We know some people have been insisting that Apple's Quality Control department has been napping on the job for the past couple of years, but personally, we've always had very good luck with our Apple out-of-box experience, so we've generally cut the QC folks a little slack. Granted, in recent years it hasn't been terribly unusual for a given Mac product to have a signature "quirk" that affects some of the units rolling off the production lines; that whole fracas with those "Cube cracks" leaps to mind, for example. But even a problem as systemic as that was relatively subtle, and quite possibly not the kind of thing an inspector could reasonably be expected to notice as an affected unit is chugging by on a conveyor belt.

An Apple logo that's been torn asunder and slapped on cockeyed, however, strikes us as the kind of thing that should catch someone's eye. Faithful viewer Usonian74 tipped us off to a photo of a new iMac over at Mac OS Rumors that's just... well, it's just not right. There's supposed to be a shiny silver Apple logo on the back of the screen above the point where the LCD attaches to the stainless steel articulated arm; in the photo, however, there's a lonely silver leaf in roughly the expected position, while the rest of the apple is about two inches too low, an inch to the right, and perched at a jaunty forty-five degree angle. In short, it's messed up.

Anyone with the merest hint of Macness in his or her soul would spot such a sacrilegious perversion of our Holy Icon in an instant. Yes, we know that the logo is on the back of the screen, but shouldn't an inspector be looking at all sides of a product before it goes in the box? (We also suspect that true Macfolk can just sort of feel when the Apple logo has been somehow defaced-- it's kind of like Spider Sense, only far more useless.) Maybe we're being desperately naïve about the whole concept of inspection, but to us, a quick glance at a product from one angle doesn't exactly constitute a winning strategy for quality control. We're not suggesting that Apple subject each iMac to a rigorous all-angles fourteen-point visual inspection followed by a pass under a scanning electron microscope, a professional aura reading, and a thorough scan with a Tricorder from Star Trek. But jeez, at least take a glance at the back of the thing.

What's worse, this particular "mangled logo" issue doesn't appear to be a one-of-a-kind anomaly; MOSR reports that another iMac was spotted at an Apple retail store sporting a back-of-the-screen logo that was "located in the far left bottom corner, somewhat deformed." On the plus side, two instances is hardly an epidemic, and we're betting that errors like these are rare enough that afflicted systems might even be worth something someday. You know, kind of like when they accidentally print stamps upside-down? So take a look at the back of your iMacs, people; you may just have a collector's item on your hands.