Apple cancels Christmas... if you want a 27 inch iMac
Apple has slammed the brakes on shipments of its much coveted 27 inch iMac after users were driven cross eyed by flickering screens and other problems with the machines. The problems with the machines have been detailed on imac.squeaked.com, where Mac apostles have been forced to openly question their faith. Now it seems that …
Glad I went HP Touchsmart anyway.
Got it delivered on Saturday and it's just beautiful !
Whatever these issues are, it's certainly not endemic to the hardware design. We ordered seven for the office and have had them for two months now. Not a single problem with any of 'em.
Presumably just one of the suppliers falling down on QA. That or our dumb luck.
Tell my wife that you can get truly rogered by 5 1/2 inches.
HOHOHO
have I got a surprise for you Lil Stevie, all your all in ones belong us.
Paris cos she knows what a boy wants for Christmas.
Bit specific to identfy its the screen thats at fault.. it is an all in one so there is more than just a screen in that box, or is that just the mac way of identifying components? the bit with light is called a screen no matter what it actually is...the box on the desk = hard driver whereas to another its called the CPU.
I have noticed some graphics cards squeal when displaying certain images/resolutions, not sure if its bad caps or just the cards.. but I can well believe that it happens on the mac but not when windows is installed! its a different screen image afterall!
Anyway as always: Bad components always = bad product.
sounds like these gold plated turds are still made of turd! what a surprise. I'm sure the gold plate is nice though. go on give it another polish..
Running Windows made the screen stop squeaking? Chortle .
So Apple are dealing with an obvious problem - why are you getting so het up about it?
El Reg aren't exactly baying for Apple's blood here... they are just reporting the issue. Just because Apple don't like talking about it when they have problems doesn't mean that no-one else is allowed to!
Somehow I think that if this was Dell or HP you wouldnt have batted an eyelid at it being reported.
My Xerox screen used to make a very high pitch noise while it was in stand-by, it was ok during the day but I had to switch it off to sleep. It's either stopped now or I've got to an age where I can no longer hear it.
i cant understand how people are reporting issues with this imac it dont make sense apple is a big company why would they sell dodgy stuff for starters dont blame apple it could be the courier whos delivering it they might be thrown it about in the truck. or it could be people given bad reports on purpose cause they have nothing better to do you get some sad people in this world its pathetic.
for the love of God man. Maybe the odd capital letter as well.
Thats why THE SCREEN IS ALWAYS CRACKED IN THE SAME PLACE.
Help yourself to a glass of LOGIC while you're hunting down that CAPS SHIFT...
People are reporting issues because, duh, there are issues.
Maybe it's a design flaw that didn't show up on the more carefully assembled prototypes but does show up when they go to mass manufacture. Maybe a bad batch of components got into the mix. Maybe a batch of finished machines was built where the cheap outsourced manufacturing department and cheap outsourced quality control department both managed to be asleep at the wheel at the same time and let a bunch of lemons escape to distribution. Either way, it happened. It happens quite often.
This sort of problem child product isn't the first from Apple. Apple isn't the only company to drop a truckload of faulty gear on it's unsuspecting customers. The computer industry isn't the only one which has these sorts of problems. Big companies are just as vulnerable, maybe even more so because they're more likely to be building mass-produced items to cost in a cheap semi-skilled labour market and the numbers involved are much higher when it all goes Tiger Woods. Apple aren't immune to it just because they're Apple. ;-)
These problems are nothing new either, though in days gone by you'd take the item back for exchange or refund and maybe moan a bit to your mates at the pub about it. Now, people get online on a dozen forums, Facebook and Twitter and moan about it, and other people who had the same problem join in until there's a big echo chamber effect where a typical product problem starts to sound like the company is deliberately churning out broken hardware.
P.S. I'm sure Apple will replace your keyboard with one that has working SHIFT keys if you ask them. :)
I am gripping wood quite hard (in the superstitious rather than pass-time sense) as I report that my 27incher, which took a month to arrive from order, is running just fine in a combo of WinXP (Bootcamp) and OSX 10.6 boots.
