Our family iMac has been ill for quite a while now. About a year ago I noticed it rebooting randomly; we would come back to the machine after not using it for a while and it would be at the login screen. It was annoying but not tragic. Then the hard drive went out last month and I started looking around. It turns out that the power module was going bad and throwing a "AppleSMU: shutdown cause -110" error in the system logs. The bad thing is that this is a hardware problem and it's probably expensive. :( The good thing is that it's covered under a recall and we have a new Apple store in town. :)

I took it to the Genius bar last night and Wil knew right away what was wrong with it. He took my information, chatted about the problems with the iPhone, and even gave me an insiders tip on what Steve Jobs was going to introduce at MacWorld next week (hint: It's a new line of Apple branded clothing*). After all the paperwork was finished Wil took my iMac to the back room and told me they would call when it was ready to pick up.

According to the paperwork I was given, this problem normally costs over $600 to fix. But I was getting it for free. On a 4 year old computer! WOW!!

*NOTE: I'm 99% sure Wil was pulling my leg with the clothing thing, but you can never be sure what the Steve is going to pull out of his magic bag of tricks.