You Tube is your friend.
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Or ifixit 
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I absolutely hate opening iMacs but Iāve not done that for donkeyās years.
An external USB 3.0/C SSD at least is unlikely to kill the iMac (even if youāre very careful following guides) so personally Iād give the external a shot first as it will always double up as external storage if you decide to attempt the internal SSD (check the sites to ensure you can).
If looking for a newer Mac check out also Appleās refurbished stock (link at bottom of their page) where you roughly save VAT or the CEX chain of stores who last time I purchased gave a 2 year warranty on used devices.
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We have many Macs. I work with my son and we have a M1 studio as the main with 64gigs of ram and 1TB SSD which is fine for 3 x 4k monitors, however he uses a M2 Mini with 16gigs of ram for Final Cut and Blackmagic DaVinci on a single 4k monitor. Fewer Thunderbolt connections.
They are both great but I wouldnāt settle for less than 16gb ram. For what itās worth I use a 2012 at home with 8gb ram and a fitted SSD as a Roon server. Itās perfect. It all depends on what you want the Mac to do.
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think Iām going down the Mac Mini route with an external display. just sold my old iMacā¦
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Did the same a couple of years ago Mac mini M1 chip 16gb and 512SSD in fact I bought a refurbished one direct from Apple. My monitor is a 27 inch 4K Dell which has additional USB ports very pleased with it.
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thanks for this - really great information; I never would have known about the 256 slower memory
will follow the configurator adviceā¦
a studio looks like complete overkill now
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A geeky Windows loving friend sent me this to open up my options for the next move
(EBay)
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You are welcome, coming from the same iMac slow hd issue you mentioned, I wanted to be sure the next Mac would be āsnappyā so did abit of researchā¦ i think the higher ssd capacity is worth it for the speed advantage even if you use external storage for libraries etc.
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Iāve got a 2008 Mac Pro ācheese graterā 2 x 4 core Xeon 3 GHz desktop which I got as a refurb from Apple for a couple of grand - just googling itās probably not worth Ā£100 now but has at least 16TB of internal storage. Phenomenal machine at the time 14GB RAM from memory which was an odd spec - think it came with 4+2 GB and I added another 2 x 4 GB from Crucial. It ran hot enough to heat the study and used to run 24/7 as a media server in the days before streaming services took off.
Weighs a bloody ton, must resurrect it, itās about 4 feet away:
The dual Optiarc CD/DVD drives were awful though.
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That is a beast of a machine - assuming theyāve used Open Core Legacy Patcher to get Sonoma running on it.
Yet another thing Iāve been meaning to play with but donāt have the patience/time/clear head!
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My Mac mini canāt cope with spreadsheets and window docs open. I often have to shut down Roon just do some work.
Is it an M series Mini?
When I got the 8GB M1 Mini I realised there was no way I could run Roon and do much else with it which was contributory to me ditching Roon. Roon was using 2-3GB of memory which I thought was ridiculous. Considered (and still do) repurposing the 2012 16GB Mini running headless for Roon but with electric costs the last few years I canāt really justify it, though may give it a bash for Audirvana 3.5.
Yes M1. But Iāve added one of those MacMini docks and a SSD for storage.
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I have a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 128 gb ram and my wife has a Mac mini M1. I must say Iām not that impressed with the new range of Macs, they give the impression of speed but really donāt perform that well under load, plus connecting peripherals is a nightmare as is network performance. Really considering going back to a high spec Windows PC.
Tim
what do you do that you need 128GB of RAM?? 
Video editing, sound production and a bit of artificial intelligence work.
It may be the coding but even Photoshop is a bit sluggish.
Tim
Yeah, but just think of all those new Emojis they make available to us every so often 
Precisely, one of the things that has pi??ed me off in recent years. Wow new OS weāve added some new emojiās but you still canāt connect to your NASā¦
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Bought an adaptor to connect USB memory stick to USB C port. But my local Mac store also sell high end docking stations which allow multiple connections.
I do have a Windows gaming machine, but dislike windows ecosystem.
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