I visited the Genius Bar at the Apple store today. I made an appointment last night so I would be certain of a time. I brought in two machines – my 11in Air and my iMac. Both needed repairs.
The Air was stepped on by one of my grandkids. It must have been one of the older ones because the screen was not only messed up – even the Apple Logo on the lid was cracked. I learned that the cost to fix the screen would be > $400. I decided to buy a new Air instead. The broken machine still works, but there is a band across the middle of the screen that will not display information. Perhaps I can use the machine to drive a separate screen of some type.
The iMac was my home work machine and was to be the machine to be used at the lake. It stopped working on the 27th and it turned out that the hard drive is toast. I use an online backup system so the data with the exception of the Christmas pictures are safe. This situation is actually better than I expected. However, I learned that Apple no longer stocks the drives for machines older than 5 years. This machine is five years old. They cannot fix my iMac at any cost. I still live in the old days of installing your own hardware and a terabyte drive would be less than $100. I understand that these are probably specialized drives and not the generic drives you can install in a PC. I will have to find an independent repair shop and see what they say. I know I could rig an external drive as bootable but this would be more an exercise in “see if you can do it” rather than the way I would prefer to work day to day. At $2500 or so, the iMacs are little bigger purchase than the Air. I miss the old days with swappable parts. I understand the need for small scale in a laptop, but the ultra-thin desktop is not really a requirement. It does look pretty.