The 20″ iMac is no more.

I have long known that one of the key dictates of being a smart investor is knowing when to cut your losses. I now know that the same applies to iMacs. It also makes sense, like with investing, to have alternatives. Read on.

The garbage awaiting collection

The repair place said they couldn’t fix the logic board from the 20″ iMac so I removed the remaining components and trashed the case, beautifully drilled as it was. A $2,000 machine dead after 30 months. Please, no cracks about buying AppleCare. When you pay a 100% premium for a machine, you should not be required to pay another 10% for insurance.

The 24″ iMac with its new graphics card is up and running so stay tuned for developments and some measurements of temperatures.

Meanwhile, I have bought a Mac Mini and an HP display. We will reuse the Apple keyboard and mouse. The display at least comes with a 3 year warranty and at $580 the Mini with a 12 month warranty is a whole lot less than a new motherboard for the dead iMac with a 3 month warranty. After selling off the bits my Mac ‘investment’ will come down maybe $200.

As we all know, the white iMacs were replaced by the aluminum-bodied ones with the ghastly glossy screens and purportedly improved graphics. So you thought the cooling problems would have been fixed by now, huh? Oh! I forget – what problems? At least, that’s Apple’s line.

Well, here’s an ad from yesterday’s Craigslist which I chanced upon when listing the components removed from the dead iMac:

It just works fries.

Not all is bad, however. One day my 24″ iMac will die and be uneconomical to repair. In my techie phase I learned some interesting things. Macs use industry standard components. They come in lovely cases. They are poorly heat engineered. They are overpriced. They are cheaper to build yourself.

Clearly, buying another iMac is out of the question. With its core audience of photographers and movie makers abandoned, and with quality control having fallen off a cliff, all that remains is the pretty looks and the high price tag. My primary reason for switching to Macs a decade ago was the software. Constantly rebooting the fraud that is Windows was getting old and OS X delivered – and continues to deliver – in spades. Rare reboots, no spam, maybe three kernel panics in ten years. That’s why I use Macs.

And, by the way, our first iMac, the lovely ‘screen on a stick’ design, remains perfectly operational to this day. Not a statistically meaningful sample, but, for this user, a meaningful fact. Too slow for heavy Lightroom work, but great for surfing and email use.

So my next desktop Mac will have the following specifications:

• 3.8 gHz Intel Quad Core CPU (Yes, 3.8)
• nVidia 9800 GT GPU with on board cooling fan and 512mB of video memory ($100 compared to $260 to replace the nVidia 7600 in my 24″ iMac)
• 700 watt power supply with dedicated fan
• ‘Superdrive’ DVD burner/reader
• 8gB of DDR3 system RAM
• Sound insulated heavy steel case with three 120mm fans
• 8 USB, 3 FW400, 2 FW800 and Dual DVI connections
• 1 terabyte HDD

Cost? $1,012 including $62 for delivery. Assembly time – 2 to 3 hours.

Number of cooling fans? 5.

Maximum temperature of any key component? 90F.

All parts easily user upgradeable at low cost as technologies improve.

And no, you cannot get it from Apple whose MacPro starts at $2,500 and which will be left in the dust by this machine. The nearest comparable Mac Pro configuration would run you $3,350, or more than three times as much. So much for all that nonsense about ‘you pay more but you get more’. And as for the ‘server quality hard disk’ in the machine (Jobs’s words, not mine) it’s nothing more than a bottom-of-the-line POS Western Digital, unlike the better quality one shown here.

Can you spell ‘Hackintosh‘?

Don’t get mad. Get even.

Here’s the build list, in case you are skeptical:

Hackintosh build list

The Intel CPU is easily and safely overclocked to run at 3.8gHz if that is your thing. Trivial to do. Every component is as good or better than its counterpart in the MacPro at a fraction of the cost. And you don’t get the single electronic part that Apple actually designed in its computers – the mother board. The one that fries. My seven year old, now a recognized Lego expert, could probably assemble the bits in an hour …. and at $5/hr, half the payroll rate of the alleged Apple ‘Genius’.

