Resurrecting this thread a bit as I’ve encountered several shows recently where Flame Artists working on iMacs have had major hardware failures and have been really, really screwed. iMacs are beautiful machines and I’ve owned several. But, they aren’t exactly amazing at dealing with prolonged heat and dust. You can’t open up the case and blow all the cat and dog hair and dust out. That and the prevalence of machine learning tools taxing the gpu heavily, and, well, it’s only a matter of time before catastrophic logic board failures put you at the Genius Bar in tears.
Always have a backup machine.