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On Monday I took my 27″ iMac in to have its optical drive replaced. While at the Partridge Creek Apple Store Genius Bar being repaired the techs noticed that a fan wasn’t behaving as it should, so they replaced that as well. When I picked it up today everything seems fine, except there’s now a small smudge in the upper left corner of the screen (seen above) and a thin smudge line across the main panel a few inches below that. Both of these appear to be on the LCD itself, which is located just behind the flat glass front.
I’m a bit disappointed, but I may end up just cleaning this myself as removing the glass to access the inside of a late-model iMac is apparently not particularly complicated. I’ll need to do this myself in the future if I ever want to upgrade the hard drive, so I may as well buy some small suction cups now and do it.
When I took my MacBook in to be repaired it came back with a big sticky mark across the screen where they’d taped the job sheet to the device. I pointed this out to the Genius and he had a rub at it with a screen wipe but the mark is still there.
Be sure to take photos of your iMac bein opened :-)
(ps: typing on the iPad is so much nicer than poking away at other devices’ touchscreen keyboards. I can hit full typing speed and not mistype)
So… did you ever find out what that smudge [on your iMac] was caused by? Did you find out if there is anything that can be done about it?
-I’m curious because I’ve started to see similar phenomena in several LCD panels used within my company — where we always “pamper” our equipment and treat things (such as LCD panels) with due respect. I’ve searched throughout the Internet and I haven’t seen an intelligent analysis (or reasonably responsible technical response) about the causality of this.
My own thinking [and I am just an extremely over-educated, extremely experienced engineer) is that there is a mechanical component to the damage — meaning: something caused an abrasion of some sort to a component of the LCD panel (whether or not that meant “bruising” or “damaging” the LCD element itself, I don’t know; or, if it truly is something as simple as a smudge of dust, again, I don’t know).
Of course, when you know specifcally what causes something, you can make intelligent decisions to do something about it.
Gerald: No, I didn’t find out for sure. However, I definitely know that it was something in the panel itself. When I took it back the result was my getting a new iMac. I can’t help but suspect that a tech there didn’t do so well with his work and (again) damaged the iMac so severely that it required a new mainboard. Whoever had worked on it also did a terrible job removing fingerprints from both the LCD itself and the inside of the screen.
Since the machine had to have its fan replaced as well I’m guessing that either someone left the LCD sitting to the side and dropped something on it, or didn’t take due care in opening and closing the machine.