You can add a screen of your choice, but don’t waste money on the dated Apple 30″ Cinema Display (made by LG, by the way). Get the newer technology from HP, model LP3065 at $1,180 with HDCP support, and save another $720 while you are at it – why, that almost pays for the other hardware. (The Mac Display is $1,800 but you are hosed down an additional $100 for Apple Care to equal the HP’s 3 year warranty). The HP includes on site service. Nice, as you can be sure Steve Jobs ain’t coming by to fix your Apple Display when it blows. And as for the OS, use the goddamned disks that came with that iMac in the garbage. You paid for them.

The 24″ comes to life

Here are the ‘after’ and ‘before’ System Profiler screen shots reflecting the change to the new GPU card:

So while they appear almost identical physically (see yesterday’s piece), there’s no denying the doubled video RAM in the new card.

Diagnostic comments will have to await an extended test period, but the spinning beachballs are gone, for now, and performance in Lightroom 2.4 is exemplary. For example, in full screen mode, holding the right arrow key on the keyboard depressed has 150 images zip by the screen (these are 1:1 previews) in 5 seconds. Faster than the eye can make sense of. A promising start.

And yes, a lot of heat can be felt pouring out of all those holes I drilled. No surprise there.

Further, this is confirmation that owners of 24″ iMacs with the Nvidia 7300 GPU can upgrade to the improved Nvidia 7600 variant without any system issues. The 7600 was available in Apple’s premium machine as a Built To Order model (meaning Apple’s costs went up 50 cents and yours went up $500) which, at least in the US, seems to have included a faster CPU as well, the Intel 2.33gHz Core2Duo. As I have discussed before, for photographers CPU speed is not a major consideration. It’s the graphics, stupid.

What I did not realize when I wrote that earlier piece is just how heat challenged Apple’s poor engineering is. Those of you who like to waste your time and make schmuck class action lawyers rich can start a suit to recover your $4 in damages from Apple two years hence. Me? I’ll be taking pictures and, hopefully, still processing them on my 24″ white iMac. You know, the last one with a matte screen.

True cost of doing this:

“Ah!, Thomas”, I hear you lament,” you are a moron when it comes to economics. You are clearly clueless about opportunity cost – what your time and trouble cost because you could have been doing other things rather than messing with your iMac to make it run”.

Well, let’s look at the alternatives.

1 – Buy a new iMac. Let’s put aside the fact that you can’t get one with a matte screen. Base 24″ iMac with 2.66ghz C2D and (overheating) Nvidia 9400 GPU – $1,500. Scrap value of your old iMac – $400. Net cost – $1100. Time to order, unpack and install, including moving all your data over – 4 hours at, say, $100. Satisfaction quotient – “This is the last Mac I will ever buy; after that it’s back to crappy PCs and the horrors of Windows.” Total cost – $1,500.

2 – Send your old iMac for repair to Apple. Repair $950. Shipping + materials $100. Time to pack and unpack – 1 hour. Satisfaction quotient – Disgusted. Plus what do you do during the month your iMac is out for repair and it still runs too hot when you get it back, if it runs, that is? Total cost – $1,150.

3 – Repair it yourself. New GPU $260. Tools – $50. Time to gut and reassemble – 3 hours. Time to drill holes and install mesh – 3 hours. Time to read manual and prepare – 1 hour. Given that you can hire a laborer to work in your garden at $20/hr rather than doing it yourself while you repair the iMac, you just saved $560 (7 x $(100-20)) in time value. Time to read my blog – sheer joy and free; you are going to do that anyway so it’s not an opportunity cost. Satisfaction quotient – enormous. Total cost – $450.

Hey, seems that I do get it after all. Why, maybe I’ll buy that blown one from you for $400 and fix it up as a back-up? Drop me a line if it’s for sale.