I was thinking of buying a new iMac in October when they have Leopard out, but I'm reading a lot of posts where some of the iMacs are freezing up, and the only way to "unfreeze" them is to use the power button and turn it off. I was just wondering if there are a lot of iMacs users that are still experiencing this, or has this been resolved?
Yeah, it is frustrating. Most things that don't work out of the box fall into that category.
The engine in my wife's brand new car (brand/model not important) blew up within days when a fuel injector stuck open, filling a cylinder and blowing the rod into the oil pan. But we didn't run around town with a loudspeaker truck proclaiming all cars ever made by XXX car manufacturer are horrible products.
However, there is a point to this analogy which is the one valid complaint all of you have: Apple's silence. There is no doubt that it is the one thing that is most frustrating.
When our engine blew up, my wife called the dealer who immediately sent a tow truck. After determining the cause, they did indeed say "We've never seen this before". But they acknowledged the problem and gave her the choice of a new engine or a whole new car.
I have no doubt that if Apple had actually acknowledged the existence of the problem and issued occasional assurances that a problem is being worked on (something beyond a single vanilla non-informative statement), along with directing Applecare to acknowledge its existence, the frustration level would be much lower.
What is missing here is not so much a resolution, but just Apple treating its faithful (and switchers) with the same loyalty Apple has always received from its faithful.
So I'd go a little easy on the attitude when a switcher vents at a company which so far has only reminded him of where he came from.
I just had to return my 20 inch, 2.4 ghz iMac. I had owned it for less than 24 hours. It was not a useful system at all. Just constant random crashes. They started when our ten year old was using Photo Booth. Great program on a terrible machine. Usually, the screen would freeze, the mouse would move, but the system was otherwise 100% nonresponsive. This did not clear up at all with time.
After I spoke to the Apple folks on the Apple care line, I started getting crashes to a black screen. Just starting a program produced this on a couple of occasions. When I took the machine back to the Apple Store, the guys there at first said that they hadn't had these issues yet, but eventually acknowledged that there were a lot of posts about it on the internet. I suspect the entire generation of these iMacs are just broken, but it is just getting some attention now because most iMac users are home users. Business users could not put up with the absurd instability of the iMac as long as home users can before sounding the alarm.
If you can return your iMac, I really think you are best off doing that. There is no sense in owning the Edsel of computers. I think that the iMac problems are going to get worse not better until there is a fix at the manufacturing end. And I don't see that change any time before Christmas.
