Dead pixel on my new 24″ iMac

I bought a new 24″ iMac last week, and it arrived on Friday. It worked flawlessly for the first day, but on Saturday, I noticed a pixel at the top of the screen about in the middle that was stuck magenta.

A lot of things I was reading said that because the pixel was a color, it was a “stuck” pixel. This would possibly be fixable by one of those programs that flashes different colors really fast.

I ran LCDtest which is a really simple program which just turns the entire screen a color: white, red, green, blue and black each time you press the right arrow. When the entire screen was supposed to be green, there was a black spot, but the spot did not appear in the red or blue screens. This tells me that it is not in fact a stuck pixel, but a dead pixel! And pixels don’t come back from the dead.

After talking to AppleCare on the phone, they pretty much told me that flaws in LCDs are common, and had to be expected, and they would not replace the computer. I was not convinced. I made an appointment with a Mac Genius at my “local” apple store (a two hour drive from my house) and went there this morning. I told him the problem, he took out my computer and turned it on, and then promptly gave me a new one!

So I am a happy camper again!

I bought a firewire hard drive the same size as my iMac’s, and backed up my iMac’s hard drive to it before I took it to the store. When I got my replacement back home, I was able to copy everything back, so I didn’t even have to reinstall my programs! I did this from the terminal (meaning I can make this script run every night to always have a copy of my hard drive at hand) with the “asr” command:

sudo asr restore --noprompt --erase --source /dev/disk0s2 --target /dev/disk1s3

Things to take away:

• I bought my iMac online, but since I did not customize it at all, I was able to exchange it in the store.
• Apple Care over the phone does NOT have the last word in the matter. They plainly told me they could not exchange my computer.
• The pixel was not dead when I took the computer out of the box. It showed up the second day. This means verifying that there are no dead pixels while you are in the store is not necessarily the end of the story.