Tuesday May 13
 
00:18
 
New Toy

The only way I could be sure to get a PC that will run XP: buy a Mac. In this case, the top of the range iMac: 24″ widescreen, 3.06Ghz Dual Core 6MB L2 cache, 500 GB Hard Disk, 512MB Nvidia Graphics Card, 4GB Memory. Just a sliver under a whopping 270,000 yen.

I know I swore I’d never get another Nvidia again, but the only way I could get a 500GB hard drive in the Apple store was to go for the top of the range model - with Nvidia. However, since Apple gives a guarantee that they have prepared all the drivers to get the machine working under XP and Vista (”Everything you need to make your Mac work with Windows is right there.” on the Bootcamp page), I decided to take the risk.

Buying this machine once again raised the horrid issue of bad LCD pixels. My Nikon D40x has one bad pixel on the LCD screen. It annoys me and I wish it wasn’t there, but I accepted it because the body plays so nicely with my Sigma F1.4 lens I have. That lens is known for back focus issues, and you really have to luck-out and get a body which matches the lens. While the shop agreed to swap my D40x for another, when I tried the replacement with the Sigma, it had backfocus - possibly a different batch of cameras. So in the end I kept the bad pixel, since I’d rather have the body working with my lens.

So on something cheap, or where the LCD is not of primary importance, I could potentially accept a bad or bright or dead pixel. Even if I bought a PC which had a monitor with a bad pixel, at a push I could accept it - because I could always replace the monitor later.

But spending over 2000USD on an iMac, I wanted to be sure it had no bad pixels. I would feel so crap if I spent that much money, switched on my iMac, and found a white dot slap bang in the middle of the screen. There would be nothing I could do about it - Apple’s policy, so I’m told, is that they don’t replace screens with just one bad pixel.

Apple, etc, say that it would be unrealistic to expect every monitor to be perfect, but, to be honest, I can’t understand that stance. In Korea, almost every manufacturer gives you the choice of “guarantee of no faults” and “you take your chances” - the latter being about 10-20USD cheaper. It seems like a much better way to do things rather than forcing you to take the risk.

In Hong Kong and Korea, when I bought a laptop, the shops always let me test to see whether there were defective pixels. In Japan, that seems to be impossible. Nowhere would let me test, and nowhere would replace if there was a problem.

In the end, after trying other places, I went to the Apple store and I lucked out. By sheer fluke, the guy I talked to was the store manager, and he was quite happy to let me test the machine before buying. I was told later, by another staff member, that usually such tests are not allowed, and it was only because I’d talked to the store manager that it was possible.

For anyone buying a Mac in Japan, the other staff member (ie. not the store manager) also let slip something else interesting. He said that if you buy from the Apple Store and there’s a dodgy pixel, because you bought from that Apple store, you’re much more likely to get an on the spot replacement. If, I was told, you buy from a reseller, they’re much more likely to just send you away with an “it’s in normal limits” explanation.

So I lucked out - and I have a perfect iMac. In honestly, if they had not let me test the screen, I wouldn’t have taken the risk in buying. I’d have built my own PC instead, and run OSX on that. I’ve seen it done. I’ll probably do it on my LG.

It’s fantastic to have a Mac again - and even better now that I can use Mac OS but still have a window open which has an XP desktop, thank to VMWare Fusion. So the few things that I can’t do on a Mac - such as Video Chat on MSN Messenger and use Korean websites - I can do within an XP desktop from within Mac OS. Splendid.