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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Individuals attempting to disassemble the SMU to resolve other issues.

"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).

"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.

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.

[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".