Ashgrove <[email protected]> wrote:
There is a caveat, though: G5 iMacs and the first couple generations of Intels suffered from display and/or graphic card problems. I've not only read about it, but seen them firsthand.
I too have an iMac G5. I bought mine, a 20-inch iSight, 2.1 GHz model (MA064LL/A), at the end of January 2006 after the first Intel iMac was revealed and the price of the iMac G5 began to drop. I really like it and hope it lasts forever!
According to MacTracker, the iMac G5 was brought out in three major revisions from August 2004 through October 2005, and was finally discontinued in March 2006. The first version of the iMac G5 (1.8 GHz) and probably also the second revision (2.0 Ghz) were built with defective electrolytic capacitors that caused logic-board failures within a a few years. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague> for more information on these bad capacitors. (Neither of these models came with a built-in iSight camera.)
I was under the impression that the third revision (2.1 GHz iSight) was not built with these bad capacitors, and thus far my computer has shown no external evidence of logic-board problems. However, the message by John Hobbs included in <http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist/browse_thread/thread/ffdfb88089231079%3EiMac%20G5%20Problems> points out that even these 2.1 GHz iSight models have shown failures due to faulty capacitors. In Mr. Hobbs' case, the problem appears to have been due to a sloppy job of manual replacement of capacitors at the factory before his iMac G5 was shipped out. So far I have had no reason to open my computer to look for bulging or popped capacitors; I hope I continue to have better luck than Mr. Hobbs did.
Each of these three major versions of the iMac G5 seems to have been subject to minor revisions between the major ones. For example, the iLife package bundled with my machine was iLife '05, whereas some people who bought nominally the same model of iMac G5 received iLife '06 with their computer. But I don't know if my hardware is any different from what was in the machines that came with iLife '06.
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