Here is a tale of woe. I'm not crying foul, or expecting sympathy or anything of that sort. I just wanted to express on a forum how disappointed I am with Apple's quality control on their 2012 27" iMac.
Oh, and none of the replacement iMacs experienced the terrible buzzing noise of my first one, so that's something at least.
It's just a shame, the whole thing. The 2012 27" iMac is simply fantastically powerful. That Apple managed to stuff an Intel 3770 CPU, a 680MX 2GB GPU, PSU, RAM, several drives etc, and have it cooled by just one extremely quiet fan (in normal use) is a testament to fantastic design. It's a shame the LCD panel is by far (to me at least) the weakest link in the whole setup.
I can't speak for other people, but I'd be happy paying several hundred dollars more to guarantee a higher quality panel.
I really hope nobody else has to go through the nightmare of iMac exchanges. Thankfully my boot OS is on a Thunderbolt SSD, so I didn't have to spend hours reinstalling my OS. Just connect my drive and away I went! Still, lugging an iMac back to the store over and over was not my idea of fun.
Thanks for reading.
I went through a bunch of iMac replacements and was banned... Awesome, right? https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1578437/