Apple iMacs iLemon Review

Regular readers will know my affinity for Apple products. In general, they’re high quality, and I’m willing to pay a bit more for that. But a lemon is a lemon, regardless of who it’s made by, and must be labeled as such. These new 27-inch iMacs? Lemons.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the screens on these massive things are failing left and right. Granted, not all of them seem to be
affected, but 110 pages worth of support questions/rants on Apple’s Support page for the issue tells me the problem is pretty widespread. That’s 1,640 replies, so far. And that thread has been viewed an incredible 264,630 times. The next closest recent page with that many views has 26,852 — and guess what? It’s also about a problem with the 27-inch iMac screen.

Two days ago, Apple issued a fix for the issue. The only problem? The fix doesn’t appear to work.

It did look like the fix was working for a little while, but today I’m back with the same constant flickering and random screen shutoffs that have plagued many of us. It basically makes the machine unusable. The support board is already filling up with users who applied the fix and still have the same problem. And, in fact, the only other TechCrunch writer with the new 27-inch iMac also has had the same issue and the fix hasn’t worked for him either.



Earlier this month, it was reported that Apple was delaying further shipments of the 27-inch iMacs until it could get to the bottom of the screen issue. Many believed the fix two days ago was the solution, but it’s not. And so Apple appears to have a very big problem on its hands, literally. If I have to send this bad boy back, it will be the second time I’ve done so. The first time, it shipped to me with a crack in the screen. A problem which is also not an isolated one.

Perhaps you read about how the FDA delayed the replacement one because it thought it was a piece of fruit. I was mad, but I shouldn’t have been. The truth is, these new iMacs are a piece of fruit. They’re lemons.