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27" iMac apparently died last night. . .

aliensporebomb

aliensporebomb

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 19, 2005
1,912
332
Minneapolis, MN, USA, Urth
So last night at about 4 a.m. a thunderstorm entered the area and my wife woke me and suggested I power down all the computers in our office in case a lightning strike causes a power spike.

I blearily stumble to the office and shut down her windows machine, her iMac and then my iMac 27" and once everything had shutdown normally I unplugged the surge suppressors to the AC current and went back to bed.

In the morning I reconnected the surge suppressors, powered up her windows pc, the 21" iMac on her desk and then proceeded to my own machine.

Reconnect the surge suppressor, connect the computer to it - verify power is getting to the suppressor and press the power button on the computer.

Nothing. Tried resetting the SMC and no joy. No lights, power or sound.

Took the memory access door off and insured the ram was seated properly. It was but pressed them a little more firmly into the slots - there wasn't much in the way of dust but blew out with air duster anyway.

I let the computer sit on the desk while at work with no AC power attached and tried again. Nothing. Well that was unexpected.

Here apparently are my choices:
-My applecare ran out 2 years ago
-it's a corei7 imac 2009 with 16 gigs of ram
-I'm still pretty pleased with the performance but this is a crossroads.

-I can bring it in to the apple store for potential repair action but since it's
most likely power supply or motherboard it's going to be $$$

-This could be more spendy than I expect if it's power supply/motherboard and video card. If I did take a voltage spike I could be replacing more than one component internally.

-I can look at another i7 iMac (a refurb in all likelihood)

-I ended up spending a great deal of expendable income on my replacement
external hard drive array (5TB) just last week.

-So any solution is going to have to wait a while.

I'm pretty much all set up Mac for my recording studio stuff so going Windows while a huge change of gears would mean retooling pretty much every piece of software I own. So I'm thinking of still staying Mac.

But I'm concerned that the last two Macs I've had have not lasted as long as the first two I had. I get 5 years out of them or just under and wham. Done.

Anyway. Thoughts?
 
aliensporebomb said:
so last night at about 4 a.m. A thunderstorm entered the area and my wife woke me and suggested i power down all the computers in our office in case a lightning strike causes a power spike.

I blearily stumble to the office and shut down her windows machine, her imac and then my imac 27" and once everything had shutdown normally i unplugged the surge suppressors to the ac current and went back to bed.

In the morning i reconnected the surge suppressors, powered up her windows pc, the 21" imac on her desk and then proceeded to my own machine.

Reconnect the surge suppressor, connect the computer to it - verify power is getting to the suppressor and press the power button on the computer.

Nothing. Tried resetting the smc and no joy. No lights, power or sound.

Took the memory access door off and insured the ram was seated properly. It was but pressed them a little more firmly into the slots - there wasn't much in the way of dust but blew out with air duster anyway.

I let the computer sit on the desk while at work with no ac power attached and tried again. Nothing. Well that was unexpected.

Here apparently are my choices:
-my applecare ran out 2 years ago
-it's a corei7 imac 2009 with 16 gigs of ram
-i'm still pretty pleased with the performance but this is a crossroads.

-i can bring it in to the apple store for potential repair action but since it's
most likely power supply or motherboard it's going to be $$$

-this could be more spendy than i expect if it's power supply/motherboard and video card. If i did take a voltage spike i could be replacing more than one component internally.

-i can look at another i7 imac (a refurb in all likelihood)

-i ended up spending a great deal of expendable income on my replacement
external hard drive array (5tb) just last week.

-so any solution is going to have to wait a while.

I'm pretty much all set up mac for my recording studio stuff so going windows while a huge change of gears would mean retooling pretty much every piece of software i own. So i'm thinking of still staying mac.

But i'm concerned that the last two macs i've had have not lasted as long as the first two i had. I get 5 years out of them or just under and wham. Done.

Anyway. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

rip
 
I assume you tried plugging the iMac into another AC power outlet, preferably one on the wall rather than on the surge unit. Also reseat the power cable into the back of the iMac.
 
Yep

Yes, I brought it to an outlet and disconnected and reconnected the power cable.

It appears to be the CPU.

When I tried it this morning on a third outlet it's in a super quiet part of the house and I could hear nothing going on inside the machine when I tried pressing the power button.

No fans, hard drive spinning or the like.
 
