Apple has issued a voluntary recall, iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues.
I may have already been bitten by this particular problem, but I can’t be sure. Shortly after I moved back to the East Coast in February 2005, I lost power to the house and the iMac of course was unceremoniously shutdown.
It was never right after that, scrambled video, and eventually it just wouldn’t boot. Two self-service repairs later, one for the power module, the other for the motherboard, and I was back in business. The self-service stuff on the iMac G5 was brilliant, once I walked through their troubleshooting wizard on the web. Apple sent me parts, backed by a credit card of course. All I had to do was install the new parts and return the old ones. I also secured the first personal UPS I have owned in a long time to prevent the power outage thing from happening again.
But the iMac G5 fan noise has changed, it is louder or maybe just higher-pitched now, and I always wonder if I messed something up with my open-backplane surgery. I think I might take this repair opportunity to have an Apple Tech put the iMac right, if they will of course. Not that there is anything truly wrong, it runs like a champ and I have “stressed tested” it with 6 hour marathon World of WarCraft sessions.
Is this recall a negative thing? Yes, there is a problem with the original parts Apple used in the iMac G5. However, we all know this happens with any number of PC manufacturers, and instead of manufacturers coming clean and saying they are going to take care of this for you; they make their customers work, and usually real hard, before repairs are authorized, even on warranty equipment. This has happened to me so many times, it’s why I ended up just building my own PCs from scratch because the manufacturers weren’t giving me anything I couldn’t do myself.
