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How Old Is My Mac?

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Dan Knight

It's easy to visit a site like Low End Mac and find out when a model was first produced and discontinued. But how do you determine how old a specific unit is?

Apple has a coding scheme they use in the serial number to indicate both when and where a Mac was made. This information has been published on other sites and discussed in various news groups, which is where I came by it. And I thought it would be of interest to any Mac owner. Your serial number tells what year and week of the year your Mac was made, as well as which factory built it.

Unfortunately, Apple considers this information a trade secret (despite the fact I found it on a public newsgroup). Posting this information here led to a strong letter from Michael S. Rubin, Attorney, Worldwide Sales and Service Law Department, Apple Computer, Inc.

And I can't even show you the letter!

So if you want to know how old your Apple product is or where it was built, you'll have to obtain that information somewhere other than this page. (The computer profiles on Low End Mac usually indicate a range of dates during which a model was produced.)  LEM

Recent Online Tech Journal Columns

Recent Content on Low End Mac

  • Mac Pro overclocking, Windependence with Darwine, Blu-ray for Macs, and more, Mac News Review, 07.04. Also more on running Leopard on non-Apple hardware, Ubuntu on a Mac mini, the first autofocus webcam with Zeiss optics for Macs, and more.
  • Wouldn't life be great with an iSlate?, John Hatchett, Recycled Computing, 07.04. PDAs and smartphones are too small for some tasks, full-fledged Tablet PCs are overkill, and ebook readers are too limited. Apple has the tech to own this niche.
  • Mac of the Day: iMac G3/266 MHz, Jan. 1999 - The first multicolored iMac runs at 266 MHz, loses infrared communication.
  • List of the Day: G4 List is for those using Power Mac G4s or G4 upgrades.
  • July 6 in LEM history: 00: 3 user accelerators - 01: SCSI and FireWire Disk Mode - Stick with the Mac - Computers for college - 05: Optimizing OS X performance - Return of the bumper snicker - 06: Can consumer MacBook replace 2 PowerBooks and a ThinkPad? - Vintage Macs with System 6 run circles around 3 GHz Windows PC - Run Windows apps without Windows
  • The Macintosh Portable started a notebook revolution, Carl Nygren, Classic Macs in the Intel Age, 07.03. Before Apple introduced the Mac Portable, notebook computers were text-based and ran MS-DOS. Ever since, graphical interfaces have been the norm for laptops.
  • More links in our archive.

Go to the Online Tech Journal index.

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