Q: New iMac / no cd / no firewire - Frustrations
Hi All,
I find it interesting that you can leave feedback on pretty much anything, but I'm not seeing how I can do this with the iMac itself. Overall I'm pretty frustrated here.
My old iMac is several years old, and starting to feel it's age with no options to upgrade ram for Aperture, and speed for the odd video game I play here. Without doing any research I just bought the new iMac, cause hey I can't go wrong right? I've had 2 iMac's in the past and never had a problem.
Yes I'm fairly new to apple compared to the life long people but towards the XP days I needed something that worked and not something to fight with.
This new iMac isn't what the first 2 iMac's I've owned is, and my frustrations are making me think there will not be a 4th iMac in my future at this point.
1) Ghosting issues with the monitor.
I noticed fairly quickly that as I had some things on the screen for a while and then would open something else, or move that app, or just close it that there seems to be a "ghost" of whatever it is I had on the screen there. It seems to go away after about 15 minutes, but this is so very very annoying. I use my iMac do a number of things, but one of those is to edit photos that I've taken as I'm one of those crazy hobbiest that spend to much on camera gear. I've found that I've had to sit waiting for a few minutes for the screen to clear.
I talked to the store about it and they told me this was expected, that this was normal. I kind of got a little annoied because I've never seen this with any LCD monitor in the past. But Apple's support is trying to tell me that all monitors do this.
I've had to spend additional money now to get another monitor, I picked up a viewsonic IPS panel monitor, and set it up as the new primary display for my iMac, guess what.. no ghosting there. Now the iMac monitor has nothing but a dark background on it, so now when I use Aperture I can use the dual monitor feature which is nice, and as I don't use the imac monitor I don't have to wait for the ghosting to clear, unless i'm on a photo for two long during editing, then there is still a bit of a wait, but so far hasn't been to bad.
2) No CD Drive.
I still buy music on CD, sorry guys it just sounds better there. I still primarly listen to music on CD, and well I can't on my new iMac.
Also I still have people asking for cd's when they want photos that I've taken of them.
I'm finding that now I've brought my old mac out of retirement, coping files on a thumbdrive to the other mac so I can burn them.
I have finally broken down and ordered the external drive, so there goes even more money.
3) No Firewire.
Well after buying video cameras with firewire, so I can connect my video cameras to my imac and get the video into iMovie or whatever I need, I find that I'm completely not able to do this on the new iMac. So far I haven't even found an adaptor to do this with thunderbolt or whatever.
Overall, this has been a frustrating experience, and probably the first time that I've had to pull a mac out of "retirement" (my old mac) just so I can continue to do what I need to do to get things done.
Lesson learned about not doing any research before buying, if I had done some research I would have found the countless articles I have found on the ghosting issue (apparently it's the LG panel in the imac's and mac book retinas), I would have seen there is no cd rom or firewire, and I would have not bought this computer.
If anyone out there, can shed some light on some firewire options, or if they have found a way to get there ghosting issues fixed ... please please please ... let me know.
-Stuart
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)
Posted on Apr 1, 2013 1:46 AM