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Problems documented with single-processor G5 desktop

updated 07:40 pm EDT, Mon August 8, 2005

Single-proc G5 issues

in June of 2004.

The website documents three specific symptoms that cause the system to crash: The "Eject Syndrome", caused by pushing the CD eject key, sometimes crashes all applications related to mounting or unmounting a volume/drive; a second sympton is described as a "Wake from Sleep" syndrome, where the machine will not properly wake after being put to sleep; and the third is called the "Full Screen OpenGL syndrome" under Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, which causes the machine to cease all graphics functions after quiting a full-screen OpenGL-based application following a few hours of operation. These symptoms have been reported by dozens of users on Apple's free support area.

"The best thing about this bug is the fact that it can be reproduced. The worst thing about this bug is the fact, that it affects only (you guessed it) PowerMac G5 Single (late 2004). The freezing symptom can be noticed from within safari, too. After about two hours of uptime there is a high chance that the mac freezes when watching an embedded quicktime movie. A good way to reproduce this failure is surfing to the apple quicktime page after two hours of usage."

The site offers a few workarounds that seem to help some users, including turning off some power management features, reverting to Mac OS X Panther, using the more expensive Mac OS X Server, and more; however, the workarounds appear to be temporary and in some cases, cost the user time and money. Interestingly, the site notes that one particular "freeze" may be temporary and the user may regain control of the machine after waiting a few hours.

by MacNN Staff

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chicken_tastes_good
Junior Member

Joined: Dec 1999

0

08/08, 08:27pm | report spam | close Reply |
Afflicted

I'm totally afflicted by all three of these crashes. I was able to get my motherboard changed once, as bluetooth was acting wacky (BTO), but since Apple has denied servicing my machine any further because they can't recreate the failure.

I've been suffering with this since the day it arrived at my doorstep, and in combination with my Powerbook "losing" its lower RAM slot, I'm getting VERY annoyed at Apple and their definition of "Warranty" and "Service".

OsakaBill
Forum Regular

Joined: Oct 1999

0

08/08, 11:38pm | report spam | close Reply |
Discussion Forums...

Discussion forums are a great thing, but you cannot presume a known systemic failure (and cover-up thereof) simply because other people are experiencing issues similar to yours. After all, if you walk in to an emergency room and see five people being treating for heart attacks, you are not going to assume that EVERYONE in the U.S. is having heart attacks right now.

Are you going to see people having issues with their machines or software in discussion forums? You bet! But to conclude from this that a systemic problem exists with that hardware or software is a faulty assumption.

Of the total number of this particular PowerMac model that have been sold, what percentage are experiencing the EXACT same issue resulting from the EXACT same cause? And yes, it has to be confirmed that it is the exact same cause behind the similar issues. Different culprits can manifest themselves in similar symptoms. And yes, it has to be a hard number percent, not some wild arse guess.

Once you have that solid number, how does it compare to Apple's acceptable failure rate? How does it compare to the industry's acceptable failure rate?

When you get solid answers to those questions, and not just hunches and suppositions based poor observations, then you will know if your conspiracy exists or not.

Until then, stop with the petitions and web sites. Move on with your lives.

spacefreak
Addicted to MacNN

Joined: Feb 2002

0

08/09, 12:32am | report spam | close Reply |
Apple has to get on this

It took me a few years to convert my friend and his wife to Apple. They finally took the plunge and got one of these freeze-fest PowerMac SP1.8.

Pisses me off, too, because Apple refuses to even acknowledge complaints. Their representatives all say "no... no reported problems that we've heard of." And if it weren't for my hanging out on MacNN, I would have never known that there are a good amount of people with the same exact machine experiencing what appears to be the same exact problems.

If any of you had ever experienced one of these freezing machines, you'd understand completely exactly why people are bitching.

OsakaBill
Forum Regular

Joined: Oct 1999

0

08/09, 01:12am | report spam | close Reply |
I Understand...

I understand that when people have problems they get frustrated and angry and tend to over-simplify and exaggerate. I understand that when people feel they've been wronged (even when they haven't), they demand the world on a platter.

OsakaBill
Forum Regular

Joined: Oct 1999

0

08/09, 01:15am | report spam | close Reply |
Good Amount of People...

So what exactly is, "a good amount of people?" More importantly, what percent does, " a good amount of people," make up of the installed user base?

Quit generalizing and get some solid data.

(Proud owner of the exact same machine in question and never have suffered any of these issues�beyond mucking my own system.)

koolkid1976
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: May 2003

0

08/09, 06:28am | report spam | close Reply |
Please Stand Up!

