Well, the odds said the risk was low. Very low. Not quite zero, but certainly close to it. We had the AppleCare signup in our hands with days to go in the original iMac Warranty. And we chose to gamble and not sign up.
And we lost!
The Intel iMacs have gotten excellent reviews overall. People love using them and they have been overly reliable. Sure, the occasional problem has been reported, but usually those are exceptions and not the rule. We bought three in late 2007. During the first year of heavy use, we had no unusual problems. Typical maintenance issues – all fixable.
So when the first year was nearing it’s end along with the its complimentary warranty service – we mulled over whether it was worth the expense of getting two more years of AppleCare to cover us in case of a disaster.
Our decision to not sign up was based on the lack of any serious problems being reported for these iMacs. The G5 iMacs, on the other hand were known to have major hardware problems with capacitors bulging on the logic board, amongst other things. It seemed like a safe bet that we should get three good years without needing a repair by Apple. It’s not like these were laptops getting toted and banged around all the time.
So we decided to let the deadline slip by and pray not to get burned by any malevolent gremlins that might want to hide inside the iMacs slick all-in-one case.
About three months post-deadline, one of the three Intel iMacs started to malfunction in quite a serious way. I succeeded in reviving it at least three times. Each time it came back, all seemed well.
That is, until the dreaded Spinning Beachball of Death (SBOD) appeared – and would not go away. While that’s happened before, this time it lead to a fatal crash. And fatal in this case means just that – FATAL!
No boot. No nothing. Just a screen of gray. Panic set in. I got my trusty eDrive to boot up the iMac. This worked just fine, but DiskWarrior saw no internal drive. More Panic. This was about two weeks after a clean reformat of the drive. It should have been perfect. Clearly, that was not the case at all. It was far from perfect – more like a disaster.
What to do? I shut things down for the night and went home. In the morning, just to humor myself, I pressed the power switch to see what would happen. BING! A nice sound to hear under normal circumstances. But what’s this? Wait a minute…. There’s an Apple Logo showing up right in the center of the screen. Seriously, I’m looking right at it! And look! There’s the spinning gear thingie, too!
IT’S BOOTING!!!
The desktop appears. OK, now what? Everything is here like nothing ever happened. Being a seasoned techie, I knew that this was an illusion – a mirage if you will. This iMac was on borrowed time. I copied all of the emails off to another drive. Shortly after that, the SBOD returned for good. Just in the nick of time.
Off to the Apple Store it went. One diagnosis later, and the “Genius” claims it needs a new hard drive. That’s sad to hear, considering the iMac is not even a year and a half old. But ok, it is what it is. So what will this non-AppleCare service cost us?
$135 for the labor and $279 for the replacement drive. Excuse me? $279 for a 500GB internal drive? Hello? Are we still in 2005? You’ve got to be kidding me! These drives cost $85 on the open market. If I could crack open the case of an iMac, I’d replace it with my own $85 drive. But I can’t. Apple knows this. And they charge you 3 times what it should really cost.
And there’s nothing we can do about it , short of making a call to Apple’s Customer Relations Department. Maybe they’ll give us a credit to the Apple Store. That would be nice. But had we had AppleCare, it wouldn’t have cost us a dime. Oh well, you win some and you lose some.
At least the other two iMacs are humming along nicely. Two out of three ain’t bad!