We recently had a pretty bad experience with our iMac that had us questioning how much Apple has the bases covered on design and backup. Here is our story..

1. After a year and a month of use the hard drive in our iMac went out. The disk was a WD 500 GB Caviar drive. When we test ran the disk outside of the computer, we noticed it ran hotter than any drive we had tested previously. This was not a good drive to put in a computer.
2. The Apple Store quoted us $420 to replace the hard drive
3. We were able to remove the drive ourself, but the iMac is unnecessarily complicated to open and to work on.
4. Finaly, after we installed a new disk, Time Machine, which we had dutifly been spending computer effort to backup, completely failed to recognize the images we had created on an external drive.

Conclusion

The entire experience was  idiotic. Why all computers don’t have mirrored RAID drives standard is beyond us. Apple needs to improve the serviceability of its computers, be more careful about the heat of the drives it selects, and improve the reliability of TimeMachine.