So a month or more on and there has been another development in my saga.
I’ve been using the repaired iMac solidly since I got it back and all has been working as expected. Then suddenly it started to lose power. It would literally just shutdown without warning sometimes lasting for hours and others lasting minutes. I took it back to Apple who kept it for a couple of days to stress test it and they called me yesterday to say it had not failed at all. Wow!
I have no idea what is going on here and neither does Apple. I’ve tried it with multiple operating systems, safe mode, recovery mode and it fails in every situation for me. The only thing I’ve been unable to try is the power cable but I think its a long shot to say that’s it.
On a positive note, they have made an interesting proposition. They have offered to refund my original repair and said my iMac is worth £380 as a buyback. That would give me around £950 towards something else. So I think I’m going to take this offer. Unfortunately the new 27" iMacs I’ve been waiting for haven’t surfaced yet so I think I’m going to replace my very old 2013 MacBook Pro and use that as a main machine until the iMac’s are released.
Now I need to go and research docks though as I’m going to need one with only two ports on the Macbook Pro.