$2.399

Well, my experience this morning with the Apple service side was pretty good, on balance.

I packed up the iMac G5 last night, and schluffed it out to the truck and through the mall this morning, landing at the Apple Store at West County right at 10AM. At that time, the Genius Bar was already booked solid, and my appointment was to be at 11.20AM “worst case”. They gave me a pager and I walked the mall. And walked the mall. And walked the mall. I showed up at 11.20AM, to find that I was still three down on the list, and the list had only moved by two folks in the last hour or so. Ugh.

So I stood and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, around 12.30PM, my name was called, and we started trying to figure out what was going on. As it turns out, the symptom that I read about last night on the Apple site was not what was going on with my iMac. (That problem is about capacitors blowing, and my mobo wasn’t the right kind for that — guess that’s why they have you bring it to the store to figure out the problem, eh?)

After figuring out that the thing was powering on by itself when power was applied, and doing a little work under the hood, the Genius Bar dude decided it was either a power supply or mobo problem, and is ordering both. ETA for return is September 10th, but he thinks he’ll beat that. The impressive thing? They do the work right there, and don’t ship the systems off. That’s hugely comforting!

So, I’ll be using the Mini or the Gateway for the next couple of weeks until the iMac is back. I’ve got a little Mitsubishi LCD on the Mini — Beck’s old one — and I can’t get over how tiny the monitor is compared to the iMac’s 20″ widescreen!