Q: New iMac 27inch screen flickering/tearing/shutoff

OK, here are some statistics for you...
1754 posts divided by approximately 5 posts per user (including "NO" Issues posts) gives a total of 350 faulty 27" iMacs...
Alarming statistic? Hardly...
Apple Have sold thousands and thousands of 27" iMacs by now.
Happy New Year.

Russel

I see.. thanks for the feedback (or.. bedankt voor het antwoord .. in dutch )

You're right about the features, but it was just a question for people to test.
Your imac still flashes so... that one is ruled out too.

For me, it's my 3rd 27" and this one is good. I'm wondering then if it is just a "hit or miss" because if it is a production-error it must affect all of the imacs.

So i'm guessing...bad assembling or very bad transport method.

I have yet to experience a problem with a week 48 machine but I do not use either wireless or blue-tooth, nor do I ever put a machine in sleep mode. Do you think I should turn them on and see if I get a flicker?

(I guess I would prefer to know now if I have a problem.)

im a week 48'er!!!!!!!

so far no flickering....... slight yellowing....maybe!!! apart from that maybe week 48 is a time when the production line went on holiday and a few non smashed ones came out!

(oh i also had no os installed)

What, when you bought it there was no OS X???? Was there anything on the HD? I have bought 8 apple computers over the past 5 years and have never heard of anything like that.

{quote:title=atlatnesiti wrote:}OK, here are some statistics for you...
1754 posts divided by approximately 5 posts per user (including "NO" Issues posts) gives a total of 350 faulty 27" iMacs...
Alarming statistic? Hardly...
Apple Have sold thousands and thousands of 27" iMacs by now.
Happy New Year.{quote}

Yeah, because every user experiencing the problem has posted in this thread, right? The vast majority of people experiencing issues do not post about them in these forums.

hi mate,!!

yep no osx at all!! hdd was labelled up as diagnostics with nothing on it!

maybe theyd picked it off the line to check that batch or something???

i was thinking of contacting apple about it but thought.... will they give a crap?

JiminSF wrote:
{quote:title=atlatnesiti wrote:}OK, here are some statistics for you...
1754 posts divided by approximately 5 posts per user (including "NO" Issues posts) gives a total of 350 faulty 27" iMacs...
Alarming statistic? Hardly...
Apple Have sold thousands and thousands of 27" iMacs by now.
Happy New Year.{quote}

Yeah, because every user experiencing the problem has posted in this thread, right? The vast majority of people experiencing issues do not post about them in these forums.

The vast majority of people are NOT experiencing any issues and that is the the reason they do not post.

Given the amount of people that do post about this particular problem, I would say that, statistically, the number of affected machines is very high, precisely because the vast majority are not going to post about it here.
To that, you can add the fact that many of the people reporting issues are still experiencing them on their 2d or 3d replacement machine.

So, again, statistically speaking: the problem is clearly very widespread.
My i7 (8gb, 1TB) has been delivered on December 11th, it's a week 50, and so far I haven't noticed any flickering. I, however, feel that the problem is so widespread that I wouldn't really be surprised if it would eventually show up on my machine too.

This is the key point: people experiencing problems on multiple machines. All the rest of this is at best (or worse) guess work: this is not a statistical sample and there is no way this forum represents even a good cross section of new iMac 27" owners.

The way I see it, it looks like there are 25 people in this forum that have experienced flickering on three machines. Assuming QA tolerance of mulfunctioning machines of say (what?), 0.01% (fair?), that would mean the probability of some one getting 3 bad machines in a row is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 12th.)

Or better yet, the probability of 2 bad machines in a row is 1 in 100,000,000. No way Apple sold that many machines.

Even if you figure they are engineered to a QA tolerance of 0.1%, the probability of 2 bad machines in a row is 1 in 1,000,000 and 3 bad machines is 1 in 1,000,000,000.

With these odds everyone that owns a faulty iMac should be playing the lottery! I suggest this is a bigger problem that we really know. (Only Apple knows as they are logging all the calls.)

"Statistically speaking" the problem is NOT wide spread.
My i7 week 47 is perfect - delivered 5 weeks ago...

atlatnesiti wrote:
"Statistically speaking" the problem is NOT wide spread.
My i7 week 47 is perfect - delivered 5 weeks ago...

BTW; If it's faulty - return it.

I suspect the problem is much more widespread than we might think. I think a lot of people just accept it.

My new iMac 27 intel (purchased in November) was fine for several weeks, then several weeks ago, I began to notice the screen would flicker for maybe 5 minutes at a time, then stop. Recurrence seems completely random and not correlated to anything in particular I am doing - sometimes just web browsing.

I will be logging a call with Apple support, but I am not interested in changing anything until Apple has the problem in hand and a real fix available.

{quote:title=atlatnesiti wrote:}"Statistically speaking" the problem is NOT wide spread.
My i7 week 47 is perfect - delivered 5 weeks ago...{quote}
Ah, I see, because you think your machine is ok, they must generally be ok? The assertion that people with problems all post here is absurd - if anything at all, the majority call Apple support, and even more often just reboot the machine until the next time the problem returns. On top of that, as numerous people have pointed out, the odds of people getting multiple machines in a row with the defect are infinitesimal if the problem is not widespread as you assert, yet we see repeated reports of people getting two and three machines in a row with the same thing.

In any event, debating the odds of getting one of these machines with or without the problem is not really a helpful discussion, esp. where superfans who have zero data are just chiming in to say it's not widespread with no factual basis at all other than their own one machine - Apple has the real info on this and is keeping mum about it, and the only thing we know is that people are getting machines that have this multiple times in a row and that the number of reports is significant enough to have been noticed by a large segment of the community.

Chiming in from Canada...I've had my 27" i5 for a week. After a huge and very tricky migration to make sure all my pro apps were working, the blackouts and flickering started. This is my first major hardware upgrade in 5 years (migrated from a G5 dual 1.8 PPC).

My retailer sent me the link for the latest firmware update...seems to have made the problem more frequent. Big drag.

Will be watching this space for clues towards solution.