If you shut it down and unplugged it, I doubt it's anything lightning related. Since you're not getting any power at all, I'd go with the power supply picking a good time to crap out. :|

Hope resolution to the problem comes easily!
 
Update

It was the power supply.

Since my iMac was out of warranty I was able to get it replaced for around $110 total parts and labor USD. Not bad considering I was already starting to price out potential replacement machines. Everything is working great so I think I'm good for the foreseeable future. Knock on wood.

A housemate living with us ended up having PC problems too so it wasn't limited to just the iMac here. Bad storms!
 
Glad it worked out so inexpensively, if it was storm related, I recommend perhaps a better surge protector/
 
$110 is pretty good considering the labor. A nice regular tower power supply is in the $60-80 range, so.. yeah. Glad to hear all is well :)
 
Considering it's a machine which you appear to love and probably cost at least $2000 to start with, $110 was very good :) Glad everything worked out.

You've got to love Apple though. My late 2009 MacBook's screen and trackpad went after a storm (I was too late to unplug) and even though I wasn't under Applecare I received a whole new top case, trackpad, and even the RAM (one of the modules had died apparently) for $200. I was pretty pleased then.
 
Too bad they don't repair any more. Replacing ≠ repairing. Usually only a 0.1$ component in the PSU dies. ;)
 
Yep

thesimplelogic said:
Considering it's a machine which you appear to love and probably cost at least $2000 to start with, $110 was very good :) Glad everything worked out.

You've got to love Apple though. My late 2009 MacBook's screen and trackpad went after a storm (I was too late to unplug) and even though I wasn't under Applecare I received a whole new top case, trackpad, and even the RAM (one of the modules had died apparently) for $200. I was pretty pleased then.
Click to expand...

Yep, it's been a good unit for me and the hyperthreading on the i7 gives me faux 8-core performance when using audio and video applications. If I get another year or two out of it it will have been worth it.

Yeah, Apple does do things right occasionally. When my G5 had a coolant leak they basically replaced everything except the outer case and I didn't have to spend a penny since I was still under Applecare.

In this case, my i7 iMac had been out of Applecare for maybe a year.
 
aliensporebomb said:
It was the power supply.

Since my iMac was out of warranty I was able to get it replaced for around $110 total parts and labor USD. Not bad considering I was already starting to price out potential replacement machines. Everything is working great so I think I'm good for the foreseeable future. Knock on wood.

A housemate living with us ended up having PC problems too so it wasn't limited to just the iMac here. Bad storms!
Click to expand...

Just saw this thread, and was going to suggest the power supply.

The power supply on my first Mac Mini (2005) got a hard time, living in an apartment with very poor, and highly variable mains voltage. At the end of the line, there were times that it was not enough to kick fluorescent tube into luminance. I had a UPS, as does everybody around these parts, but it was a basic model. It had surge control, but not AVR. It failed once, out of warranty, but the supplier repaired it free of charge. Eventually it's death knell was a surge that knocked out the power to millions of houses in the South of the (third world) country.

I replaced it with a better UPS late in 2008, with AVR. I also installed an earth system. About the same time the mains supply was upgraded. I still have that UPS, and replaced the battery in it for the second time late last year.

A few months prior my Mini was getting a bit dicky. It was OK if I left it on, but switched off it took minutes, then hours, then a whole day before it could be switched on again….. I figured the problem was with the power supply.

Eventually the HDD failed about mid 2009. Replacing it, the power supply, and some other things would have run to nearly half the cost of a new Mini…… and being G4, it was already obsolete.

A new 2009 Mini was purchased forthwith, set up. and back to work within an hour. Fortunately I had backed up my main files the week before, so lost little in the process…….. And I'm still using that, with Time Machine back-ups. It may not be cutting edge, but it is is still far from obsolete.
 
Last edited:
Glad it worked out to be just the Power Supply.

I had the same thing happen a couple weeks ago to my 27" late 2012 iMac. It was just a couple months out of the 12-month warranty. Unfortunately what they thought was the Power Supply for about $110 became a failed logic board for about $800. I was not happy.

I always use my American Express credit card to double the manufacturer's warranty of any higher priced items. I had filed a claim on that but asked them to hold off as I had also contacted Apple about by disappointment on a product failing so soon.

At the end of the day, Apple took care of me and all is good.
 
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