Once again, my Rev A iMac G5 has completely failed. Fantastico.
Yesterday evening I started to get system freezes (not kernel panics, incidentally) – the display would freeze up, and there’d be nothing to do but force a restart. That kept happening, until the boot process itself began to freeze: the grey apple, the spinning cog, the loading screen, the login process – the system would randomly hang at any point, whenever it wanted.
So I rang AppleCare – mayaswell get my money’s worth, even if it meant fifteen minutes on hold. Karl got me to boot into safe mode and remove all my startup items. And that seemed to fix it, I repeatedly managed to boot it up okay, so I got off the phone.
And then it began to freeze again, at what seemed like entirely random times. And then it wouldn’t start up at all – in exactly the same manner as the previous two times. Boo and hiss.
So this morning I was up bright and early to be back on the phone to Applecare. Not so long a wait this time, but it turned into a fifty-minute call (on my mobile, at peak rate…) as we ran through various bits and pieces, at the end of which I had a dead iMac with my OS X installation disc stuck inside it.
So it’s dead. Again. The good news is that this time I wasn’t expecting the fantastic service I got when this first happened, and I knew the case would get transferred to a company down in Kenley called Amsys, and my iMac would need to be couriered there and back by TNT for the hilariously named “on-site” repair.
[Last time I never mentioned how un-sensible TNT were in getting it back into my hands, such was my rage, but that's another story.]
Now, having said all that, Amsys gave me a call really quite quickly, and they even remembered me from three-and-a-bit months ago, which was nice. And then TNT called me right on their heels – and they even picked it up at the exact time they’d stated, only four hours after my call to Applecare. So, as bad things go, this was pretty good.
Okay then, here’s the interesting stuff – when I get my iMac G5 back, it will almost certainly have its fourth (4th) logic/midplane board. I pointed this out to Gemma at Applecare, and she commented that, should it fail again – ie, a fourth time – then Customer Relations would probably be willing to discuss “an alternative”. Well that’s nice, but here’s the thing: what sort of “alternative” are we talking about? Another Rev A/B iMac G5, with the same likelyhood of logic board problems? Even if they still have any in stock (does Apple keep old models just so they can replace defective ones?) there’s absolutely no guarentee that it won’t happen again.
Let’s look at serial numbers. This iMac’s original serial number (the case, logic board, and everything) tells me it was made at the Shanghai factory in the forty-third production week of 2004. It’s no surprise that this serial number falls into the range included in Apple’s neatly-named iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues (something to do with capacitors, apparently). I didn’t think to keep a note of my second logic board’s serial, but the one I’ve just sent away also came from the Shanghai factory, and was made in production week 40 of 2005. And that doesn’t fall under the range given in the repair program. It was a newer board but it only lasted three months.
What would be the point in giving me a replacement machine if the part which keeps going wrong doesn’t seem to show any sign of not failing over three (maybe four) different versions? And would I be able to keep my hard drive? If all they had available was the current first-generation iMac core duo (with its own set of exciting teething troubles) would I be able to manage without Classic?
All these questions and many more will hopefully remain unanswered. Remind me to ask insist that Amsys not wipe my hard drive for testing purposes, and check that TNT know where they should be delivering it back to.
[The ultimate irony, of course, is that I'm writing this on my PowerBook G3 "Wall Street" from 1998: she may have a snapped screen hinge but she's been a lot more reliable than my lovely, lovely iMac.]
