Mac desktops forum: iMac - a cautionary tale

You don't know the half of it. As someone who spent about 3 years as an Apple repair tech (just not working for Apple), you have barely begun to scratch the surface.

The company is extremely manipulative, and its anti-competitive behavior makes Microsoft circa the 1980s-2000 look like some two-bit hood who thinks he's some big crime boss because he shakes down a couple of stores.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but they at least have the gumption to tell you well ahead of time when you're going to kick you in the teeth and give you a shafting like you've never had before. I don't have to like it, but I can at least respect the fact that I get fair warning. Apple just sort of drops bombs in your lap one day, no warning at all.

Once you get a glimpse behind the curtain at the real Apple, only someone lacking any kind of moral compass would not be deeply disturbed; I think many would probably run away screaming.

You can install the OS on an external HDD, with USB or firewire, and set your Mac to boot to it. Firewire will be a lot faster than a USB drive, especially if you have firewire 800 on your iMac.

To be fair, Apple is quite clear that they only warrant the unit free from defect for 1 year, which is a pretty standard warranty period for computers no matter who makes it. Yours lasted 6 months on top of that, so really you made out pretty well on the deal.

I know people like to come up with these conspiracy theories about how there's some secret lab in the bowels of the company HQ where they test products to figure out how long it is before they fail, and then they set the warranty period to be just under that. It's not true. If you've ever worked in a large organization, you understand that such a level of competence is well beyond them. With the left hand having no idea what the right hand is doing 90% of the time, and then all the various inter and intra-departmental feuds and turf wars which further muddy the waters, that just isn't feasible.

You did have the option to buy the AppleCare Protection Plan at any point before your initial warranty period expired, which would have covered your current issue, but you elected not to. You assumed the responsibility for anything that went wrong after that. It's a calculated risk, you lost, it's time to get over it.

Having worked as a hardware tech, I have little sympathy for people who whine about how "it only lasted X amount of time!" If you bought into the fantasy that somehow Apple devices are these magical machines which defies the laws of physics by essentially being a perpetual machine, well that's your problem to be disabused of. Anyone who believes marketing hype like that, regardless of manufacturer or even product type, brought it on themselves as far as I'm concerned. The evidence is plain to see and all around you. Walk into any Apple store and how many people do you see in there with some sort of problem they're trying to get fixed? Why offer a warranty at all if the machines are perfect and never break?

Apple is a real arse of a company, and I'll probably do a bit of a happy dance when Tim Cook, or whomever replaces him, finally succeeds in driving the company into the ground. Doesn't mean I have the time of day for people who whine because something died after "only" some period of time, as long as that period of time is past the warranty period. Now if you have a manufacturer that refuses to honor their warranty, that's a whole other story. I see no claims of that here, so I refer you back to my earlier comments.

"To expect a punter to cough up for extended warranties is not on"

I wonder if you could tell me of one electronic company that does not "encourage" the purchaser to get an extended warranty, or even one large store that sells anything electrical that does not do the same.

A $5000 Zero Turn mower, on sale at the local big box store, is warranted for 1 year, so price is not the governing factor as to how long something will last.

It's no good knocking Apple, they have never told you that their equipment will last for any given length of time, but they do promise to fix it for free if it breaks within one year.
Remember, there are only two, possibly three, manufacturers of Hard Drives in the entire world. ALL computer manufacturers buy their HD's from the same sources.

P

Someone else might be helped by my reply.

I'll have a spare HDD to bring it back.