The HD 'seems' noisy, but that's only because the machine is otherwise silent, so even slight disk noise is noticeable.
I'd always suspect Apple users grabbed wood often.
I don't believe it's a 27 incher though....
Paris, 27 incher, oh ffs, you work it out.
I fail to see the attraction in these anyway. Is a box on the floor with my choice of components that I can update at will that bad...? Give me that any day over one of these all-in-ones,
“The new iMac has been a huge hit and we are working hard to fulfil orders as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience or delay in delivery this may cause our customers,” a spokesman intoned.
should be translated to
"The new IMac has been a huge failure and we are working hard to rectify problems as quickly as possible. We apologi"S"e for any inconvenience or delay in delivery this may cause our customers but we're surprised that so many of our dedicated followers have reported issues since we have an impeccable reputation of producing Personal Computers that "Just Work".
Penguin cos he's the culprit who started smashing the screens.
HALO Bill cos the high pitch noise goes away with windows.
Devil Steve cos he really shoud've have a better QA process in place for this monsterous F*ck up
Just lol
what I said about imacs (and like before)....
I got the 27" quad-core i5 model that is the highest-end model available at Apple's retail stores. Purchased it on Black Friday to take advantage of the sale.
It's behaved absolutely flawlessly so far - superbly fast and the screen's a gem.
Best computer I've ever owned.
I like buying retail so that if there is something wrong I can simply exchange it for a new one. Pity that prevented me from buying the i7 model, but it's less than 10% faster than the one I have.
For some reason Apple is very efficient making the all in one machines. It cost US$1,899 and costs far, far less than the equivalent Mac Pro without a monitor. Even the combination of a similarly-specced Dell with a comparable resolution monitor is a few hundred dollars more expensive.
I'm sorry Apple's having trouble building them, but the machine itself is first-rate and I'm extremely happy with it.
D
squeaked.com has less than 400 people reporting this issue. How many of these machines has Apple sold? It must be in the hundreds of thousands at the very least considering that Apple sold 3 million Macs (of all models) in the last quarter alone.
So we're probably talking about a fault with no more than 0.1% of these machines. Still, reporting about problems with just a handful of Macs would be enough to get all the anti-fanboys on here to foam at the mouth and make the usual predictable anti-Apple comments.
My guess is that if the noise disappears with Windows it's probably something like a problem in the refresh rate in the OS X driver, in which case it should be easily fixed.
...compared to the massive stuff-up that was Nvidia not so long ago. I still get the odd HP and Compaq laptop with a dead video card rocking up here. It takes a while to get confidence back with certain brands after such a massive stuff-up.
"it's probably something like a problem in the refresh rate in the OS X driver, in which case it should be easily fixed"
For the premium price on the premium product that Jobbitologists peddle, I'd expect the fecking thing to be fecking perfect, especially as Apple sell themselves on providing unparalleled end user experiences controlling both software and hardware!! IIRC, Apple have gone as far as to tell the unwashed masses that they don't know how to build a cheap $500 machine, only great, high-end, expensive and shiny toys...
BTW, this vent is possibly on the back of watching a lovely, new, unibody Macbook Pro become the world's shiniest paperweight for two weeks this summer.
"For the premium price on the premium product that Jobbitologists peddle, I'd expect the fecking thing to be fecking perfect"
Yes, we all expect them to be perfect but nothing is perfect. Is there a single company on earth that hasn't had some failures in manufacturing? I met a guy who bought a Rolls Royce which broke down after a few months of use - you don't get much more premium than that.
Apple is clearly taking this issue seriously or they wouldn't have halted shipping. Let's wait and see how they deal with this before we jump to conclusions and rant about something we honestly know little about, shall we?
Never underestimate how much out-sourced manufacturing can screw up a good design.
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