My iMac's Heart Transplant

By David Norton 

Well... I got a story about my 4 month old 500Mhz iMac. About a week ago, I was visiting a music store online, when for no reason that I could see, a big box came up on the screen, flashing on and off for a second, then the screen froze. "Whoa," I thought, "IE froze again. Man..." Then I tried restarting via the keyboard. Didn't work. So I pushed the button on the right side, to restart it. "Surely this will work." Uh-uh. It was still like that. So I unplugged the machine, and plugged it back in, pushed the button, and Voila! the power light turned on. Oh no, wait... no startup sound. No screen activity. I couldn't hear anything except the almost-imperceptible low-pitched whine that is always there. I was scared. Lots of stuff on the hard drive that wasn't backed up.

After trying several times to get it to start and waiting a couple hours, I called Apple, but since my 90-day warranty was up, the only way they would try to help is if I was willing to pay $50 in the case it was something software-related. Over my dead body! I didn't feel like wrangling with Apple Tech Support, so I decided to take it in to the computer shop and have them fix it. They were Apple-certified or something, and they'd fix it for free as long as it was hardware-related. If it turned out it was something dumb like the PRAM needed to be zapped, then they'd call me and ask if they should go ahead and fix it (and charge us). I was pretty sure it wasn't software-related, and that it'd get fixed for free.

Thus began "The Wait". It was Thursday morning, the iMac had crashed the day before. They told me they were pretty sure the hard drive would be ok, so I didn't need to worry about the data on there... except the data was on the iMac, where I couldn't use it. I had several things that I wanted to get done before Christmas break, but now it would be delayed by a while. Not like I couldn't do any work (I had 2 other Macs around), but a lot of the stuff I wanted to work on was on the iMac. And I could do work just fine (though not as quickly) on my Performa 6400 as I could on my iMac.

I thought that it would be fixed that day or the next, but they couldn't get around to looking at it until the next, and they determined Monday (they aren't open weekends... I don't blame 'em) that it needed some parts from Apple. They came in Wednesday, but didn't fix the problem. So the serviceman called me, told me what was up, and said he ordered a logic board, but Apple's site said it was on backorder. I was ticked off! Not at anybody in particular, but you'd think they could have figured it out sooner. But, lo and behold, the guy called the next day (Thursday) and told me the logic board had come in that day, and he'd popped it in, and it all worked great. I let out a war-whoop as soon as I hung up the phone, and I went over their and picked up 'my baby'. Now I'm up two hours past my bedtime writing opinion columns and doing graphics work and programming software, and listening to MP3s (more about that in another column). Ahh... life is good.

But why?? Why did the iMac I bought less than four months ago blow up (on the inside)? Why did it have to get a whole new heart? Why does it seem that Apple is having less and less quality assurance? Don't get me wrong, I love the design of their computers, their system software, and all the speed and stuff that they do, but they seem to be letting the quality of their hardware slide. Maybe they have to do it to keep the competitive pricing. But in my opinion, it doesn't save them much money, because they had to replace the whole logic board on this iMac and the hard drive on my brother's iBook (which turned out later to be a big software bug of Apple's).

I am still going to buy Apple products, but if they don't get around to shaping up their act, it's not going to be pretty. People used to think we were weird for buying the 'different' computers, but now that our brand-new one has died, they can't get over it, even though everybody I know with a PC has had major (worse) problems. Ahh, this society is weird. So the main point of my message is this: "Apple, watch your step, and don't let your reputation slide by giving us low-quality insides".

David Norton is expecting a little baby sister soon... he is SO psyched!!  

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