Old Macs Get New Lease on Life at UNICOM

It's every Apple owner's worst nightmare: your trusty Mac blinks out, crashes, dies — right after your warranty runs out or Applecare ends.

Or, you have an older Mac collecting dust, loaded with family photos, your 2004 family budget and that steamy romance novel you were working on but never finished.

Before you decide to drop your older Macs off at the next electronics recyling event, consider stopping by UNICOM on Dyer Avenue.

It's a repair shop. And it could be considered an Apple museum, as working examples of old Macintoshes, iMacs, Apple IIs and other vintage Apple machines are on display and for sale, complete with working software, disks and accessories.

And best of all, owner Barry Schiff, who has been a Machead long before Macs were even cool, can crack open your out-of-warranty iMac, Macbook or even an Apple Lisa and get it working once again.

"They're still useful," Schiff, who has been in business for years but recently opened his location on Dyer Avenue, said. "When you walk into the Apple store with an old mac, they look at you kind of strange. Their employees are 22-years-old and some of these machines are older than them!"

Older Macs work perfectly fine, Schiff said. Even if an Apple is 10 years old, it can still connect to the Internet.

"You can't stream video but you can pretty much do everything else," he said.

A lot of times, it's a simple fix. A new hard drive. A loose connector. A memory chip that needs to be re-seated. Often, the repair costs much less than you'd expect, and certianly much less than a new machine.

"Anything not under Applecare, I'll look at it," Schiff said. 

Schiff scours craigslist and gets machines from recyclers. Sometimes they're dropped off in loads, donated, or end up in his shop after an estate sale or when a loved one passes away.

Each machine is given a good cleaning and retooling and original software is loaded back on.

"The thing i like about Apple computers is the only things that die on them they didn't manufacture — batteries, hard drives, RAM," Schiff said. "The rest of it — you can't kill them. That's why I have machines from 1987 that are still running."

Everything Schiff sells is covered by a 90 day warranty — unheard of for used machines.

"I have enough confidence in the machines I work on that I give a 90 day warranty for everyone," Schiff, who estimates that just 1 percent of his machines come back for repair, said.

So why do people hang on to older Macs? 

For starters, not everyone needs the latest and greatest. Web sites, word processing and e-mail tasks can be handled by an older machine just fine, and not everyone has ditched their cable boxes for Hulu and Netflix.

Secondly, there is an aesthetic appeal to vintage computers. Remember that beige Macintosh on the desk in Jerry Seinfeld's apartment? You, too, can make a nod to the 90s with a Macintosh Classic in the corner of your home office. As a writer, I can relate to the desire to reconnect to my junior high days in the computer lab, hammering away at the clacky keyboard, writing bad poetry on a black and white screen. It was a time when you could sit and work at a computer without Facebook status updates, breaking news Tweets and the latest celebrity photo controversy creeping from the corners of the screen.

It was a time when computers weren't disposable, when a keyboard and mouse were engineered to last 20 years (and still work good as new today).

The aesthetic appeal of older Macs compelled one RISD student to walk through the door at Unicom recently. Schiff said an art student bought several of the candy-colored iMacs from the early 2000s to use as an art project.

"It was her senior project and she made a static display out of them," Schiff said.

So if you want to make a room in your house light up with a display of old iMacs, UNICOM is your place. Or, if you want to resurrect that old Mac in your basement, or get your 2010 iMac with a bad hard drive that keeps crashing back in working order, UNICOM is your place.

UNICOM is located at 881 Dyer Ave. It's open from 7:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Mon-Fri, 7:30 to 11:15 a.m. on Saturday and on Sunday by appointment. Call them at 401-419-1619.