Time to upgrade, cont., cont.

This morning, while actually working on my new iMac, I noticed that the screen brightness was quite visibly uneven: noticeably brighter on the left third than on the rightmost two thirds.

So of course, my first reaction was: « oh fuck! Not again! ».

I really am CURSED!

After my three attempts to get a MacBook, and more recently, my new TV woes, now my brand-spanking new iMac!

I went googlin’, only to discover that this is a widespread problem, with some saying that pretty much all aluminium iMacs are affected to some degree.

In my last post, I said that even with the brightness turned all the way down, the screen is too bright. Well, I must have had something with a white background on the left side of the screen when I wrote that, because on the right side, it’s bearable.

Furthermore, when the brightness is all the way up, it’s less noticeable, but that’s probably just because the screen is too bright to look at!!!

Sooo, what to do? I’m going to go check out some iMacs on display where I bought mine, to see if there’s a difference, and if so, I might risk exchanging mine… Sigh… If they are all like that, then I don’t know what the alternative might be, because there really isn’t another model that I would want and/or could afford right now. It’s otherwise a sweet deal with a lot of memory and storage for the price…

Apple makes great computers, but the quality of the components are obviously lacking 🙁

For now, I’ve at least found a solution for the overall excessive brightness. I installed a small preference pane called Shades that can darken the screen (presumably by overlaying a semi-opaque image over it…). Crude but effective… (In fact, users are asking the developer to add the option to overlay a gradient image to counteract the unevenness of the iMac screen!)

In the meantime, I can always look at the iMac’s backside, which is quite stunning…