The case and cables are of an orange cast, like the nicotine-stained fingertips of a chain smoker. It smells faintly of the congealed tar and smoke of a thousand cigarettes. But it runs. This is the new iMac (the one with the RAM issues from the previous post). And it works. The iBook apparently had a small manufacturing error, the end result of which is that the Ethernet port cracked in half. And, as a laptop, it's back to the old "everything on the motherboard" issue. Cost to replace: $600. With that as incentive, I discovered that the RAM problems on this machine were less severe than I had earlier believed. Turns out the sequence of diagnostic beeps for "RAM is fragged" are identical to the diagnostic beeps for "RAM has come unseated in shipping". Hopefully I can keep the Internet connection for longer than two days this time around.