Intel Imac with bad logic board.

"..the army of evidence on the support forums is hard to deny."
i tried to bring this up at an apple store only to be told that the majority of the evidence is being posted by a very small minority of imac users. uh-huh.. i think a sampling of the posts represents a VERY broad spectrum of users. and all with the EXACT same problem.

my repair bill is $1700cdn. ($336 for ati 2600 HD card, 1011 for the logic board.)

the final step is to cry to customer relations and beg them to waive the fee because there's no way in **** i'm paying.

My early 2006 Intel iMac again is in the shop. This time it's diagnosed with a bad logic board and/or display. Fortunately for my budget, it's under Apple care.

As I read the postings, I've read of display problems with vertical lines and with horizontal lines. Not me! I had diagonal, equally spaced bands of very, very small, very, very close indescribable (I used a lens) images covering 35-40% of the screen. They appeared while I was surfing the web. From ten feet, the bands look all black. The band intersecting the lower left corner hits the right side about a third up from the bottom.

After a system reset ( no wires connected) one gets the usual Apple logo, the rotating hypoid gear, then the bands and then the blue screen. That's as far as it goes.

An Apple user since the 80's, I had no hardware problems until I replaced a G-5 with an Intel iMac. I concur with those griping about Apple's design and quality control on the Intel iMac.

Just yesterday my late 2006, 24 inch had some sort of kernel panic which resulted in a trip to the Genius bar. At first, I thought that a simple fresh reinstall would solve my problem as I was having other issues with this computer - namely horizontal lines, stuck pixels, and other video artifact - but this proved to be too trying for this dying computer couldn't even make it through the reinstall! I lugged this beast downtown San Francisco and was told that it was a faulty logic board and that the repair would be $900! Like a lot of others on this board, I found that there is a link to these issues and the Shanghai facility; it seems like Apple should address this issue and make it right.

Jay

Bought the 24inch version in nov 2006 for around 2000 Euro's, vertical lines flickering on screen started about 6 months ago, followed by intermittent crashes, then it completely frazzled & died a fairly quick & pathetic death. The 'Genius' from technical support charged me 47 Euro's to inform me it was 'just old age and probably a one off'.
For anyone considering the imac, DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT, IT WILL DIE AFTER 2 YEARS!!!!!
I've used apple for the past 10 years, and, as much as it pains me, will never purchase anything from them again...unless of course they do the decent thing and issue out of warranty repairs or replacements.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

Computers and the components used inside them are manufactured by the millions. In Apple's case, the number was about 2.5 million Macs in 2008, not including iPods or iPhones. Although I couldn't guess exactly how many of those Macs were iMacs, we can make a few assumptions: laptops have been outselling desktops for a few years now, so the desktop market is less than 1.25 million Macs for Apple. On the other hand, the iMac far more popular than the Mac Pro and aging Mac Mini, so let's arbitrarily say that of Apple's 2.5 million Macs sold in 2008, 1 million of those were iMacs.

In a thread of 33 posts (the number f posts thread has as I write this), 33 dead iMacs out of 1 million represents a 0.000033% failure rate, which is actually impossibly good.

In all fairness, I'm making a pretty misleading claim on a made up guess of iMac sales. Of course there's more than 33 dead iMacs out there, because not everyone who has experienced a logic board failure has posted their experience here. By that same logic, I could argue that not everyone who hasn't experienced a logic board failure has posted their experience here, which is the crux of the argument: where are all the people whose iMacs are working perfectly, and why aren't they posting here? It's because their iMac is working perfectly and they have no reason to seek out a support forum.

So is the iMac horribly flawed and guaranteed to blow up after 2 years?

No. Please stop spreading misinformation.

So this is just an acceptable fault is it or just a big co-incidence? Either way any iMac user should just accept, shut up and go out and buy another Apple product.

Yeah right.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, ****** lies, and statistics...but thanks very much for your helpful and impartial analysis.
If this is not an inherent problem in imacs, why would these people be complaining?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1580232&tstart=0

these nutters must be imagining the issue as well.
http://lapsusbloggus.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-intel-imac-is-dead-logic-board.html

as are these paranoid fools...
http://forums.macworld.com/thread/101104

I could go on, but I'm sure it's all just a big coincidence. OK it's not guaranteed to fry after 2 years, but would you really spend your hard earned cash on a product which is quite obviously flawed?
Good news is that apparently apple are starting to issue free repairs if you escalate to 2nd tier supervisory support. See 1st thread for details.

Duo,
horizontal lines issue apears in 20 and 24 iMacs (late 2006) both with ATI and NVidia graphics from Chinese factories. So revise your statistic a bit. Keep in mind that not everybody with such affected iMac write to this thread.

My parents late 2006 20" Intel Core 2 Duo iMac's logic board died a few months back. Apple wants $799.00 or $899.00, I forget which, to repair it.

