Power Mac G5/1.8: The buggiest Mac ever?

Steve McCabe - 09:30am Oct 6, 2005 PST
Guest User

Hi, folks

There's a story that I'm wondering how many people know about. I'm usually
fairly up on most Mac developments (I try to justify it to myself by telling
myself that it's because I need to for work, but the fact is that we only
have two-and-a-half Macs in our home office, and I'm just sad), but this one
was news to me.

The story started back in March. I bought my wife a new Power Mac G5; we got
a 1.8GHz single-processor model from the Apple Store in Tampa, and had them
install an extra gigabyte of RAM. We also picked up, while we were there, a
Bluetooth dongle and wireless keyboard and mouse, and the whole thing was
connected to a new 20" Cinema Display. A fair old piece of kit, if you ask
me.

For a month or two, Deborah (for that is the lovely and talented Mrs.
McCabe's name) was delighted with her new Mac a definite improvement over
the eMac she'd been using until then, although she missed the ten-minute
breaks while she made PDFs.

Then one day, while she was out, I thought I'd do her the favour of
upgrading the OS to OS X 10.4. From that day on, we had nothing but grief.
Applications would hang routinely usually when an open or save dialogue
box was accessed, but not exclusively requiring a force-restart from the
power button on the front of the case. Suspecting a disc problem, we
disconnected the network, and even tried installing a new internal hard
disc. We stopped using her Firelight external firewire hard disc. Discs were
reformatted, OSes were re-installed, Bluetooth was removed, and still the
problems persisted. Her computer would crash and crash hard every two
hours, almost reliably. And, as an added inconvenience, the optical-drive
tray decided that it didn't care to eject discs.

We took the machine back to the shop, and they replaced the optical drive.
Then, on the next visit, the replaced the logic board. On the third visit,
it was a new power supply and a promise that this was the last time they'd
change components the next time would see us getting a whole new computer.

Then last week I found a reference on the MacInTouch website to ongoing
problems with this machine. Purely by chance I was surfing around, just
reading the latest Mac news I discovered that this particular machine had
a fairly major flaw, one of which Apple's engineers were well aware. There
was even a page devoted to the problem in the Support section of Apple's
website:

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

A little more investigation led me to this site:
http://www.g5freeze.com

I was quite surprisingly surprised. Here was a quite major, deep-seated flaw
in a computer we owned, and I'd never known about it! We'd already told the
Apple Store that we were bringing the computer back for a replacement, and
so the following evening, we packed it up and took it in. To our total
satisfaction, our old, failing machine was replaced with the current
entry-level Power Mac a dual-processor 2.0GHz machine with double the RAM,
twice the hard-disc space, a double-layer Superdrive, and (I believe) a much
more capable video card. They even restarted the warranty to date from last
Friday, not last March. The manager did make the point, though, that we were
getting an upgraded machine because the 1.8GHz single-processor Mac was no
longer in production, and so they had no more to give out. I get the
impression, though, that this was a little bit of face-saving on Apple's
part "We're giving you the nearest equivalent, not a real upgrade."
Whatever the politics of the matter, we're pleased with the outcome.

All in all, a very satisfactory outcome to quite a problematic story.
Deborah lost many hours of productivity, as well as a significant proportion
of her sanity, during the months that this was a problem. I don't recall
when we first took the machine in for repair, so I have no way of knowing
whether this issue was already known to Apple when we first encountered it.
But I'm surprised, as I've said, that I'd not seen more information around
the Web regarding this issue. Of course, once I found out about it, I
started looking and noticing *lots* of information, but for about six months
I thought that we'd just got *really* unlucky with our Mac.

And the new Mac's running just fine.

Steve