Intel Imac with bad logic board.

Same thing happened to my unit and about 3 months outside Applecare...And the repair was quoted at $900.00. Decided to purchase a newer imac. Apple suggested I sell it on ebay for the parts. Or they would recycle it for a fee. Bottom line this is a terrible way to treat customers when this is obviously a design flaw. Best wishes....

Hello
The only thing I can think of is this: Did you happen to buy it with a credit card that automatically extends the manufacturer's warranty? Usually these cards (most notably American Express) will double the warranty up to another year. Coverage applies only to hardware repairs; which this certainly would fall under. Dig up your paperwork and read the card's website; make a phone call if necessary; asking if you have this type of coverage for items purchased with your card. It would be well worth your time!
Good luck!

Would one's Household insurance guard against such matters I wonder? I'm thinking from the UK perspective as well.

I'm in the same situation as Markrut, bought my son an iMac 17" in Dec 06 and 15 months later the system stops working reliably. Had a 'genius' at the Apple store diagnose it as bad RAM and said it would be $200+ to fix. Ok, No problem. A week later I get a call saying it wasn't the RAM but the logic board and that it would be $950ish to fix!!!. I was stunned. I told the guy to forget the fix since I could buy 2 cheapo pcs and put Ubuntu on it for roughly the same amount - something I now intend to do.

After years of working with PCs, this was my first foray into the Apple world, unfortunately the computer was for my 11 year old son and it's broken his heart that the thing died so badly in a little over a year. He learned his lesson I guess, form over function never works when you need to get work done.

$950+ to fix what should NEVER have broken in the first place. Shame on you Apple. The current uptick in sales you're getting from the "I-Hate-Vista" crowd will be short lived if you think you can get away with business like this.

-Martin Lewald

I had the same problem occur on a mid-2006 intel iMac. First the problem was attributed to power supply unit, then hard drive and finally logic board. All up this would have cost more than the computer in the first place and, on the advice of the Genius Bar in Apple's Sydney store, I took it to customer relations. They offered me $145 (Australian) towards the repairs or discount on a new purchase through their online store. A thoroughly miserable response. Given that these problems first manifested soon after expiry of the 12 months warranty, I think it is very poor of them not stand by their product and to weasel out of meeting me halfway. Are they punishing me for not taking out the extended warranty? I have been using Macs exclusively since 1989 and rarely had anything go wrong - certainly nothing serious. But in the last 12 months there have been thse problems with the iMac along with a hard drive failure and faulty keyboard on a brand new Macbook. One wonders about their quality control processes as much as their poor public relations efforts.

I've also encountered this problem with a late 2006 iMac model. It's not even 2 years old and the logic board is now defective and the Apple store is slamming me with an $850.00 repair. This is unbelievable and unacceptable. Apple can't even make a computer that can hit the 2-year mark? Really?

I am very concerned about the quality of this company's products.

In my experience, once you get a machine past the 18 months to two years old mark the likelihood of it failing diminishes over time. This is the same for every machine, whether it be a Mac, PC, or even a luxury ocean going liner. Google "Copernican Theory" about the liner bit. You will I'm sure find it very interesting. 😉

I myself have a PowerMac which I bought in April 1998. It went wrong once, fortunately for me it was still under warrenty. It has never failed since and it was still working up to a year ago when I mothballed it to get more space for my new iMac. In theory it should still operate now. No doubt someone somewhere will have a PC of that vintage that is still working (even if it is only as a door stop).

I have to agree with you though. That repair bill is absolutely shocking. I know I couldn't afford it. Do Macs absolutely have to go back to Apple for repair, or could someone else do it cheaper?