Today the back light on their late 2006 Intel Core 2 MacBook went out. Apple wants $700-something for it.

They'll have the MacBook fixed by a third party, but really, no such option exists for the iMac.

It took me nine years, count them, nine years to get them to come to Apple products.

Lately my uncle has been showing them recent builds of Windows 7, and I've had to concede that it is a drastic improvement over Vista.

When they have the funds to replace the dead iMac, I have no idea whether the machine will have Leopard (or Snow Leopard) or Windows 7.

On top of this:

1. I purchased a 32GB 2nd generation iPod Touch in late September (2008) and it failed late December. Apple refuses to replace it, says the liquid submersion indicators are red and looking at them, they are. But here's the rub, I never had it near any source of liquid and I know that. They want $199.00 to fix it.

2. My mid 2006 Intel Core MacBook's airport has been dropping out intermittently, getting low signal strengths or seeing no signal at all when sitting next to the router. Every other computer on Earth can connect to and has no trouble with my router. This problem is new.

So my faith in Apple is definitely shaken.

Actually, I feel betrayed. One, I was effectively called a liar to my face and two, I spent a great deal of time trying to get my parents over to the Mac side and had begun on my siblings when everything blew up.

Truth be told, when my MacBook's time ends, I don't know what OS my next machine will be running either. It could go either way.

- S
Mac user since the Performa 630CD

@particle_ac you can replace the airport card pretty easy (if that's the fault). I just upgraded the one in my macbook so that it now uses wireless n.

http://forum.hardmac.com/index.php?showtopic=1363

Yeah mine just crashed. 2 yrs old, 2 grand to buy, 900+ for new logic board. Looks like it costs about a grand a year to be with mac. Nice. This was my first mac. I wanted to not have hassles so I tried it. Wonder what kind of PC I can get for a grand a year. I'm not going to bother fighting with the apple help guys. It's clear from this thread and several others that my time would be better spent buying lottery tickets. Not happy. Thinking of making a YouTube vid with the things I'm finding about the 2006 imac intel and its cost vs lifespan of the model. I think it would be hilarious to re clip a mac PC commercial. I'm thinking huge viral hit! I cannot tell you how bad this stings. Why would I EVER look at another mac product again? I was looking for worry free haslle free but higher price NOT smack to the head and higher price!

Wow, Ouch, Sigh,
Sadly back to PC for me.

I recently had the same experience. 15 months after i bought my 2.2 ghz 20 incher it started to crash. Got some info from Apple and took a few trips to the genius bar however had to get an independent mac specialist to look at it in the end who said it could be the Logic Board and that it was lkely to cost me around 800gbp to fix. Anyways i received a replacement last week however this one now wont turn on. I cant believe it. I set it up and it was fine for the 1st few days however over the last few days it has taken a few presses of the power on button to get it going. Yesterday i shut it down and now it wont turn back on. This is my second Intel i mac in 2 years, very frustrating and i expect more from Apple. Before i bought the new imacs i had a G3 that lasted about 10 years.

Count me as another late-2006 core duo iMac with a dead graphics board/chip. :< I love this computer and if this is death for her, then it is wayyy premature.

Nope, no apple care...never had a Mac that died or had major problems (we've had lots in the family over the years: MacPlus, 660av, BW G3, blueberry iMac, lampshade iMac, several laptops).

I, unfortunately, have joined your ranks. My mac went to sleep on Friday night and did not wake up on Saturday morning. I turned it off and, upon restarting it, found a black screen and no boot up. I have only had the computer for exactly two years and of course, being a student, I certainly cannot afford to have the logic board replaced for $900. My wife is not impressed; I spent $1700 on the mac and really could not afford to spend another $170 on warranty that did not (at the time) seem necessary. These computers are advertised as being the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel but I getting the sense that there is a design flaw at play here. It seems unlikely that so many people are having the exact same problem at nearly the same life span on their machines. I hope Apple will listen to these concerns and problems that their customers are having. I was telling a friend of mine how great my mac was the night before it died. I can accept some issues with a computer but to have such a major failure in so short a span of time is beyond acceptable.

Another one bites the dust - well almost!

Early 2006 20" thankfully with the 3 year cover is with apple at the moment after having it's second possibly third logic board in just over 2 years due to large colorful patterns on the display - Graphics again. And for good measure they changed the hard drive as well?

Problem is i think they are going to change it for a third time because when i got it back a week ago it was plagued with problems i.e. the airport not seeing the router and when it did it flaked out after a while, isight not working half the programs crashing etc. took it back.

Phone call saying it's fixed - got it home - the front panel was hanging off - back to apple.

Got it back again same problems as above, this Imac has made 4 trips now in the space of 2 weeks (do you think they will pay for the fuel and parking tickets????)

The long and the short of it is there is a problem with apples logic boards and my cover runs out in August I'm worried.

I am getting really p....d of now as it's probably going to be another week and they can't seem to fix it.