Thanks for your calm and constructive words Samsara. The thing that kicked me into getting a Mac Pro this summer was in part my G5 Quad overheating.
Unfortunately 800 numbers in the USA do not work from the UK (which is awkward as so often support operations only give out such numbers). As calling the USA from England will be expensive (especially so if there are long waiting times), is there any way that I could write to anyone? Of course just listing the facts and leave any passion out.
Yes the machine seems to be in the hands of Apple UK's repair service. I am left unsure whom I'm meant to be dealing with, I assumed AppleCare. Unfortunately there has been no back and forth with AppleCare, it is all communication attempts from my side and no follow up from AppleCare.
There is an Apple Store about 30 miles away, I was ready to take the machine up there, but the AppleCare guy told me that if I paid £195 I would get on-site repair, otherwise immediate pickup and faster turn around. He seems to have had no idea Apple UK service facilities carry no spares and don't do on-site repairs. Pick-up for Saturday (a week ago) did not happen and was delayed until the end of Tuesday. I was left taking days holiday (even missed significant things, but that's not Apple's fault, it just gives some sense of how serious getting repair going was to me) for pick-ups that never happened.
Well having re-calibrated my expectations from 1 day to 1 week, now as I look at the next week and worry about Christmas calling a halt to any repairs, I do feel that a new machine is not unreasonable. This will let Apple get on with doing whatever they want with that dead machine. I can't see why if that machine died so ruinously as it did, any others aren't headed that way too, not to say it will happen but that Apple might be interested to do an autopsy on that machine.
The way you phrase things I'm left thinking that I should be grateful that Apple has maybe done a lot of work on the machine. From my perspective, that machine was kept very clean and babied here (apart from suffering the audio/heating issues), was almost new, so any manufacturing failure or design flaw that lead to complications doesn't accrue blame on me. Besides 99% of the time taken and cost to me has been for Apple doing nothing, not collecting, not working on it, not stocking spares, not communicating, ...
On the subject of Apple doing work for me, they have my telephone number and could easily phone anytime, or post information/progress reports on their
https://support.apple.com/repairstatus/site. Being left in the dark, effectively unemployed ... is what is somewhat peeving. To lose one's work machine and be cut off like this, is like going to the office to find the front door slammed shut with no explanation why. OK again not Apple's fault that this slow and awkward repair is crushing for me, but one could say that Apple should be flattered that I placed so much trust in them. This too is being radically re-calibrated.
If the way Apple works is that a new system could go pop anytime, and from there on one should expect to hear nothing and to do without the system for weeks, that really does change my attitude towards Apple. I don't know if any other Computer systems can offer a better support operation than this, and I thought that I had bought exactly this by paying an enormous amount of money for a loaded top of the range Mac Pro, but I will be on the look out for a new platform on which to work. For the first time I see why the Hackintosh people do what they do. If I could nip out to a local store, get another machine that is sensibly priced, install my material (including the OS if needs be) and get back to work in hours, I would do just that. I see PC laptops in the grocery store for not much more money than I paid just for priority AppleCare which has so far proved worthless.
To my mind the Mac Pro promises a huge amount. OK in OS performance there's a long way to go before the hardware is put to work efficiently and deeply, and there are some bugs to work out. But as a whole package including the realities of ownership, the Mac Pro seems to fall far short of both good value or performance.
Like buying a home where it is as well to consider what it will be like to live in and finally sell, to buy a Mac demands that we consider the nature of the support offered as part of the bundle. Not something that comes to mind when oggling a super sounding new machine, but the reality of user experience has utterly obliterated any joy of acquisition.
On my Mac Pro's failure, I've no idea what caused it and only partially look at the sound/heat issue. But I am surprised if the whole machine should be fried by a PS failure. In days of old maybe, but I'd expected far more resilience these days.
But back to what now seems joyous fun in comparison, the audio/heating issue.
As to the Nehalem being designed to run hot (hot being approaching the temp of boiling water), I do wish that Apple would be explicit and clear about operating tolerances. FWIW AppleCare seem to have no knowledge of operational temperature norms or limits, all I could glean from AppleCare/Support was if the CPU exceeds 70C the machine should be shut down immediately - which would make Mac Pros rather unusable. I put that insight down to Apple support staff just making things up.
After the G5 PowerMac heating issues, we seem to be in completely new territory heat-wise. This seems odd as I thought the move to Intel was in part because the PPC architecture was failing on heat and here we are with more cores and in general less GHz. But that's a red herring re. the audio/heat issue.
As to a crescendo of 09 Mac Pro failures, I too wouldn't think that likely. Maybe more will push their power and cooling system limits and so fail where manufacturing weaknesses exist, but I wouldn't expect that to grow over time. But I do wonder if life expectancy will be reduced. It is not just the extreme temperatures, but the rate of change of temperatures. In general I think steady state running helps reliability, heat transients in particular do the opposite. That said, why should my PS and more have failed as they did, other than "sound" I was not taxing the system. Statistics and time will tell what trends are in all this. But that is of no help in the here and now.
On storage, I was meaning speed. As processing speeds climb, so the bottleneck between our working dataset and the running environment becomes more critical. So budgeting from an entry level MacBook to a sensibly specced Mac Pro, the cost of storage will quickly surpass the cost of a MacBook (the more so if using SSDs). I was just about to embark on exploring the SSD depreciation curve (the more so with Chrome pressure) with a view to boosting paging performance.
On credit where credit due, fair point. Credit for what seems a good design, not so for support operations (from my perspective). In my own work (s/w), I've seen areas where I get more than 10x the performance on Nehalem than I did on PPC (and that before using OpenCL or GCD), a quantum leap in fixnum limits, and so on. Credit due there, and hopefully more promise to come.
But as to Apple responding to user/customer pressure, I have my doubts re. the Mac Pros. Apple is moving focus to iPhone and other areas of business away from desktop machines. Proportionately the Mac Pro is a small part of their business, so I think we should expect longer reaction times and more deafness. Besides systems get more complicated, and if things as radical as the audio and Rosetta bugs can get through the net, that rather suggests there isn't that much resource focused on the Mac Pro. But we can't tell in advance how much energy Apple will put into the 09 MPs, we'll know that looking back.
Another trouble with AppleCare-UK, is that we're left with weeks of frustration time so can rant hopelessly on the net. I'm punch drunk and running out of optimism. But if there's an audio/thermal fix soon, I must remember to credit Apple. If I ever get my PM or a substitute back, it'll be relief rather than joy.
