For the second time within the past year, my incredibly sleek, stylish, fast, and supposedly virus-free, 24″ 3.0GHZ Intel imac has taken a crap on me.
The first time it died was due to a hard drive failure within six weeks of purchasing it. Needless to say I was more than a little bit pissed.
This time it’s the Logic Board and graphics card that are being replaced. From what I understand, that’s basically the entire computer aside from the power supply, RAM, and hard drive (which has already been replaced once). Beginning late last week, my computer started crashing intermittently, then eventually with frequency and regularity.
Lucky for me, I paid the $169 peace of mind fee for AppleCare when I bought my new imac. I really didn’t think I’d “need” an extended warranty though, since Apple makes such *cough* quality products.
While my “bad Apple” hasn’t completely soured me on the company as a whole, I am starting to see through their smoke and mirrors ad campaigns. Truth be told, I feel they’ve probably cut back on quality control and manufacturing costs in order to better bolster their smear campaign against Microsoft.
As far as the operating systems go, I think OSX is brilliant, but the quality of their hardware leaves something to be desired. I was fooled into thinking that the carefully assembled advanced electronics, housed within the svelte aluminum and glass chassis, were worth the several hundred extra dollars I’d spent. Pffft..!
The worst part is… you can’t even work on these things without highly specialized tools, a hazmat suit, and a purified airtight chamber to complete the repairs. While under warranty, all macs must be taken to an official Apple Store for service, where they never have the parts in stock.
Anyway, I should hopefully have my computer back on Friday of this week. The Apple Genius couldn’t promise it’d be ready any earlier than that because they were inundated with iPhone 3GS repairs.
Hey, wait a minute… didn’t the new iPhones just come out..?!
Mhmmm.
Although my Apple product is a little lacking, I will stand by their support. Everyone I’ve spoke with at AppleCare, along with the techs at the Apple Store, have all been very courteous and helpful. But then again… if your products are problematic, then you sure as hell better have superior customer care. 😉
I’ll be poking around the internets on my wife’s PC, keeping up on WoW and Hunter class related news, but I’ll be taking a week long sabbatical from Azeroth until my computer gets sorted out.
to be continued…
I have the same 24″ 3.06Ghz iMac as well, and had something similarly crappy. The machine always seemed to run hot, I mean like 60C idle hot, but figured it was bad airflow. Eventually it started shutting down, so installed one of those temperature monitor packages and guess what? my CPU fan never worked. It seemed only sheer good will prevented it from catching fire or just breaking.
Also, yeah, to get a new fan, after the hour drive to the Apple store took… 9 days… for a fan…
I work with both Mac and PC since 1999. We’ve got 2 PC and 2 Mac in our office and we had to upgrade/change them over the years of course. I would like to be honest here: Apple computers -despite the incredible propaganda- have more or less the same problems of PC machines: they hang, freeze, reboot, etc exactly like a PC with Windows.
Back to WoW: PTR 3.2 is up, will you go testing the new stuff?
I may copy over this weekend or early next week. Depends upon when my imac’s back in my possession.
Wow this just happened to my Macbook Pro… they had to replace the Logic Board because all the screen would show were vertical lines haha.
Yeah I’ll have to say Apple makes good quality products… much better than Gateway at least xD. Those two lemoned out in 6 months…