Its fans have cranked up to 11 for no discernible reason for the final time. No more will its internal not-so-SuperDrive refuse to read a disc, its USB 2.0 ports decline to recognize the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface, or its attempts to record and play back sound through same bring back memories of trying to tune in distant FM stations at 2 a.m. while piloting a ’74 Datsun pickup along U.S. 50 in Nevada, with a sixer of tallboys between the knees and rings of marching powder around the nostrils.
This iMac ran $1,200 new, but 10 years later Apple considers it worthless for any purpose beyond recycling, and frankly, so do I. P’raps Tim Cook will make a new MacBook Air or Mini out of the auld beastie and try to sell it back to me (at top dollar, it goes without saying).
That will be a tough sell, Timmy old scout. We already own a 2012 MacBook Air and a 2010 Mini. Both remain functional yet underemployed, like me, and so I think we can struggle along for a while before deploying the Visa card in the direction of Cupertino yet again.
I just hope this goddamn thing doesn’t wind up in Malaysia, where all the rest of our old crap seems to be piling up, when it’s not being buried in landfills or mysteriously catching fire.
I was wearing green, but the iMac pinched me anyway.
Ah, jaysis, I should’ve known better than to declare victory in my battle with the auld iMac so. Froze up on me again it did, as before, after less than 12 hours of extremely light use.
It caused me to explode in righteous wrath, and before I could go for a wee ride in my St. Patrick’s Day finery too.
Pardon the poor Photoshop job. I wasn’t using it. Apple’s Preview app works fine for basic photo editing, but not for extensive copyright violation in the name of cheap humor.
The old iMac has been acting up the better part of quite some lately — a function, I believe, of the Mavericks “upgrade” I performed last year — and last week, after yet another spate of inexplicable freezes that I could not resolve via Safe Boot, Apple Hardware Test, Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, disconnecting external drives and/or monitors, and finally the deployment of chicken blood, rattles and incantations, I waved the white flag and dragged the doddering iBeast down to the local Apple Store for a chat with a Genius.
The Genius advised a “nuke and pave,” erasing the drive and installing a fresh copy of the OS. I had my doubts, having done way too much looking around online to believe that a solution would be so simple.
Still, I thought, I’m backed up all to be-damn, from Time Machine to SuperDuper!, two copies of each. Want to try Yosemite? Sure, why not? How much worse could it be? Let ‘er buck, cowboy.
So I dragged the iBeast back home with a nuked and paved HDD and a brand-new copy of Yosemite, and then let it sit overnight, to cure, or rest, or whatever. The next day, I booted it up and set about the onerous chore of configuring what amounted to a brand-new, 6-year-old computer.
Installing a new OS did not include fresh copies of the iWork and iLife suites. I didn’t want to drag over old files and applications from my backups, reasoning that if they had bugs, I’d be giving my New World Order a case of Old World pants rabbits. So I decided I’d use those drives as storage for now — sort of a Waste Isolation Pilot Project of bits and bytes — and downloaded fresh copies of Pages and iMovie for starters, plus a smallish OS update.
Word and Photoshop? Nah. Fuggem, I thought. Let’s keep this thing all Apple for now, see what transpires.
What transpired? Freezes. Just like before. One on Saturday, a second on Sunday and a third today.
Bloody exasperating, that is. Especially when you open Console to see a grinning octupus-dragon-man-thing wearing a “Think Different” T-shirt laughing at you and gibbering, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
So, no, thanks, I don’t need a skinny, $1,299 laptop with a shite camera and one oddball port that will require a backpack full of adapters. And I really don’t need a Dick Tracy watch, especially if it makes me look like a Dick Head.
I already know what time it is. It’s time to retire this iBox. And I’m not buying another one.
What director Quentin Ferrentino sees just before the iMac hiccups, stutters and croaks.
Is the Super Bowl finally over? No, I see we’re still second-guessing coaches, lip-syncing sharks and that crucial, botched call — Nationwide’s decision to run that dead-kid ad instead of throwing it into the trash.
We didn’t watch any of it here at Rancho Pendejo, not even the ads. Herself was on a mission from God to clean up the joint, and I was doing a job of work, hammering away at a video review of the Novara Mazama for Adventure Cyclist and trying to troubleshoot ongoing technical glitches with the old iMac.
At 6 years of age, this ‘puter may be nearing the end of its useful existence, though a 15-year-old G3 “Pismo” PowerBook is still ticking right along with all its original equipment. Not so the iMac. Its optical drive croaked a while back, and ever since I “upgraded” to Mavericks I’ve been enjoying occasional and inexplicable freezes that force me into an irksome hard reset that occasionally costs me a bit of work. Kindly old Doc Google tells me I’m not alone in my suffering, and this is one of the reasons I’m dragging my feet on the Yosemite and iOS 8 upgrades.
Last night after a weirdo crash that left both monitors black, but with a moveable cursor, I booted into Safe Mode, which runs a few diagnostics, then said fuck it and booted again, this time into the Recovery HD, and ran Disk Utility.
The hard drive “appears to be OK,” says DU, so I repaired permissions and called it good. This morning nothing was on fire or defunct, which is better.
Now if Samsung will get around to installing a new drain pump in our 5-month-old washing machine, we’ll really have it going on. The goddamn thing has been on the sidelines for a week and I need to upgrade my undies to something a little, um, fresher.
A while back I mentioned that I was contemplating kicking the old iBox into the future with an OS upgrade to Mavericks. Being both a sluggard and a paranoid, I never quite got around to it, until last night.
It was the perfect time, really. Monday was a rest day in the Giro; I’d wrapped the most recent review and video for Adventure Cyclist; and I didn’t have a BRAIN deadline until Thursday.
There was one evil omen (there always is). The ‘puter’s optical drive went spastic on me, as they apparently do in the iMac. Mine will read and play audio CDs, but spits out movie and software discs like an infant who won’t eat his puréed spinach. So if something went sideways during the install I wouldn’t have access to my original system discs (I was still running Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6.8).
True, I had a belt-and-suspenders HD-backup system — both Time Machine and SuperDuper! — but being familiar with Murphy’s Law through bitter, painful experience, I decided to score an external optical drive, just in case.
I went Apple, of course, which means expensive — and in this case, inoperative. Seems their $79 disc-spinner won’t work with a pre-2012 iMac, and mine is a 2009 (read those system requirements, kids, and don’t forget to say your prayers). SuperDrive, me arse.
So I barreled over to Best Buy and picked up an LG for less than half that and it worked like a top. Suck it, Cupertino.
Then I reminded myself the worst that could happen was I’d get a chance to swear a lot and buy a new computer, and pulled the trigger. Ka-pow! Three hours later the old iBeast had a new brain. It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s aaaalllliiiiiiiive!
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