We had a couple of these. My wife had bought a steely gray IMac about 10 years ago (next generation after the lollipops came out), and the other a cute flower power mac hand-me down from her niece who upgraded. I liked these machines, but they always had some odd aggravating little quirks that made me really identify with the "crash different" video (If the link dies, just video search for "Mac Crash Different"). Sure, mode confusion on the control panel, erratic mouse behavior at times, useless error messages and interrupts (I think on a mac, "esc" is like the "close door" button on elevators). The apple software doesn't do what I want, and what I want wasn't ready for the OS. And speaking of apple, can't help but get a gnawing feeling that I'm getting the shaft by getting stuff that's not ready for prime time, paying a premium for it, then when the fix comes, they want you to pay for the stuff they should have gotten right in the first place. Ah...but the Unix terminal, at least I could work with the stuff the GUI keeps pretending doesn't exist.
Well, at any rate, I am not a "power" user and with time they did what they did well and quite frankly, it is comforting that it is hard to get a mac sick from the wrong piece of email or some criminal script. But, the machines were so self contained. I have resusitated pc's before and even keep an old P3 of similar performance recovered from the bits and pieces of others, and it wasn't hard to do. The Imac though would be another story.
Eventually the Imac started shutting down by itself. Research said that it was just a $9 battery, but to fix it required opening the whole thing and getting to the motherboard which on this boat anchor wasn't trivial...because SJ doesn't want you poking around in there. Eventually I get the guts to open it and after a bit of effort and dealing with the scary plastic cracking sound required to take the bottom off, I replace the battery. Voila! It works. Then the other mac dies and so I repeat the feat which also works. Alas this works for a little bit and then it starts doing it all over again.
Finally I read up on the problem again and basically it means you should kiss our mac goodbye because the real fault is a $100+ "flyback" transformer used to power the IMacs built in screen. You see Steve Jobs hates fans, they whine and whir and are, I guess, annoying, so the old Macs don't have them. Instead the heat up like a coffee pot and unfortunately over time fry this flyback transformer. Now, on a PC, if your screen burns out, you just replace the monitor, but here it's integral and you can't just replace it with any power supply because they are matched by board revision (not even by mac color). If you thought replacing the battery was tricky, doing anything to the board itself is a whole other level of effort. A substitute monitor requires finding an analog monitor with matching old style cable that you can patch into the video feed from the motherboard. Consider replacing the built in, well opening the other bits of the mac come with that "high voltages can result in injury AND death" warning that tends to turn one off and just throw in the towel.Oh, great fortune that "Small Dog Electronics" would take the boat anchors off my hand for free. Of course I first wanted to see if there was anything I could take off them that I could use somewhere else, but unlike PC's there really wasn't. I took their memory, the hard drives, the DVD drives which being slot driven I probably can't use anywhere else and those fine speakers. That's it. They worked just fine for what I wanted them for and they died because I couldn't swap a monitor.
So that's today's "Wednesday's Child" even though I couldn't finish typing all this by the end of Wednesday. Fortunately it appears blogger thinks I live in California (How in the hell do I change that...there's always next Wed.). Oh, and by the way, I wrote this using a Mac.
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