iMac Pro restarting because of a problem?

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If this posting is considered inappropriate in any way I apologize in advance.

Hope this helps,

John

Ocean City, NJ

Sorry, somehow I clicked on the wrong button and my prior post got "reposted" by mistake.

Was just wondering what's new? Any word from the Apple engineers?

Today, I noticed some strange behavior, which I had experienced prior to one of the updates before, whereby if I save a file to my desktop, it does not appear on the desktop (as it normally should and does) nor does it appear in the Finder, however, if I REBOOT, then these files show up properly in both locations. Trying to see if I can recreate this behavior in the hopes it "may" have "something" to do with the ReStart issue in this discussion.

All the best,

John

Ocean City, NJ

It's been a while since I've shared my progress, it's now at a point that it's probably worth sharing.

A LONG story short: I got to the top tier technical support, and uploaded a few images from Capture Data. Feedback from the technical team is that they recognize there is a problem, and that they have said a fix is forthcoming.

When I asked when I could expect a patch to fix it, all they could tell me was "not the next update, and maybe not the next patch either".

So, it seems as though there is light at the end of the tunnel, but we don't know how long the tunnel is.

Hopefully this feedback helps others here..

Thanks for the update sugaraspa,

It's still all very vague, a bit too vague for my taste as a professional user. I would very much like to know more about the problem. (not asking you, for the record. Asking Apple)

Then again, the problem that I have - my computer crashing and locking up every time I compress a certain set of videofiles (who cause no problems on inferior and older macs by the way) - might not be the same as your problem. There might be more than one problem with this machine. Anyway, I'm still waiting for my feedback from Apple and they'd better give me a technical answer and some kind of timeframe. The price of the machine alone dictates they owe me that much.

Well they came out to replace my motherboard and the board that was installed was bad and would not fire up; so waiting on another motherboard. Is anyone else being told that their AMD Radeon Vega 64 is bad??

Just had another random restart, and i have the basic 8 core iMac Pro with Pro Vega 56, it happened during night after 4-5 days that iMac is on and running.

Its my second random restart after two weeks that i own the iMac Pro.

In my Energy Saver settings I disabled power nap , if its enabled then my iMac can go to sleep and never wake up until hard reset so I'm disabling that option.

Now I will disable the Prevent computer from sleep automatically when the display is off option and see how that will affect the situation.

Anyway as agreed with apple support that contacted me as well ill sen the log directly to them to email that they provided me.

its very problematic situation because we stuck with computer that we can't rely on and no one knows what is the issue and how and if it can be fixed.

They did not specify, though my thinking is that even if it is a hardware problem, they can write software to avoid the hardware error (e.g. if there's a production flaw in the memory, then the kernel can be told to avoid the bad registers).

Either way, I think a software fix will fix the symptoms.

Interesting.

Would there thereby be a specific firmware patch for a particular lot or serial number range, or would there be special software versions, and subsequent (in perpetuity) for all forthcoming updates just for the affected iMac Pros?

I'm not an expert (but I'm not a novice either); I'd imagine that if it's a hardware problem, then the software would apply to all machines with the faulty hardware in perpetuity (unless Apple recalls those models, which I'd highly doubt).

Remember, when the OS queries Apple HQ for software updates, they send their serial number, which tells the update servers the exact hardware configuration (among other things, including when it was actually shipped off the production line; which means even if it's a faulty batch of hardware, a software fix would apply and work).

Yes, I am aware of the slight build variations that end up on various machines for the same MacOS updates. Smart, Kudos to Apple for being this dogmatic and detailed in this regard. So, I agree with your conclusion that if there in fact is a hardware issue that at least Apple can handle it based upon serial numbers, etc.

I guess I'm still just wondering, could this all be solved by a specific FIRMWARE update to the affected machines?

We have had a lot of unfortunate experience with this issue on multiple iMac Pros right up to yesterday 22 June. This remains a serious problem and these do not appear to be isolated incidents. Compare my notes below with previous reports in this thread these panic/restarts and I believe we can almost certainly conclude this is an APPLE problem vs a problem caused by user files, third party software or third party peripherals.

We have just yesterday identified a possible mitigating workaround (see my last paragraph). It doesn't STOP the panics, however it appears to consistently reduce the frequency with which they occur.

iMac Pro USERS: PLEASE HELP us isolate the problem!

• If you've experienced this problem and it's been fixed by Apple or yourself please speak up and tell us what caused or fixed the problem and how you got Apple to take action.