If you own one of these machines and not experiencing the problem? If you don't, then quit criticizing people who are having a problem. You are hardly in a position to do so. You are not in their shoes. I don't have that machine. So I'm taking an open mind approach as asking for people who have that machine, but not experiencing the problem.

addisonx
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Nov 2002

0

08/09, 07:41am | report spam | close Reply |
I am Jack's Powermac G5

I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. It's a story problem. A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up.The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

dave a
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Jan 2002

0

08/09, 08:28am | report spam | close Reply |
In this case...

...the question "do you have a functioning single-processor G5 of this type?" is indeed valid. We ALL know that just as some cars have bad designs, some computers have bad designs. Remember the Mac Plus whack-on-the-side fix? Various Powerbooks? Mac SE 20-meg Miniscribe hard drives? (I might have the manufacturer mixed up, it's been a few years.) For that matter, while there might be a few people with 1995 Neons who haven't had their head gaskets replaced, or high-mileage 20th-century Ford Tauruses with original transmissions, or Toyota Coronas that didn't have severe rust-out, etc., etc., most did...

I went through the same discussion at http://www.toyoland.com/ with regard to sludge in Toyota Camry engines. People blamed the owners, said they were making it up, etc., etc. Turned out sludge in the oil was a pretty widespread problem, not affecting ALL of the cars, or even most of them...but if it happens to you, you get MAD when the company insists it never happens to anyone!

I'm perfectly willing to believe this; Apple lately has been fairly lax in their quality control (10.40 anyone? how about 10.0.0?).

chicken_tastes_good
Junior Member

Joined: Dec 1999

0

08/09, 06:10pm | report spam | close Reply |
Failure Rate?

Its not about failure rates (acceptable or not) and its not about owners with issues finding solice together on a forum. Its about INEXPLICABLE failures that the manufacturer denies.

"I tried for 5 minutes and it didn't happen to me. It must be your MONITOR" isn't a solution or "technical support". Its called "passing the buck." When I take a machine in because it isn't working, and it recieved completely new internals, and the "fixed" machine "works" (fails) in the exact same manner as before "repair" the statistical probability of this NOT being systemic is very low. And they don't believe me when I say it has never gone A DAY since I purchased it without crashing.

I don't care if there isn't another person with the same failure, I just know that my situation is NOT acceptable (even if the failure rate globally is below the rate needed to warrant a recall). But when I find out there are other people suffering with the EXACT same failures with ONLY the same machine, the suspicion of POOR DESIGN is 100% confirmed. The only common element between these exactly similar failures is the motherboard and CPU.

Thorne^
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2005

0

08/10, 07:26am | report spam | close Reply |
Yes it is true...

I have also one of this Mac's and can confirm, everything is true. The worst of all described errors, is the GUI freeze.

jofallon
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2005

0

08/10, 07:59am | report spam | close Reply |
Failure rate

I don't suppose we want the world on a platter, just what we paid a considerable amount of money to get. Our $600 Dell 2400 is immensely more reliable than the $1500 PowerMac, not counting the $200+ for AppleCare. The AppleCare person had heard of the problem, but had no suggestions besides "Archive and Install". Obviously Apple did some math and discontinued the thing; too much trouble for too little profit.

A good bit of the trouble no doubt is Tiger. How anyone can claim to be trying to get a toehold in corporations, and then break so many networking things with a new version? Lots of new features, and speed; but stability?

OsakaBill
Forum Regular

Joined: Oct 1999

0

08/10, 09:42am | report spam | close Reply |
Missing The Point

As much as we expect Apple to be perfect, it is a fallible company run by fallible human beings who have fallible human beings designing and manufacturing their products. As such, a statistically verifiable percentage of products will fail and nothing can be done to stop that.

This is the point that seems to go unnoticed.

Yes, "a great number" of these owners are having problems, even similar problems, but no one has verified that this is a statistical anomaly. The fact that you can find others publicly complaining about the same issue does not make this a statistical anomaly.

It sucks to be one of the statistics, but that's life.

OsakaBill
Forum Regular

Joined: Oct 1999

0

08/10, 09:46am | report spam | close Reply |
Faulty Logic

Sorry Chicken Tastes Good. Your logic is faulty. Just because you find people with similar issues you cannot conclude a poor design conspiracy.

And while it sucks to have things break, the nature of the beast means it is going to happen to someone. An unavoidable fact.

verbo_phobia
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: May 2005

0

08/10, 01:10pm | report spam | close Reply |
me too

I am also having problems with this Mac - freezes, eject button fails to work, QT movies won't play in web pages.

