Q: Curious on how many Mac Pro (Late 2013) are defective?

I have to agree that these computers are a flawed design and components. I've been working on macs for years and have never had the problems that theses mac pros have. I'm on my second one of these and the problems persist. They replaced my first one when they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it and now I'm bringing the replacement in for multiple repairs.

I've been on the phone with Apple WAY too often regarding these machines. I've run through physical repairs and all the permutations of how to get it up and running at home. All with no results. When you talk to them on the phone they don't really seem to care much about your problem. "Bring it in to the Apple Store again and we will repair it" they tell me on the phone. Not an easy feat for me as the closest one is 150 miles away. How many times does this have to go on before Apple seriously addresses it?

SynGatesFan200 wrote:

 

Hey everyone

 

So i'm in a bit of a trouble with my mac pro (late 2013). One night i noticed my mac pro was acting very strange, I was getting screen tearing, random reboots, frozen graphics, weird error messages... etc. I had no idea what was going on and I did literally EVERYTHING to get it fixed. I have tried:

Mac Pro's do not have screens, I think it is a Macbook (of some kind)

By screen tearing I think he means the when doing thinks like scrolling a page the page does not uniformly scroll, one side lags the other side so it looks like the image is tearing. I originally had that problem with my 2013 Mac Pro with my 4K monitor when on Mavericks but with subsequent OSX updates the tearing went away.

Wasn't sure what model he was talking about, clear now though.

Our company has four late 2013 Mac Pros purchased from MacMall in 2014. We are a HiDef/4K film post production facility that has time sensitive deliverables. It is clear to use that there is a fundamental design and quality control problems with this 4 year old product. Apple crammed too much into too small package. Aesthetics took precedence over function(and lack of expandability).

All four have had multiple hardware failures of two types in the last year. In fact, we have had one machine in for repairs at all times the last 4 months. One machine was completely replaced, and that replacement had a hardware failure.

The repeated failures have come down two two issues:

1) The partially well known AMD FirePro graphics card failure

2) The "RAM riser" failure, which is the RAM chip holder

We have had Four AMD FirePro D700 graphics card failures. Two were covered by Apples unannounced internal recall which only covers a 2 month period of manufacture - February 8, 2015 and April 11, 2015. This was later extended to cover 4 months. Two, even though they had the exact same hardware failure, were not covered by the recall because they were outside the recall period. The cost is $546 each time. Clearly, the parts failure extends beyond the recall period.

Btw, you have to know to ask about the recall or it may not be mentioned to you.

We have now had three failures of the RAM risers. One was covered under warranty repair. The other two, we had to pay (one is Apple Repair right now). These cost $1,200 each.

The repairs(and cost) aren't really the worst of the problems. It's the repeated Adobe Premiere Pro crashes and editing export/render failures that happen for weeks or months leading up to the complete parts failure that really cost man hours and money.  A 2-5 hour export that crashes three hours in and has to be repeated is brutal. And this happens all the time. And the worst part of this DESIGN/QC flaw is that the exact same Adobe Premiere Pro projects can be opened in our 1/2 the cost 27" iMac Pros and render/export without error everytime.

The lost time, man hours, energy, spent taking these machines in for repair is nothing compared to the ultimate insult Apple reserves for owners that want answers - you cannot get copies of the repair histories for your products. After the fourth repair trip, I wanted to look up everything that had been done to our MPs. I cannot access that information online via my Service Profile, even though it has a link to "Repair History". Click it, and you get a blank screen (at least, I do).

So, I requested copies of work authorizations/confirmations for each of the four machines at the Apple Store and been told by reps and managers that they cannot give those out for "privacy reasons".  Really? We are the owners of these things, what privacy would be violated? They recommended I use the chat feature on Apple's website and have them email me copies - no luck, same answer. I was referred to Apple's phone Customer Service. After 4 hours of calls, I was elevated to a senior adviser who, after reading the service contract, told me that he could find no legal reason why I cannot receive the print outs. Except.....his computer system would not let him do it. So, he told me that he would he consult his superiors and get back to me the next day.

Guess what? He said their database system would not allow anyone to print out all repair paperwork at once. He would have to submit a request for each individual work order, wait for me to receive it via email, then submit the next. Every single one, for each machine. And that this would likely take weeks and "this is going to be an absolute time consuming process" .

Now, anyone with even rudimentary experience with databases knows this is ******....unless Apple specifically had their system designed to prevent this. Which leads one to the question of why? Why would they not want anyone to get a complete repair history?

Anyway, this one year battle has so soured our company that we are considering abandoning the Apple platform...and we are an all-Apple company. We love our laptops and iMacs. But, paying $10k for machines that continually break down is insulting and infuriating. Made even worse by a company that will acknowledge that there are fundamental problems with the design and/or execution.

<Edited by Host>

I forgot to add that while we currently have one Mac Pro in at Apple having the RAM riser being replaced, another is now show signs of problems when being pushed hard inn editing projects with a decent amount of 4K content. This MP just had both D700 video cards replaced (on our dime) last month. Now, during long editing sessions, we get the spinning ball lockup and there is a 30 second hangtime until even the most basic commands/mouse clicks are executed. Not just within Adobe Premiere, but any computer function.

I'm guessing right now, but this could be temperature related. We run into this problem generally during render/exports which tend to push one, or both, GPUs pretty hard. Although, this has happened right after booting a cold system for the first time in the morning. As mentioned before, we can open the exact same project on a 27" iMac with zero problems.

I installed a demo version of iStat Friday. Adjusting the fan speed to "high" drops overall temperature of the MP 15-20 degrees, and the same at the CPU/GPUs. We'll see this week if that prevents the seizing up. The MPs are situated on the desk with clear ventilation and the rooms are generally kept at 74 degrees.

are you running the approved version of SMC firmware for those Macs (or later, if your MacPro was issued with later)?

Mac Pro

from:

About EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Mac computers - Apple Support

.

I cannot say for sure which version the Mac Pros(& iMacs) are running, right now, I'm not at the office.

But, all of them were updated to the latest version of OS X El Capitan, then the followups,(10.11.5) in the last few months and those firmware updates are included with it.

From your linked article:

"Most firmware updates are automatically installed when you update or upgrade OS X."

But, I don't think that would have prevented the outright hardware failure of the video cards or RAM risers

I was fishing for the possibility that one or several of your Mac Pro (late 2013) had somehow managed to not get the update, which some reported was for better fan control.

The comment that a fan control program lowered the internal temperatures by 20 degrees was what set that thought in motion.

Understandable line of questioning, I am also curious if the current "spinning ball" freeze is the result of overheating, which may cause the system to turn down clock speed to the level it cannot perform exports/transcode/renders.  We've had this happen on 2 of the 4 MP's - on the same Premiere project. The editors tell me it nothing unusual with regards to 4K section content

The average temp is 102-106 degrees, overall. GPUs get much higher during exports, as expected, to ~165 degrees. I think CPU is around 140 degrees at that point. I'll recheck that tonight, if I go in - average temp at idle, then during heavy export, idle with fan on high, export with fan on high. I'll get overall, CPU, GPU, PSU temps at each point.