Q: Late 2006 iMac, Lines, Kernel Panic, Freeze, Reboot, Restart, Serial W8 ?

The question is not about how long Apple has to repair individual problems, the question is: Is Apple responsible for a mass production problem?
Car manufacturers are held responsible if their brakes fail because of a design problem that is not related to car usage but to faulty material, a computer has to have a reasonable guarantee to function, my idea is 5 years. That's reasonable. My machine started to show problems after one year because the Apple indroduced failures tend to show up after the one year period. These problems convert the computer (especially the W8 series) into a piece of sh...
It's also reasonable to believe that this problem affects thousands of computers of the W8 series:
- Many people replaced their computers. These people won't show up here
- Many people tried to do it the Apple way, via Genius Bar and phone
- Many people got their computers repaired by Apple Care because they paid extra for a hardware design problem. They will have the problems again
- The topic is old. It's recurrent. It has been here under different titles with different users for years.

If we only count the users that showed up within this Apple forum we can extrapolate that this is a hardware design and a hardware material problem not a usage problem or an individual problem. Extrapolation is a common practice in statistics! It's estimated knowledge about the "unknown" but assuming that the "expected" unknown has a very high probability. I would rank probability at about 99.9% for the W8 series given all the cases reported over time.

And once again: This question is not answered!

Message was edited by: maitaimai

As simply as I can put it, Discussions is not a complaint department -- period, end of story. The Help & Terms of Use make this very clear. Please study that document if you are still confused about that or why your posts were removed. Ranting, venting, or whatever you want to call it is not constructive & if that is the focus of your posts they will most likely be removed.

Discussions is for users to help each other, but just complaining to each other about this issue is not helpful. It serves no useful purpose because other users can't resolve the issue for you. They can help you estimate the number of users affected by providing the info requested in the first post, but complaining in no way contributes to that. Confine your remarks to that & they will not be removed.

Regarding your last comment, only the OP (original poster, here GaBeech) can mark a topic as answered. This has *nothing whatsoever to do* with why posts are removed or edited by the moderators. The moderators decide if a post violates the terms of use, not the OP or other users. Their decision is final. Again, if this is not clear to you, study the Help & Terms of Use.

Please remember that you agreed to obey the Terms of Use as a condition for posting to Discussions. If you can't or won't do that then you are just wasting your time (& ours) by submitting posts that will be removed & possibly result in the revocation of your privileges to post anything at all to Discussions.

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Serial Number (system): W8603

Problems (streaks, lines, smearing, colored blocks, slow performance, etc.) started a couple of years ago and have been sporadically "fixed" from usage of SMC and perhaps OS updates (currently 10.6.4) These symptoms have become more serious lately and I am worried catastrophic malfunction is immenent.
Purchased and used in USA.

Hope this helps. First tangerine iMac still works (anciently), but is very old now by electronics standards. Thought this system would too.

Same here, glitches and visual trash.
Also kernel panics and freezes.

iMac 20" Core 2 Duo, 2.16 GHz
Serial Number W8638****

C'mon Apple, do something already, our computers are getting inoperable day by day.

Message was edited by: ianos1986

I was searching for possible solutions to my problem when I stumbled upon this thread:

iMac5,1, late 2006 20"
serial W86371***
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz, ATI X1600 256MB, 3GB RAM

Graphic corruption started a while after the 3-year applecare expired early this year (original applecare was for an early-2006 iMac, which was replaced with the late 2006 model after some other problem) the machine is less than 3 years old in reality. The last repair was just before Applecare expired, to replace a dead DVD burner.

The corruption is a single multi-coloured line, usually 1000 pixel in width at most, appearing in windows of any apps (as I'm typing this it's in Safari). Usually goes away after a reboot or logout, login. This is sometimes followed by a freeze which requires hard reset (press power button till it shuts off) if I don't reboot. Realized it's a hardware fault when I started to see artifacts in games in bootcamp, but at least no freezes in windows. Neither Apple Hardware Test or TechTool shows any problem with video ram, and the occurrence of the problem does not correlate with high temperature, but it does correlate with apps that uses videocard extensively.

If this turns out to be an engineering flaw I certainly hope Apple provides a cheap fix, I don't mind a reasonable repair fee but a new replacement logic board is just too expensive.

Same problem here

Apple iMac "Core 2 Duo" 3.06 24-Inch (Early 2008)

Computer is a little over 1.5 year old. After 1 year i had intense graphic glitches then kernel panics.

Apple replaced my logic Board (for no fee, even if my warranty had expired 3 weeks ago).

Then today, a few months later, i got an instant graphic glitch, then i always get kernel panics when trying to boot.

I feel like there is a conception problem with those iMacs, i'm very disappointed. I'll try calling Apple to see if they acknowledge the problem.

Have all these problems with my Imac 24" serial W8638......

When he heats up he will become totally useless. Sometimese 10+ restarts a day. I mainly use may Macbook Pro because this "great" machine is totally useless for searious work.

I do try to watch TV on it as ou can imagine with a lot of problems.

I had reported my problems to Apple care shortly after my extended warranty had expired.
Because of this forum I decided to contact Apple again and they recommended taking it to a Genius bar.
After politely explaining my problem they offered to do a replacement on the logic board last week.
My mac has been with them for 5 days and when I called to check they said the logic board replacement had not corrected the problem and they were getting another replacement part. Currently I am still waiting to get it back. I trust they will fix the problem, but it does not seem to be a simple fix even for Apple. In my decades of being a Mac user, Apple has always treated me well. I will post an update when I get my mac back.

