Well, recently I had a bit of bad luck with my lovely 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac. In a good-bad-good karma story I will tell you about my experience fixing my broken white 24″ iMac with a series of photos and walkthrough of the disassembly and the inverter itself. I hope this helps someone. For the impatient non-readers, skip to the bottom for photos…
I bought the iMac in November of 2006 as the last revision of the line before the new Aluminum ones were released. I had never purchased a Mac before, and I purchased it at Future Shop and then never purchased the Applecare extended warranty. So I pick up the huge iMac box and a few other smaller things from Future Shop and head to the till. The clerk at the till had seemed flustered for whatever reason and he was talking with another employee at the same time. I reached behind me and grabbed a couple of pops from the cooler while he was ringing everything through. I was in a hurry as my wife and baby boy were waiting in the mall and - I knew - running out of patience with my Future Shop visit, so I was also putting out fires by talking to her on the cell phone telling her I will only be a couple more minutes. I snagged the receipt from the clerk, and he bagged everything and I left.
So I get home, and wanted to check the cost I paid for a cordless phone that I had also bought at the same time. Upon reviewing the receipt, I saw that the clerk had not run through the iMac on the receipt thus not charging me $2100 for the device! What the ?!
…I sat for about 3 minutes thinking to myself what the average person would do in this situation. For me there was no choice but to call the store and advise them of the error and get them to charge my Mastercard. I called them and they were incredulous that I would report such a thing… “Wouldn’t anyone?”, I thought to myself. I am a believer in karma and to me, this was a no-brainer way to stock up on such essentials for any future withdrawls I may require.
Long story short, I figured I would be in good karmic stead for the near future. Fast forward to two months after my warranty expired in the beginning of January 2008, and I am happily working at my iMac one day when the monitor suddenly goes black. Hmmm - maybe a problem with the PRAM? Reset that, still no go…
This begins my research and hunt for what exactly could have failed on my iMac. I am a computer technician and was going to get to the bottom of this. I could hear the computer was still on, and powering it off and on again seemed to sound normal - I could hear the hard drive whirring, and disk access sounds were consistent with normal operation. Trying target disk mode from another computer worked as well. A call to my local Apple dealer’s technician told me that this indicated that my main logic board was fine, and it would maybe then be the video card or the screen itself. Plugging an external monitor to the iMac proved it wasn’t the video card as that worked fine. With a spare screen I had to use temporarily, and tried the OSX Control program called SwitchResX. It advised me that there were no problems with my monitor… What’s going on here?
Thus I began to research online to find out whether anyone else had the same problems with their computers. A lot of research led me to the possibility that this thing called an Inverter that supplies converted high voltage AC to the LCD panel for the backlight, may be broken. Symptoms include: black screen, but normal activity on the screen only seen when shining a bright light on the screen while moving windows. Check! That was it! I was now fairly certain that my inverter board was shot.
I called Apple and found that this part would set me back a grand?!?! Nice - so on to EBay and Craigslist I went. I had little success there and so my only option was to offer my iMac with a broken inverter to anyone who would want it for parts or possibly have a broken iMac they could sell me. I felt my chances were slim and none. So much for my good karma…
Then one day I received an email from a generous helpful individual responding to my Craigslist ad who was a Mac technician in a small store locally. He advised he had a matching iMac with a broken screen (close encounter with a baseball…) and he may be able to sell me the inverter to try. A couple calls later, he gave me the inverter to try, and I threw it into the back of the LCD panel and plugged ‘er in…
Gold Jerry, Gold.
It worked like a charm. He only wanted a hundred bucks for the board which is a steal for me. I was a little hesitant to try because some of the components on the other board were located in different positions from my board. Everything else appeared to be the same. It was like one was a Rev B, the other a Rev A - that was what I felt when looking at the numbers on the boards.
What follows are some photos I took of the disassembly of the iMac and LCD panel along with side by side photos of the inverters. I hope this helps someone else in their quest to fix their broken 24″ white iMac. May you never have any problems like this. What really sucks is that this hardware is still fairly new and thus there is not a lot of parts out there in the used market, and Apple’s outrageous prices are strategically stratospherically high to drive the used Mac computer market. It’s a good strategy from a business point of view, but it really sucks from a customer support point of view.
Again - note that I found that the two inverters were not the same. You can see in the pictures that the orientation of the coils (and a few other things) are different on the two inverters. Nevertheless, it all worked out perfectly when hooked up. (There were seven panel connectors, one inverter cable connector, and one other small LCD connector.)
If this article helped you get out of a bind, consider buying me a Starbucks Americano with the button below!
Enjoy the photos! You can follow the captions of the photos in order and it should step you through the process with enough detail, but PLEASE view all the images before you start this process!
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