iMac late 2013 + Mavericks + USB Sennheiser - input freeze

That's promising. Please keep us posted.

I'm thinking about doing the same myself, but just realized there is one Mavericks feature that will be very hard to live without: improved dual monitor support. I have another 27" monitor hooked up right beside my iMac, and it's really tedious not to have a menu bar and dock on the second screen. I would have happily paid the upgrade fee for Mavericks (had their been one) for that feature alone.

Sigh. There's no win-win solution for me here. Either I give up a crucial feature, completely reorganize my file structure (which I'd have to do if I partiition the FD), or spend hours trying to convince Apple to give me a refund for my iMac, and then spend more money buying a new SSD iMac and an external TB RAID to match the read speeds I have now with the FD.

The lesser of evils for me might just be to wait. I have a Macbook Air that works with all of my mics, and though it's not as convenient to use as the iMacs, it doesn't require as much sacrifice as the other options.

Then again, as Apple hasn't admitted this is a problem publicly, my concern about waiting is that there never will be a solution—or at least not for a long time. In the meantime I will have missed out on my chance for a replacement.

I am still hopeful that it will be resolved. I got one of the first 2008 Mac Pros and it had a serious problem with sleep which took months for Apple to acknowledge and fix....but it did eventually get fixed.

I'm glad your Mac Pro situation got sorted out, but this had better not take months for Apple to identify and sort out. Non-recoverable system lockups are what I consider a top priority fix, particularly on a newly released product.

I completed the migration successfully but that is where this experiment will end. I am using ML now just to see if I can recreate the USB problems and lockups but I will be removing this partition and returning to Mavericks for a few reasons.

For one thing, while you can successfully migrate from a Mavericks install to ML, apps that require Mavericks, like the updated iPhoto, will not run nor will they even update in the Mac App Store. You end up with a large section of apps called "Incompatible".

And at any rate, the onus for resolving this problem is not on the end user by trying to downgrade OSes, etc. This is Apple's problem to fix. I'm going to cross my fingers that the Mavericks update resolves it. I am also going to hope I am unable to reproduce any of the problems I was having in this ML install, which would indicate it is, after all, a software problem.

I will post with any new details as they occur.

Hi all,

I'm very glad I found your thread. I was browsing around trying to find an explanation.

I have exactly the same issue:

I'm on a iMac 27in late 2013, with Mavericks, and get all inputs frozen with this trace in the console:

12/11/2013 10:51:00.000 PM kernel[0]: vtd[0] fault: device 0:20:0 reason 0x6 R:0x80d000

12/11/2013 10:51:00.000 PM kernel[0]: USBF: 3810.501 AppleUSBXHCI::UIMCheckForTimeouts - HSE bit set:5 (1)

I've been pretty much removing anything I had installed, and I was blaming an external USB drive I was using for Time Machine backup. I even unplugged that and still got the full freeze.

Now, I pretty much only have Logic Pro X installed with a Blue Yeti USB microphone connected on a powered USB hub, and I get the same freeze.

Apple! Count one more unsatisfied client!!

This is a lot of money spent to get a machine with such major bug.

I hope it gets fixed quickly. I'm calling Apple's tech support tonight.

cdnar,

I really hope the Mavericks update fixes it too. But I recall seeing a post on one of the several threads about this issue from someone claiming they'd talked to an Apple engineer who said Apple is aware of the problem, but that it won't be fixed in the 10.9.1 update. Who knows if that's actually true, though.

I agree the onus is on Apple, but historically that hasn't meant much.

I urge everyone with this problem to take action. Here are 6 suggestions from another thread:

1. Keep sending Apple feedback at:

- http://www.apple.com/feedback/imac.html

2. Keep contacting AppleCare and Apple Support. Keep asking about the status on if Apple is working on a solution or not:

- 800 MY APPLE

- http://www.apple.com/support/

3. Keep calling your tech support for your audio interface (AVID, etc)

-Ask what is the situation is... Are you working on fix? Are you working with Apple on a fix?

4. Contact your friends who work at Apple. Tell them to give feedback.

5. Go to the press:

- Send a tip to http://www.macrumors.com , http://www.engadget.com ,http://gizmodo.com/ , http://www.t3.com , etc.

6. Keep refreshing this forum link so the views go up.

- Every time you refresh this forum (Command + R) the view count will always go up (only if you are signed in). You can literally just keep hitting refresh and the views quickly go up. The more views, the more likely websites and Apple will take our issue seriously.

I've been thinking about trying to return my iMac FD for one with SSD only. But there was a reason I got the FD in the first place. It offers read speeds of 700+ MB/s. That's great for my photography editing work. A 1 TB SSD would offer the same speeds, but I can't store all of my photos on a 1 TB drive, so then I have to split them up, putting new photos I'm more likely to access frequently on the SSD and older photos on an external drive. I don't like having to do this kind of management.

