Q: OSX Lion + 2011 iMac 27'' + Video = Freeze

I feel this thread is degenerating...

I don't think Apple got to where it is by not fixing issues. Let's just hope the fix comes sooner rather than later.

And I feel cheated, I've spent $ 2000 +, only to reset to a screen of 27 ".

The reason the thread is degenerating is because many of us feel extremely frustrated that Apple has not publically acknowledged the problem - as others have said, a simple "We are aware of the issue and working towards a solution" would be all it would take. I am a big fan of Apple but they deserve to get some bad press about this. I mean, how ridiculous is it that they are selling computers off the shelf that cannot play youtube videos without crashing?! We are not talking about old macs here, we are talking brand new off the shelf units plus near new units with clean installs of Lion. It's a big failing. Sure, things like this happen but would be nice to be reassured that a fix is coming.

My graphics card is the AMD Radeon 6970M with 1GB RAM.

Sure, you're not alone in being frustrated, and you're not alone in having paid big money.

However there are some other individuals who, unlike what you have posted, are not contributing information to the community to try and resolve the issue. They are just endlessly spouting the same strident whining in posts — doesn't achieve anything other than boring other people.

What can we do to improve this problem?

I have called several times for service, and provide no solution.

If it helps, for me the propability that the freeze will occur decreases or disappears when I am just NOT putting my machine to stand-by / sleep. To me it looks like it is bug / incompability in the firmware or the device driver of the graphic adapter. Eventually the state handling during a power-mode change of the acceleration unit, etc. of the GPU is not done properly.

Things like changing Flash, Java, etc. doesn't help!

Also, if you keep SSH running you can do at least a save shutdown, instead of pressing the power-off button, which might not be very good if you are using an SSD.

Not sure if it helps to increase the pressure on Apple, but if you want to do so, you can do it via their feedback page [1] or their bug reporting page [2], which is currently offline. Wonder why. lol

[1]: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

[2]: https://bugreport.apple.com

That's what I find most annoying, FromOz.... I just read the ones with some technical hints and delete the whiners posts from my email.

Definetely send a message to Apple using their feedback. The more the better!

Same problem here. As a new Mac user I am disappointed with this seemingly widespread and fatal bug making it into a final release of an advanced OS. I have many years of experience in the IT industry with Windows and Linux and I was expecting a little more out of Apple. A quickly released patch would help rectify the situation and my opnion of this company may be hinging on their response. I really like the Mac so far but a bug that makes your machine unusable from simply browsing youtube or playing a video just isn't acceptable.

I hope you don't judge Apple by this one incident. No, it hasn't been pretty, but it looks isolated in terms it's an iMac/Lion issue. My new iMac before Lion was fine, so that tells me it's not hardware but probably a video driver issue.

Anyway, I converted to all Macs in 2006 and will never go back. Going to all Apple products has been that good to me. I have been working in the computer industry since 1981, so I can easily make a statement that even though this is an annoying glitch and we are used to dealing with quality with Apple products, there is absolutely no way in h3ll I will go back to Microsoft products.

Hang in there

27" iMac with core i7 with 8 GB Ram and SSD boot drive.  All OEM so third party hardware should not be an issue.

I have had no end of trouble with Lion.  My initial install resulted in Preview and Text Edit crashing on launch.  Ended up wiping the boot drive 2 times and clean install to finally get a stable system. Odd thing was that I had a momentary error when Disk Utility was erasing the SSD drive when it reported that the drive had failed on test and needed to be repaired.  The error message went away after running First Aid again so I thought nothing of it.  I have since run Hardware Test and found nothing coming up so I am making the leap of fiatht that the SSD drive is unaffected.

My system ran fine for about a week and is now locking up one application at a time until the machine is useless and I have to manually power down.  At first I thought it might be a hardware issue but then relaized it is likely software.  It appears in my case that once the screen goes to sleep, then a system freeze can be expected to occur shortly thereafter.  No predicting what will trigger it, printing a Pages document is enough. 

Very frustrating.  The lack of response is typical from Apple in my many years of experience with them.  They have a history of not acknowledging "known issues" until a software update is released.  The impression you get at times is that they do not care or seem to care that their user base is unhappy and that they take their customer base for granted.

Are you kidding me??? Software Update for "HP Printer Software 2.7"??? *** Apple, so you just pushed out an update for the all important printer drivers (which were the only thing working fine BTW), and still ignore the Graphics Card update?

Is it just that Apple has no idea how to fix this, they don't understand GPU drivers, and have to wait for ATI?

I decided that I'm going to return my iMac.  Paying $3k for something I can't even use is silly.  I'll wait when Apple can ship out iMacs that have a stable OS as SL isn't shipping with new iMacs anymore.  Will Apple make me pay for return shipping?