds something different from your description we email a revised offer with photos; decline it and the courier brings the iMac back to your door, free.

Activation Lock and Find My must be off

This is the one thing we need you to do before collection day. Activation Lock ties a Mac to its owner's Apple ID, and nobody can legally erase or resell a locked machine, so we cannot buy one. Removing it takes two minutes, and it works whether or not the iMac will switch on, because the lock lives on Apple's servers rather than on the Mac.

1. If the iMac boots: open System Settings, select your name at the top, turn off Find My Mac, then sign out of your Apple Account. Erase All Content and Settings in the General section wipes your data at the same time.
2. If it will not boot or the screen is unreadable: from any phone or computer go to icloud.com/find, sign in with the Apple ID used on the iMac, select it, choose Erase Mac and then Remove from Account.

Your data is protected either way. Every Mac we buy, including one that cannot power on, is erased to NIST 800-88 before it goes anywhere near resale. The full legal picture is in our iCloud-locked Mac guide, and the preparation steps cover the rest.