Q: About fed up with my new iMac
About six months ago my 8-year-old desktop iMac began giving me trouble--it would restart by itself right in the middle of me working on a project. Then it would shut down all by itself. Sometimes I couldn't start it up again without unplugging it. I had it looked at by three different Apple specialists, and while they were unable to give me a precise reason for the problems, they all recommended I don't fix it, since it was so old.
I kept it until three weeks ago when it would not start again, no matter what I did.
So I drove down to my local Apple store and bought a new 21-incher. When I unpacked it, I hooked up my Time Machine backup from the old machine and migrated all the data and apps to the new machine. So far so good.
But when I began using the new 1 TB machine--now loaded with the 250 GB of stuff from the old machine--I found it to be incredibly slow. Anything I tried to do, from opening my web browser to opening a document, took at least 30 seconds. Quite often the spinning pinwheel would show up and I'd have to force quit whatever it was I was trying to do.
I called Apple Care a couple of times and while we tried some things (such as deleting caches and adjusting the P-ram), nothing worked. The machine remained as slow as molasses.
So I took it back to the Apple Store. Genius Bar Guy could only recommend that I wipe all the data clean and do another migration from the backup drive. He speculated that possibly there was a corrupted file in my backup drive, or that there was a hiccup during the original migration. I pointed out that perhaps doing a second migration wasn't a good idea, because it might be inviting the same problem again. So we agreed I should just manually pick and choose what I wanted to work with from the backup drive, as opposed to re-importing the whole thing again.
So today I get on the computer to start picking and choosing files, and the first thing I notice is that the Time Machine icon is missing from the menu bar. So I get back on the phone with Apple Care and the guy tells me how to get the icon in the bar. So I do, and I enter Time Machine to grab some files. Turns out Time Machine is completely blank! No files whatsoever. Five years of backed-up data seems to have disappeared.
So Apple Care Guy says it seems like you don't have any backed-up data. I said, that's ridiculous, I've been using Time Machine for at least five years and it's worked great and I've always been able to retrieve old data from it when needed.
So he gets his senior tech on the line. Ninety minutes later we discover that the data is indeed there, but for some reason my new machine is not recognizing it--it's as if Time Machine is hiding it from the machine. All he can say is, "Weird."
Finally he figures out a work-around where I can get get access to my data. We successfully download my old desktop and documents. We then begin the process to download all my movies, photos, and music. At that point, I decide to go to work and let the machine do its work in solitude. At the end of the day when I come home, I discover that the movies, photos and music had failed to download.
So I don't know what to do at this point. Genius Bar can't get it to work. Apple Care can't get it to work. What was supposed to be a simple migration of data from an old, dependable machine to a spanking-new, much more advanced machine has turned into an exercise in futility and a waste of time. This is what I paid $1200 for?
Anybody have some words of solace for me? Or better yet, some way to fix this? Thanks.
Posted on Feb 24, 2016 8:25 PM