OsakaBill, imo it's fair that if enough people have a common problem, and it can successfully be traced to a single point, in this case these specific Macs, the best course of action for anyone wanting these problems solved is to group together, as seen in the case of the iBook logic board fault, where apple eventually set up a repair program. We'd all love to go on with our lives, but we paid just as much relatively for our Macs and we deserve the same service.

Todd Madson
Mac Elite

Joined: Apr 2000

0

08/10, 01:39pm | report spam | close Reply |
Look.....

I think this can be isolated to the operating system, not necessarily a component.

This is the lynchpin people - you can solve this.

Look at what Link posted on this very forum: the machine did not actually crash or hang when these things happen.

The user interface crashes but the machine can be remoted into using a text interface and it's got to be OS related.

Link indicated that opening the console during such an episode produced this (his words in quotes):

"I open up console, this better be good! And it is!

Aug 8 22:34:35-power-mac-g5 kernel[0]: AppleSMU waiting over 2 sec for reply AGAIN! !cmd = 0x65, length = 0x09 Aug 8 22:34:35-power-mac-g5 kernel[0]: AppleSMUsendMISC: FAILURE -- TIMEOUT EXCEEDED on GPIO ! Aug 8 22:34:35-power-mac-g5 kernel[0]: AppleSMU COMM ERROR - RETRYING AGAIN WITH IODELAYS...

JACKPOT!

That sucker flooded the whole time I was using the machine, it looked like it dumped into safe mode.

I can recreate this hella easy, the problem is the "SMU" has to "fail" for me to do it, and that can take a while."

Experiment: someone with one of these machines go back to Panther and report if the same issues occur. If you even CAN go back to Panther I'm not sure.

Or, if you ARE at Panther try Tiger. There's very obviously a software problem here. People had tried different video cards among other things.

Get organized, get serial numbers, configurations down to the video card and hard drive and you will be on the road to fixing this.

Todd Madson
Mac Elite

Joined: Apr 2000

0

08/10, 01:41pm | report spam | close Reply |
Some more....

Someone needs to approach apple indicating that "Oh, the machine isn't really freezing, just the GUI. Here's the output from console that indicates something called SMU is failing (again!)."

Nothing is perfect but if you document everything like you were testing these things in an R&D lab you will have irrefutable evidence there is an issue.

Todd Madson
Mac Elite

Joined: Apr 2000

0

08/10, 01:45pm | report spam | close Reply |
Interesting...

See: http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2005/04/msg00508.html

Individuals attempting to disassemble the SMU to resolve other issues.

chicken_tastes_good
Junior Member

Joined: Dec 1999

0

08/10, 07:25pm | report spam | close Reply |
OsakaBill

"Your logic is faulty. Just because you find people with similar issues you cannot conclude a poor design conspiracy.

And while it sucks to have things break, the nature of the beast means it is going to happen to someone. An unavoidable fact."

I never claimed a "conspiracy" I claimed "poor design". When a "repair" leaves me with a machine that acts the same as before the "repair", something didn't "break". It arrived "broken". It arrived poorly designed, poorly tested, poorly verified. Any time a product fails, within the limits of normal use, due to reasons outside of the user's influence, the manufacturer is responsible to fix it. This is a Warrantee. When the manufacturer claims that nothing is wrong, that the failure "does not exist" and multiple users with the same failure, find out they're not alone, its not a case of "failure rates", its a case of multiple users being stuck with machines for which the manufacturer will NOT honour the Warrantee. Until we ALL announce our statistical presence, attesting to the fact that this is NOT an anomaly, perhaps this manufacturer will continue to pretend that the failures are somehow due to the user. But these failures are INHERENT to the machine.

And yes, I know that just the GUI is freezing. I can iChat with my machine (when the screen is blank) and hear the chat sounds. But I've tried 10.2.7, 10.2.8, 10.2.9, 10.3.0, 10.3.1, and 10.3.2 loading the OS from a completely erased HD and ONLY running the bundles apps from the OS. This is not a third party problem, and its not because I broke something.

My machine has this defect, it came with the defect and despite "repairs" still has this defect. I've changed every variable possible (power, monitor, keyboard, mouse, power settings, OS, etc) and it still happens. This is outside my control, therefore its within the control of the manufacturer (who denies that the problem exists). If other people have this defect as well, telling us to put up with it, that it's just part of life, is irresponsible. I paid good money for a machine that I wanted to use. I can NOT trust it and I can NOT use it for its intended purposes.

Maybe we are not a large enough group of users to represent a statistical anomaly on this "fallible" company's map, but in my case alone, they are NOT honoring their Warranty. Perhaps together we can raise the awareness of the culpability of this fallible company and get our machines repaired (to the point that they work).

chicken_tastes_good
Junior Member

Joined: Dec 1999

0

08/10, 07:37pm | report spam | close Reply |
Statistical Percentages

"As such, a statistically verifiable percentage of products will fail and nothing can be done to stop that.