I find this topic very interesting. My Imac duo core logic board was delcared dead 2 days ago buy an apple tech after only 2 years of service. The computer was getting slower and slower over the last few months and the screen began showing visual distortions and artifact lines. I read somewhere that it is not the logic board that fails but the ATI Radeon x1600 graphics card that is soldered to the board that fails. Apple will only replace the entire logic board which is why the repair price tag is so high. I am totally ****** off at apple. 2 years is simply too brief a period of service for any computer. The graphics card should be a replacable part and not integrated to the logic board. Does any one know if the graphics card could be some how replaced anyway? I wonder how many of these late 2006 imacs are failing anyway. If there are enough of us maybe we can get together and lobby apple to do something for us?

I will be watching this thread.

Same this has happened to me. 2006 intel IMac 17" Genius Bar just said dead logic board, nothing they can do. $950. Apple is terrible. Never again.

I've written to a few tech magazines about this. Hopefully they'll pick it up as this seems to be a systematic failure of a component, which is costing customers a lot of money. Obviously further investigation is needed to prove this, but keep posting to blogs and maybe this issue will be addressed by Apple.

It's out of warranty, so I doubt Apple will care, but lets not let this one lie - it's cost us a lot of money.

I have a similar problem that I'll describe hoping that it will contribute to this discussion and I'll ask a couple of questions. In December 2007 I bought an iMac 24 inch maxed out for speed and RAM and with the 750 gig hard drive. I had no problems until about three weeks ago when on startup I got grey hash marks all over the screen. When I selected the entire screen the grey hash disappeared and the computer seemed to run normally. I thought the problem was software related and began the long process of trying to find the culprit. Then two days ago I connected a video camera to the iMac to test the camera for the first time. It's a loaner from my school and is five years old. It seemed to be working fine. I then turned off the camera but left it connected to the computer by the firewire cable and put the computer to sleep. THAT was probably a mistake. When I tried to wake the computer it would not respond. There was a DVD in the machine and when I pushed the power button I could hear the DVD player makes it startup sounds and could hear the CD spin. Also I could hear the fans come on but the startup BONG never sounded. I disconnected all cables, pulled out the power cord for various lengths of time from 30 seconds to ten hours but nothing changed. I called Apple this morning and was told it sounds like a blown logic board which is what I was thinking. They will pick up the iMac day after tomorrow. When I talked to the Apple person this morning it didn't occur to me to ask about my chances of getting this repair done for free since I'm still within the one-year warranty period. I'll call when they open tomorrow morning but what are my chances of getting the repair done free? I've been using Macs since the Mac Plus came out but have never had a failure within one year so have no experience with the warranty. I did not buy Apple Care for this computer and never have but I will the next time. Thanks in advance for any comments.

If it's within warranty then they have a legal obligation to repair your iMac for free, don't settle for anything else.

Following up on my previous posting regarding my son's late model 2006 iMac that required a $900 logic board replacement:

Turns out the problem is apparently related to a bad CPU temp sensor. I installed 'iMac Fan Control' (Google it) which reported the CPU temp always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (obviously incorrect). The same software allowed me to adjust the CPU fan manually. After multiple trials I set the CPU speed to 2800RPM after which the system would run forever - never freezing with the dreaded grey box 'reboot me' screen. I tried several times reverting the software to default speeds and the system would always crash within 10 minutes.

The sad part is I had to spend weeks mucking with this problem and finally found the solution on my own. As a general user (not a novice but not an expert) I correctly guessed the problem, Googled for an answer and partly solved the problem. Why couldn't the guy at the apple store figure this out? Why can't apple respond and acknowlege their pretty little computers fail because their designers put more emphasis on looks versus reliability? Give me an ugly square box any time as long as it just works...

I'd go to the apple store again to see if the temp sensor can be repaired without the $900 logic board swap but the last time I left it for the week with their techs 'upstairs', it came back with half the memory it went in with (had 2GB came back with 1GB). Unfortunately, I only noticed this today when running "About this Mac" and I had brought it in over a month ago.

For my next two sons needing computers this Xmas, I'm going back to PC's but will run Ubuntu on them. No MS, No Apple. I now want Open Software AND Open hardware.

Martin