Sunday December 21
09:21
Mac No More
I no longer have a Mac. Correction: I no longer have an official Mac.
My iMac was suffering from a creature inside. No problem, Apple said, we’ll replace the LCD. That was two weeks ago.
This week I went down to pick up the repaired machine. Last time Apple touched the inside of my iMac, I was left with big wipe marks inside the glass. This time, no wipe marks but dust. Dust between the LCD and glass, which, obviously, I couldn’t wipe away. Reluctantly – as if I should accept dust there – the “Genius” took the machine away for the dust to be cleaned off.
Twenty minutes later and the iMac was back. Initial impressions were not good – the front of the screen was covered by a layer of dust and little bits of packing foam. This time not only was there dust inside the screen, but wipe marks inside the glass. Exactly the same streaks that I found last time.
An hour later and the iMac was back again. No streaks but dust and what looked to be a small hair.
“We’re never going to get it perfectly right,” I was told, “Did you buy it at this store?”
And without me asking for it, I was promptly offered a full refund. Quite frankly, I was astonished – the machine is 6 months old – but since this is the 6th time I’ve lugged my iMac back and forward from Apple, and since every time my iMac is repaired it seems to come back with something inside the LCD, I decided to accept. Why they open the iMacs in a dusty environment – which they clearly do from the second time the machines was brought back – I don’t know.
So that’s it. I’m now Macless – or at least, officially Macless since my LG still runs MacOSX. In honestly, I was getting to the stage where I was wondering why I was using Mac anyway – nothing I was running was Mac specific, and it was a hassle to backup to a network drive.
My Lightroom library opened on Windows no problem (just had to open the Mac library and then tell Lightroom the location of my top level photo folders). iTunes was trouble as usual, but after going through each of my Korean songs one by one – about 1000 of them – it was working again.
Now I’m looking at doing the same as Eyal – building my own machine. It wont run Macos, but it might run 64-bit Vista with 8GB of memory, Quad core (I do a lot of multitasking), and RAID0 on SATA disks for performance. Half the price of the iMac, double the performance.
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Nikon D700
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Nikon D90
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Panasonic DMC-G1
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Panasonic DMC-GH1/G1HD (check availability)
Looks like you found a good way to get a refund on a 6 months old machine, by way of attrition :-)
The new architecture and chips from intel look quite good. I’d probably give them a few more months before taking the plunge just to let issues surface, MB makers get a better handle on things etc.
Btw, from what I’ve been seeing lots of s/w makers don’t officially support 64bit, in many cases it’s a hit and miss with many applications on whether they’d even run. Also drivers are sometimes not easily available, are half-baked or even homebrews. But if you know exactly what you’ll be running and don’t expect to install many other things then maybe the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Eyal,
I’m looking to get the Q6600 rather than the new Core i7’s. The reason is pure price/performance:
CPU: 18000yen vs 28000yen
Motherboard: 20000yen vs 30000yen
Memory: 8000yen (DDR2 8GB) vs 28000yen (DDR3 6GB)
That’s 46000yen vs 86000yen – a huge difference. For a full base system (ie, with graphics card, case, and hard drive), it’s 70000yen vs 110000yen.
I would hold off for a few months however using my laptop monitor is giving me neck and eye strain. I need something which allows me to sit comfortably at my desk at home.
I bought a 26″ monitor thinking that alone might let me avoid building a base for a few months, but the VGA output on my laptop is fuzzy (seems quite common with D-SUBs on laptops) so it doesn’t look like I have much option but to build something at the moment.
Apart from a webcam, printer/scanner, and some USB disks, I don’t have anything which requires drivers. In the worst case I can always boot up a virtual machine if I want to scan or print (I rarely use the printer/scanner), and a webcam should be cheap. Applications seem to be generally OK, so I’ve heard.
A.
Yes it sounds like a big difference. But if you need Quad with 8Gb RAM then those extra $450 might be worth the investment. The performance is about 50% higher from what I read. Plus you get a system base with the new chipset and socket which will probably allow you to continue to upgrade going forward a few years.
You probably checked already but if not, does your laptop video card support the native resolution of the 26″? If it does then try phase tuning on the LCD and/or upgrading the graphics driver. I had similar fuzzy issues with my dual 20″. I tried all kinds of stuff without any improvement till it finally got resolved by chance, through upgrading my Nvidia driver to a hacked driver from laptopvideo2go.com. It’s unsupported of course by Apple but it works much better than the one bundled by them.