• If you still have this problem please tell me your screen saver and display-sleep settings.

• If you still have this problem please speak up, tell the rest of us and PRESS APPLE TO DO SOMETHING!

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Summary of our iMac Pro experience:

• Identical problem "day one, out-of-the-box" with three new base-config iMac Pros 20 May-22 June, 2018.

• The panic/restart problem has been verified to occur at least 2-3 times on each of the three new iMac Pros with ZERO 3rd-party apps and NO external peripherals attached.

• The problem persists even AFTER we fully erased the internal SSD and reinstalled a fresh copy of the latest version of MacOS (10.13.5) from the Apple internet "Recovery" server. After the first sign of panic problems we did not attempt to restore from a backup or migrate from another Mac. These were 100% virgin configurations.

• In our normal configuration with our usual Apple and third-party apps and peripherals install the panics increase from 1-3 times per day to as often as 3-9 times per hour, i.e. these iMac Pros are unstable and totally unusable for production (or much of anything, really).

• Although we have in every case had these panics occur within the first two hours of setup and use AppleCare's initial response was to put us through 1-2 hours of troubleshooting then ask us to either take the units to an Apple Store (90 minute drive) and wait 10-20 days for repair or ship the unit to Apple and wait up to 21 days for repair or replacement.

• Advance replacement required PAYING another $5000 (or a bank card hold--same thing really) to have a new unit shipped, then waiting a week or two for Apple to receive the defective unit and get a refund. We're short of iMacs anyway, so we PURCHASED a second iMac Pro. It immediately failed with the identical problem.

• At that point (three weeks after the initial purchase and after 14 hours of troubleshooting including 4+ hours talking to AppleCare) I pitched a fit and asked the nice, dedicated-but-powerless AppleCare Senior Advisor to connect me to Apple Corporate / Consumer Affairs. This very quickly changed the picture: the CA person listened patiently to my story, asked a few questions (including verifying that the manufacture date was the first week of Dec, 2017) then offered to replace the original iMac Pro purchased three weeks earlier with one that was "fresh inventory". He expedited shipment to an Apple Store and it was received there in about three business days. (Actually picking it up was a horrible experience, but I'll give the Store people a pass on that as their key people did their best to be helpful once I got there).

• The replacement iMac Pro A.) was NOT "fresh stock"; like the first two it was made on about 1 December, 2017 probably the first week of iMac Pro production, and it B.) FAILED WITHIN TWO HOURS. Same panic & restart.

I certainly appreciate the efforts of the AppleCare advisors and the intervention of the Consumer Affairs agent who expedited this last replacement, HOWEVER:

• The identical problem has been reported by a significant number of users for more than six months. It's bad enough Apple has not yet resolved the issue, but it adds insult to injury when we're given NO meaningful information about the root cause... and when new examples of this old problem are treated as though the store Geniuses and AppleCare advisors are hearing about the issue for the first time.

• I'm amazed at the patience most of the customers on this thread are exhibiting. Most of you sound like pro users. How can you afford this? We've lost dozens of hours of billable time struggling with this issue the past four weeks, I've now paid my IT support staff several thousand dollars to troubleshoot brand new $5000 iMacs and run around dealing with replacements, setting temporary workstations and at least 40 time-consuming 5-800GB backups and restores. Any way I look at this it has not been a good customer experience.

CONFIGURATION

Our standard iMac Pro peripheral configuration:

2, 3 or 4 external displays:

A.) One LG 5K Ultrafine 27" + one or two LG 4k Ultrafine 22"

B.) Two LG 5K Ultrafine 27"

C.) Four LG 4k Ultrafine 22"

External Storage:

• 2-4 Samsung T5 USB-C SSDs, 500GB or 1TB

• 0-2 Promise Pegasus R3 Thunderbolt 3 RAID drives

• Time Machine backups to Drobo 5n2 or Apple TimeCapsule

• Apple High Sierra file sharing via 1 or 10Gb ethernet

Network:

• Meraki 1 or 10Gb switching

• Meraki 4x4 SU/MU-MIMO multi-gigabit 802.11ac up to 160MHz channels. (It's not clear to us if the iMac Pro supports half those specs as Apple stopped publishing full WiFi specs even for the Pro).

Please note once more that the panics occur even with NO external displays or storage and with standard 1Gb ethernet, so there is no pointing to our hi-spec configuration as the culprit, however the frequency of the panics appears to increase significantly when we add our peripherals.

