Well, I guess even Apple cannot get it right ALL the time. This past weekend, my spectacular 27″ 3.4GHz iMac suddenly developed a fault – the left half of the screen would blink down to a lower level of illumination than the right side, and stay that way. Given the amount of image editing I do, this was a catastrophic failure.
A little poking around on the web revealed that this is an all too common problem in this generation of iMacs, and that the only real repair was to replace the whole screen, the most expensive single part in the machine. Happily for me, my iMac had the good grace to develop this particular failing just a few days prior to the expiry of its one year warranty, and so I quickly boxed it up and got it into my local Apple Store for repair, where it resides at this moment.
So as to to not be without a computer in the interval while my iMac is being repaired, I backed up my data from the iMac before turning it over to Apple, and restored that backup onto my trusty old PowerMac G5 2.3 GHz Dual. I used this machine from 2006 (when I bought it new) to 2008, when I upgraded to a Mac Pro. Although I still have both machines, I have always found the G5s more compelling, and I selected it for my temporary lifeboat.
S, I am re-experiencing life the G5 and Mac OS X Tiger way, and am actually really enjoying it – Tiger was so fast and so fluid on that hardware. If only current versions of iTunes still ran on it…
Quadras, Cubes and G5s 