I finished work early on Friday and headed across London to the very lovely Apple Store on Regents street.

I was standing around for waiting for the usual email checking foreign student to clear off so I could have a last confirmatory play with a 20” iMac when a member of staff approached me. Upon finding out that I wanted to buy something rather than merely access Hotmail he immediately removed Sebastian from the iMac – hurrah.

Now, I don’t know if his name was actually Sebastian but since the greatest advert ever was taken off the air they’ll always be Sebastian (‘all hair gel and fancy loafers’) to me.

Anyway, I played with the iMac, established that extra RAM wasn’t needed and handed over my credit card.

I hadn’t realised how heavy a G5 iMac would be and so got a taxi to the station although the walk from the platform at my home station resulted in very sore hands.

I spent the evening loading up all my data and settings and re-installing OS X onto my old Mac Mini for which eBay beckons. Only once that I had finished did I start to realise that the iMac was rather loud. I can accept some fan noise and air noise and the G5 needs air moving as it runs very hot but one of the fans makes a really nasty noise. A bloody shame and annoyance.

This morning I phoned Apple Care as I’d splashed out on the extra warranty and support. It took ages to get through and deal with the very slow and almost incoherent call handler (I think his name was Sebastian) but I finally established that somebody would come to my house tomorrow and try to fix the iMac if they couldn’t they would take it away.

“Excellent” I thought that should be nice and easy. That is until that is the company that carry out the repairs called me. They informed me that actually all they do is send out a courier and that I would be without the iMac for 9 working days.

I called Apple Care back and the chap I spoke to (not Sebastian this time) explained that Apple tells them one thing but reality is different. Luckily I can return my iMac within 14 days.

So Apple Care is worthless and my iMac is noisy and is heading back to the Apple Store tomorrow for a full refund.

I pick up a new iMac from my local John Lewis on Thursday as I figure that if it goes wrong they are at least local and even better I get a 2 year warranty for free.