Yes, once again, this morning as I woke my Panther-addled iMac from sleep, it presented me with Apple’s version of the Blue Screen of Death. But is it entirely Panther’s fault or is aging hardware to blame?

As promised, I will report on all Panther crashes and get the word out. It’s been 23 days since the last crash, which sounds good until you compare it to the record of zero crashes that Jaguar set.

I’ve been having another problem with my iMac, though, that makes me wonder whether Panther is simply exposing something that started to go wrong earlier. My iMac has forgotten about its Firewire ports. It won’t recognize either of them. Yes, I’ve zapped the PRAM numerous times (including waiting for four successive chimes), have gone into Open Firmware and done reset-nvram and reset-all, have left it unplugged from the wall overnight, have even tried resetting the PMU several times. Those ports are gone, baby. From what I hear both from friends and from the local Apple specialist, this probably indicates a real hardware problem that will probably have to be remedied by replacing the whole logic board.

I have a friend who kept getting Apple’s Charcoal Gray Bezel of Corporeal Expiration, but stopped getting it after he replaced the memory in his computer. So it’s possible that I have a latent hardware problem that Panther exacerbated. But it’s also easy to suspect that Panther vandalized the sensitive parts of my iMac’s logic board with a feline-themed overdose of voltage, or the like. I mean, this is a four-year-old iMac (400 MHz G3 iMac DV SE, Graphite), but is that really that old for a computer? My experience of Apple computers so far is that they are built to last.

I hate taking my computer into the shop because then it’s gone for 1-2 weeks, and I rely on my home computer daily, so unless it’s a catastrophic failure I tend to put that kind of trip off. In fact, what I plan to do is eventually buy a new computer, transfer all my stuff to it, then take this iMac into the shop, get its logic board fixed, then bequeath it to the kids. Great plan, if expensive.

So what’s going on here? Is this just the ageless forces of entropy at work, the same inexorable process that wrinkles my face and grays my hair, or is it an insanely great, planned-obsolescence, forced-upgrade, new-software-wrecks-old-hardware, guaranteed-stream-of-revenue, Machiavellian marketing plan that makes users grimace and Wall Street grin? Either way, I’m getting a new computer sometime soon.