Or, if I want to put all of my photos on an external drive and have similar read speeds to what the FD offers, I'd have to buy a 4-5 bay RAID and 4 HDDs, and put them in a RAID 0. (A 5-bay RAID0 offers 780 MB/s) That's an enormous extra expense ($2k), and I can't justify it just so my USB audio devices work.

Of course even a 1 TB SSD model iMac without the extra external drive would be several hundred more than what I spent on the 3 TB FD iMac.

So I'm probably going to cancel my Apple store appointment. What's the point? I don't want a replacement, so I'm stuck with booting from an external drive, partitioning the FD, or just waiting for a solution.

I haven't seen anything conclusive about FD being relevant here to begin with? Does a FD iMac booted into Mavericks off an external HDD exhibit the same problem or not?

1. iMacs with pure SSDs running Mavericks don't seem to have this problem.

2. iMacs booted to an external drive (**that isn't accessing the internal FD drive at all**) running Mavericks seems not to have this problem, AFAIK.

3. iMacs with FD running ML don't seem to have this problem.

Where'd you get that? In particular, I am very interested in a report of an iMac with a built-in fusion drive booted off another drive and not exhibiting USB audio problems. Cause if that's all that is, then an easy workaround would be to back up all your data, un-Fusion the drive, and restore the data. Sure, you lose the added performance of the SSD cache on top of the HDD storage, but at least you'd be back to a non-crashing Maverics iMac with 3 TB of storage.

Page 44 on this thread, halfway down.

What you suggest has worked for many people.

The loss of speed from partitioning the FD is a big deal for me, because I do a lot of photo editing. Also, 128 GB isn't big enough for my boot drive because my company uses Dropbox (which has to be on the boot drive) and that alone is 35-40 GB.

I am not talking about booting off SSD at all, I am talking about completely ignoring the SSD and booting off the 3 TB HDD. And sure, loss of speed is a big deal, but is it as big a deal as not being able to do any audio work at all? Only you can decide, depending on your priorities, obviously.

And thanks fot the link to the Fusion discussion.

Also, you can change Dropbox location. It's in advanced Dropbox prefs. (And I am pretty sure you can change it to be on any disk.)

In terms of Apple's level of response, it depends on the type and severity of the problem (critical in this case) and the number of people experiencing it. Other factors, like the amount of press it gets, do help. Whatever the cause, it is entirely unacceptable that a brand new computer costing several thousand dollars should freeze because of the USB peripherals plugged into it.

Personally, I'm not even considering switching up to an SSD-only model, or going out of pocket one more cent to resolve the issue and I would urge anyone else not to either.

Fixing the problem by reformatting a Fusion Drive to un-Fusion it is also out of the question. If I wanted a 1TB mechanical drive, I would have paid $200 less to order one.

Apple needs to fix this... immediately.

Mistakes happen, so stop acting as if other people's mistakes are unacceptable, and do something to help.

No amount of indignant complaining about how this is unacceptable and Apple needs to fix this immediately will actually cause Apple to fix this immediately. The only thing that actually helps get it fixed sooner is calling Apple and giving them information about your system and whatever troubleshooting you have done, so that they can track it down and fix it.

It's not as if there's a bunch of people in a conference room in Cupertino going "Oh yeah, that thing where our newest iMacs and our newest OS and our fancy fusion drive blow up when you plug in a USB mic? Who gives a crap. Moving on: new colors for iPhone cases."

Excuse me?! Are you even experiencing this problem yourself, or are you just in here to offer your expert advice, like crippling our machines to resolve it, or giving the boys in Cupertino a break??

Anyway, I'm not interested in participating in irrelevant flame wars so don't even bother responding if it is not on topic.

I've been engaged in this thread, as well as others, trying to troubleshoot this issue since I took delivery of the new iMac last week and started experiencing it. If you bothered reading the thread, you'd know I installed Mountain Lion to an external HD and even considered trying to replace Mavericks with it but it turned out to be impossible. The problem did not seem to exist in that OS.

In February, I wrote a request to the editor of the Mac blog, Mactrast, to see if he might not want to report about a serious issue with iCloud removing recurring events. It had a very looong discussion thread here in these forums over several weeks. He agreed to report on it, I posted a message to that effect and within 24 hours the problem was resolved. Coincidence, perhaps and maybe even probably but I've just sent a mail off to him about this thread too to see if he might not be interested in writing something about it.

Hey airbornemint. After waiting over two months, 3 Brand new iMacs, and A **** of a lot of wasted time and money on my part because of my job, I think it's safe to complain a little bit. I've talked to 6 different senior advisors and a few engineers and nothing is resolved yet. I've been nothing but patient and People like me and "cdanr" are helping by complaining because we are at the end of troubleshooting every possible solution from a consumer's point of view and it's the complaining that we are left with. Now it's Apple's turn to trouble shoot and GET IT DONE!!!!!! That's it for me.