MY CONCLUSION

• Apple does not appear to have a timely solution for this problem. We need working iMacs and we don't have these panic / restart problems with BTO i7 non-pro iMacs, therefore we may need to give up and return these iMac Pros.

• We've just now tested a single, recently-built 14-core Vega 64 BTO iMac Pro. It does not appear to have the same panic problem as the three 8-core base models, but this is not conclusive as we only tested it in our configuration for a day. (It also appears to be SLOWER that both the 8-core Pro and the non-pro i7 iMac on Photoshop and InDesign, so there's no way to justify the extra $3-4k cost for the users for whom we bought the base iMac Pros for nothing more than to get iMac Pros that actually work.)

• Yesterday (22 June, 2018) we identified a possible mitigating workaround involving the standard Apple screen saver. The problematic iMac Pros were set to start the screen after 5 minutes. (This may be the factory default setting--I've not verified that.) We noticed that the panic restarts frequently occur when the user walks away from the iMac Pro, so we watched what happens and found a strong correlation between the screen saver coming on in 5 minutes and the frequent panic /restarts. Two base-model iMac Pros (including the one just replaced by Apple) that were restarting 3-9 times per hour did not have a panic/restart at all in the first 24 hours after the screen saver was set to start in 60 minutes. When I reset one to 5 minutes and left it idle it had a panic in about 5 minutes. The other restarted a few minutes later while still set to start screen saver in 60 minutes, so this workaround doesn't necessarily STOP the panics. However, it may consistently reduce the frequency with which they occur. Note that we normally also set all our Macs to "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" and "Turn off display after 60 minutes". We've not yet experimented with changing those settings.

That's extremely painful and I recognise a lot here. Especially how this issue is being dealt with by Apple.

In my case, my machine is not restarting (happened only once) because I didn't do anything with it, but because I AM doing something with it. It's now clear to me as well that Apple has no correct protocol for dealing with professional users. The kind people at Apple Care always give you the same scripted BS ("this is the first time we heard of this, it shouldn't be allowed to happen to such a beautiful machine", etc, etc) but they really seem te be quite powerless. In my case they even refuse to get back to me for an update on my status, probably because Apple is not giving them any feedback EITHER. I've been dealing with this for almost a month now, without any results or news.

My next step is to contact the supervisor of Apple Care in the Benelux (I'm from Belgium), but reading all of the above, I'm not convinced he will be able to change anything for me.

I mean, right now it seems that the only solution they can think of is shipping another iMac Pro and hoping this unit will work as advertised.

I still think they are STARTING to realise something is seriously wrong with the iMac Pro. They just don't know exactly what, so they don't communicate about it. Scared of this thing getting into the open?

Well, maybe we should get this thing into the open. We payed enough for these machines. If we are not treated as professionals, well, maybe we should let the pro-world know about this.

Right now, until this is resolved somehow, I ADVISE ANY COLLEAGUE OR PRO-USER I KNOW OR ENCOUNTER TO NOT PURCHASE AN IMAC PRO! Right now, this thing is like the gun in a Russian roulette.

So, if anybody at Apple is paying any attention, start treating me like a professional and not like an iPhone user!

Okay I have had my motherboard replace twice and third visit from "Apple Premium Service Partner" to try to get my iMacPro to boot up and after 3 home visits for 3 hours plus I still do not have a working iMac Pro. My computer is dead. The tech worked with online support and he could not get the computer to start up - "it needs firmware update to get it to fire up" and with multiple attempts he could not get it to work. So here I am with very expensive iMac Pro that does not work after two attempts to replace the motherboard and 3 rd attempt to try to get the motherboard to work. So disappointed in Apple.

I'm also sorry to say that Apple has totally FAILED in helping me with this problem. So far I had ZERO respons from the engineering team regarding the tests. And after putting a lot of pressure on the Apple Care team they finally told me that engineering wanted me to discuss it with Pro Applications. And then Pro Applications told Apple Care this was useless because they would not be able to help me anyway.

All I have left is an option for a refund, basically.

What strikes me the most is the shadiness, the way they're refusing to tell me what they have discovered (or not discovered). That makes it clear to me there IS something wrong with this machine and they DON'T WANT ANYBODY TO KNOW ABOUT IT.

The whole thing is bizarre. So many people with variations of the same problem. Some partially sorted with clean installs, others for whom this doesn’t solve anything. Noone who has been contacted by Apple (on this forum) seems to have had a solution or fix, and yet the iMac Pro is still on sale in stores ... no recalls etc. Is this only affecting a relatively small number of people?