This is the point that seems to go unnoticed. "

No, I totally notice and accept this principle. With millions of machines manufactured, a condition of 0.01% probability of occuring will evidence itself. This is part of life (part of the business). But if the occurrance is so challenging to recreate, yet so frustrating for users, to deny its existance is irrational.

If my machine could simply be fixed (or simply WOULD) be fixed. I would be happy. That's the point that you seem to be missing. Apple, to me, through their "genius" has claimed that my machine HAS NO DEFECT. I attest that this is incorrect. How else, apart from banding together with others suffering the same fate, can I hope to get this resolved? By shouting at the Genius? Through the liberal use of ad hominem attacks? I was told I would get no more service for this issue (as it doesn't exist). That, in my case, is the problem.

The first repair failed, and I'll get no further repairs.

If statistically, the rate of failure for this problem was that low, why then was I lucky enough to get two motherboard that suffer from the same issue? The correlation between this motherboard (and its components) and this exact set of failures is too high.

verbo_phobia
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: May 2005

0

08/12, 07:56am | report spam | close Reply |
chicken_tastes_good

I sympathise with you being in the same situation myself, except when I called Apple the woman I spoke to could not have been more helpful. True, the problem still exists, and she was unable to give me a timeframe for a solution, but she said Apple is aware of these problems and that a solution is being worked on. I imagine contacting Apple before they were aware of the scale of this problem might have produced less satisfactory results - I suppose they can't work on the assumption straight off that every model in this series will have the problem. If anyone else is having this issue, Apple needs to hear from you. The more people complain, the faster a resolution will be found, and as Apple support told me, they have a better chance of fixing it if they hear from as many different people as possible.

Thorne^
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Aug 2005

0

09/29, 05:04am | report spam | close Reply |
Bug News

[url]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302212[/url]

Power Mac G5 (Late 2004) 1.8GHz models stop responding randomly ---------------------------------------- Some 1.8 GHz models of Power Mac G5 (Late 2004) computers may experience any of the following symptoms:

- The computer may freeze when performing certain video-intensive tasks for extended periods of time, such as a full screen slideshows, QuickTime playback, or some games. - The optical drive may not eject when you've been using the computer for about two hours. - Internet Connect may become unresponsive when you've been using the computer for about two hours. (This issue can affect either internal or external modems that use PPP as well as DSL modems that connect using the PPPoE protocol.) - Attached displays may not wake up properly after the computer, running Mac OS X 10.4, has been sleeping for an extended period of time. The computer seems to wake up, but the display doesn't.

These symptoms only occur with the 1.8 GHz model of Power Mac G5 (Late 2004) computers. Apple Engineering has identified the cause of these symptoms and is developing an update to address the issue. At this time we can not provide a specific date when the update will be available, but this document will be updated as more information becomes available.

In the interim, making the the following changes in the Energy Saver pane of System Preferences may reduce the occurrence of these symptoms until the updates are available:

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences. 2. Click on the Energy Saver pane. 3. Under the Sleep tab: - Drag the slider under "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:" to Never - Drag the slider under "Put the display to sleep when the computer is inactive for:" to Never 4. Under the Options tab: - Set Processor Performance to the "Highest" setting instead of "Automatic".

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Problems documented with single-processor G5 desktop

updated 07:40 pm EDT, Mon August 8, 2005

Single-proc G5 issues

Afflicted

Discussion Forums...

Apple has to get on this

I Understand...

Good Amount of People...

Please Stand Up!

I am Jack's Powermac G5

In this case...

Failure Rate?

Yes it is true...

Failure rate

Missing The Point

Faulty Logic

me too

Look.....

Some more....

Interesting...

OsakaBill

Statistical Percentages

chicken_tastes_good

Bug News

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Problems documented with single-processor G5 desktop

updated 07:40 pm EDT, Mon August 8, 2005

Single-proc G5 issues

Related Articles

Recent Articles

Afflicted

Discussion Forums...

Apple has to get on this

I Understand...

Good Amount of People...

Please Stand Up!

I am Jack's Powermac G5

In this case...

Failure Rate?

Yes it is true...

Failure rate

Missing The Point

Faulty Logic

me too

Look.....

Some more....

Interesting...

OsakaBill

Statistical Percentages

chicken_tastes_good

Bug News

Login Here

Register for our weekly email newsletter:

Connect tools:

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Follow us

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10 Most Read

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MacNN Marketplace