I had a 20" iMac late 2006 (serial QP639xxxVUV) come into my shop this weekend with exactly these symptoms. Running the Apple LCD Tester (which fills entire the screen with R, G, B, K, or W on demand) sometimes showed the streak artifacts, sometimes didn't, and sometimes hung the machine hard in a dark brown screen, or threw up the BBOD from which there was no return.

This particular machine also runs XP. XP also sees graphics hardware failures. In most cases the symptom is new windows that get half filled in and then hang. But when the failures occur, XP flashes the screen, resets the graphics processor, and displays a box explaining that the GP had stopped responding and was restarted by the OS. Sometimes it displays that the GP had just pretty much failed and graphics is now being emulated in software (I'm not sure exactly what that means, but images come up, so whatever). This is somewhat cooler than Apple's approach (hang hard and leave me the power button as my only recourse) but it tells me pretty convincingly that this is NOT SOFTWARE.

So what do I tell this client? It's a widely reported problem, and Apple so far hasn't acknowledged it?

macswe wrote:
So what do I tell this client? It's a widely reported problem, and Apple so far hasn't acknowledged it?

Yes, macswe. That's exactly what you tell him. Also advice him to call Apple regarding it. I also suggest you let him know about this thread, as well as any other threads relating to this issue - here and on other sites.

Took the iMac to the Genius Bar yesterday. They agreed the GPU was failing. They have no repair extension program for this model and say they haven't received enough reports about it for the problem to rise to that level. They quoted a repair price over $800 even if they waived the labor, which is not cost-effective.

The GPU failure is most readily apparent in (of all places) the default screen saver — as the Ken Burns effect moves the landscape photos around (beach, forest, etc.), the horizontal lines blip around the screen like a house afire.

Add my 2006 24" iMac to this list (OS 10.6.4; serial ATA: WDC WD...; serial number QP723...). Often after waking the iMac, I see the following problems:
1. The keyboard viewer is missing from the menu bar.
2. The U.S. English, German, and Spanish flag keyboard indicators are missing from their normal position to the left of the volume icon on the menu bar.
3. Under these circumstances, if I hover over the right side of the menu bar, the spinning color wheel appears and nothing on the right of the menu bar is clickable.
4. The Apple menu does not respond to clicking, but oddly enough the color wheel does not appear on the left side of the menu bar, even though it is just as non-functional as the right side.
5. The mouse is slowed well below its previously set speed.
6. The volume control does not work from the keyboard nor with the mouse.
7. Force quit does not function.
8. If I open the System Preferences, the spinning color wheel appears.
9. Horizontal lines appear almost daily.
10. Odd video rectangles and squares have appeared from time to time. Clicking the mouse usually clears them. But they shouldn't appear at all. Multiple extraneous video today forced me to restart.
11. Dock icons sometimes bounce for 60 seconds without the application opening.
12. Clicking or scrolling before a Safari or Mail window has fully loaded sometimes results in the spinning color wheel. I then have to force quit the application and open it again.
13. To get the iMac back to normal behavior, I have to do a hard restart.
14. Sometimes hard shutdowns and restarts don't always restore normality. On occasion I have to do hard shutdowns and restarts twice.
15. I have used Disc Utility to repair permissions to no avail.
16. I have also used Disc Warrior, revised 901, version 4.2 for Snow Leopard, but this doesn't solve the issues either.
17. On the date my AppleCare ended, 11 June 2010, I took the iMac to the Apple Store. I explained what has been happening. He (and others here on Apple Support) suggested that I might eventually need to replace the hard drive. For over a year I have been on the phone several times with AppleCare about these problems without resolution.

Does the Apple Hardware Test detect anything amiss?

I ran TechTool Deluxe 3.1.3 and everything passed. What can one make of that with a misbehaving iMac?

Even as I write this, Safari is failing to load at times. When the Safari progress bar stalled for a minute, a click or scroll resulted in the appearance of the spinning color wheel. System Preferences was also unavailable. Hovering the pointer over the System Preferences window also caused the spinning color wheel to appear. Just this morning I had to force quit Safari two times, and once for System Preferences. When I finish writing this, I must restart. Restarting once (sometimes twice) returns the iMac to normal operation for a while. Yet some internal deficiency will later cause it to revert to malfunctioning again, and I will once again repeat the restart ritual. Is this the death throes of a 2006 iMac?

Richard Reid1 wrote:
17. On the date my AppleCare ended, 11 June 2010, I took the iMac to the Apple Store. I explained what has been happening. He (and others here on Apple Support) suggested that I might eventually need to replace the hard drive. For over a year I have been on the phone several times with AppleCare about these problems without resolution.

You should turn out to be one of the lucky ones because of the above. You've your issues noted/acknowledged during our AppleCare warranty period.
Think use of David's suggestion from the "Customer Complaints" thread might get you satisfaction:

+The quickest way in the USA to complain is to have the Apple Care agent escalate your phone call to Customer Relations. They should do so immediately upon request without further conversation on their part. Customer Relations is tasked to make the customer happy if at all possible, within company policy parameters. I am not sure if that is available in the UK or Europe for that matter.+

Most of the rest of us seem to have to try to hobble by, e.g. using 3rd party fan control, for issues like you describe while contemplating next steps.