Since 2007, we at MacKing have refurbished, repaired, bought and sold thousands of iMacs as well as supplying tens of thousands of genuine Apple parts.  The iMac is one of the best desktop machines in Apple's history, and can be broadly split into two major groups. To be technical, the thick ones and the thin ones! The thicker, earlier models shipped with built-in DVD drives and often had common graphics card issues. Thankfully, these problems are absent in the later, thinner models.  iMacs are listed below oldest to newest. iMac 24" 2008 GPU failure - A significant number of these ..read more

Since 2007, we at MacKing have refurbished, repaired, bought and sold thousands of MacBook Airs as well as supplying tens of thousands of genuine Apple parts.  A MacBook Air (MBA) is generally a well-designed and reliable machine. They're built with onboard graphics, and have no dedicated GPUs, so as a result the faults listed here are rarer than on it's bigger brother, the MacBook Pro.  MacBook Air (MBA) machines below are listed oldest to newest. MBA 13" 2008 - 2009 RAM failure - This problem manifests as the machine failing to power on while emitting a repeating 3-tone sound. Th ..read more

Going shopping? Gertrude Stein once said 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' While that's not strictly true, you can see where she was going with that. In the modern commercial world we're constantly being (over) sold shiny-brand new-all-improved items in a sleek boxes that will surely improve our lives and make us happier, more productive human beings. Right? Wrong. Sure, we're buying a product for a specific use, but we're all magpies, drawn to glittery things and are easily seduced by cosmetic appeal. I was at my local supermarket yesterday, and ended up with half a dozen 'perfectly imperfect ..read more

Since 2007, we at MacKing have refurbished, repaired, bought and sold thousands of MacBook Pros as well as supplying tens of thousands of genuine Apple parts. Great machines as these are, certain models can be dogged by particular problems. What follows doesn't claim to be an exhaustive list of faults, so please get in touch with us if you can't see your issue here. Whether your particular problem is listed below or not - we're here to help. Before diving into model specific issues, it's worth mentioning some common issues that affect multiple models:- • Graphics card failure - A graphics ..read more

Your Apple computer is not just at the centre of your life; it's also a significant financial investment. To avoid downtime, costs and a visit to a repair specialist and/or the inevitable replacement of genuine Apple parts, it's best to be aware of the most common causes of damage. 1. Gravity Benjamin Franklin famously said '... in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.' Well, Ben, I'd add gravity to that to. The hazards of gravity are most obvious with laptops. A dropped MacBook Pro or Air may result in anything from a dented case to a broken screen, as well as ..read more

How hard can it be? So you want to record your new audiobook/ podcast/ broadcast to the nation. You just get the fastest new Mac that you can afford with a built in microphone and off you pop, right? Wrong. Producing professional quality spoken word entails quite a bit more than that. Your computer is simply a tape recorder and editor. In the recording industry, a popular truism (and please excuse the crudity) is 'shit in shit out'. Thanks to powerful software tools, that isn't quite as true as it used to be, but still and all you want to capture the best quality audio possible from the ou ..read more

Pre-loved When buying anything, one appears to have just two choices - 1/ Brand spanking new, box fresh with a guarantee from a (hopefully) trusted source. With an Apple machine, that will inevitably be Apple, so trust is a given. 2/ Secondhand - pre-owned, pre-loved, or any number of dressed up terms to describe 'used'. The problem is one of trust and the relative values attributed to those terms. Who on earth are you buying from? Is it used or abused? Is a complete stranger's definition of 'love' similar to yours? Is you new-old Mac ever going to show up (in one piece)? As a seasoned eBa ..read more

The ghost of Christmas present Most of us are spending this winter of discontent wandering around the house in more clothes than usual. Many people I know have switched off their energy smart meters and are bracing themselves for eye watering fuel bills, and when we do brace ourselves to go out to the shops we're surrounded by a communal mimed muttering chorus of 'how much??!!'. In short, we're all a bit broke one way or another. I admit that the reality isn't that festive, but speak as I find. To compound things, when we find ourselves crushed between the twin retail battering rams that are B ..read more

Do you remember when you first got your MacBook Pro out of its shiny packaging? Starting it up, configuring it and inevitably updating the OS, then cracking your knuckles with the sheer pleasure of knowing that you would now approach the work ahead at warp speed? And so you did, but as time passed you gradually began working at limping pace. It got slower and slower. It used to take you to the stars, but now seems hardly capable of struggling to the corner shop. How and why did this happen?   The problem with computer sluggishness is that it quite often develops slowly over time, so we ..read more

Vector what? Software Vector Graphics (SVG) apps generate images using mathematical statements or sequences of commands that place lines in two or three dimensional spaces. Or, to put it more simplistically, they're old fashioned join-the-dots drawings. As a result of this creation method, they're often called 'geometric files'. Vector why? All well and good, but why create files in this way? Perhaps the most obvious advantage of SVG generated images is that they're scalable, including text and type. Think of, say, a company logo that you've designed on your Mac desktop. You may have desig ..read more