steve stutman wrote:
Hi Brad,
Trade lunch at Punjab for the blue imac.
The original (A & B? *) blue imacs had a problem with the flyback transformer
failing after a few years of service, by which time they weren't 'worth'
repairing. I believe many of them were tossed rather than repaired. Whether
that's enough to make them 'rare', considering the large quantity produced
would be the question, but functioning original iMacs may become hard to find
at some point.
I spent a couple hundred bucks to repair mine a few years ago when the repair
cost was about the same as the resale value. Apple wouldn't sell just the
flyback transformer, and I had to fight with the shop to just sell me the
reconditioned monitor board without having to pay them to install it.
The ten-year anniversary of the imac was just a couple of months ago
("On-topic").
(* Monitor board is mounted vertically inside a metal cage along the left side
of the CRT, rather than horizontally below the CRT in subsequent versions.)