As you may have heard by now, many of Apple’s new 27-inch iMacs are more like iLemons. While the systems themselves are fine (and fast) there have been a ton of reports about problems with the screens (including mine and at least one other TechCrunch writer). Apple issued an update on December 21 that did not fix the problem for most of those users. Today, they have issued another update — so far, so good.
While the December 21 update was titled “27-inch iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0,” this new update is called “27-inch iMac Display Firmware Update 1.0.” A slight variation, but a big one, as this apparently is altering the display firmware itself rather than that of the graphics card. This update is also about half the size of the previous one. As with the other update, this takes a few minutes to install.
Earlier today, it was reported that Apple was halting production of the 27-inch iMacs until it could solve the issues afflicting the line. Aside from the screen flickering issue, other iMacs apparently have a yellow-tinting problem. As reports of troubles kept piling in, indications were that Apple was seeing long wait times for the devices, which some attributed to popularity, while others attributed to these problems.
The Apple Discussions forum on the topic now has some 271 pages (up from 191 a couple weeks ago) of comments/complaints and over 500,000 views (up from 400,000 a few weeks ago). It has more views than all the other threads combined — by far. Apple still has yet to say officially what the problem is with the product, and why the original update didn’t fix the issue. Hopefully this update will once and for all.