{ 2007 08 20 }

Instant Review: Aluminum iMac

I desperately want to love this computer. Apple’s quality just seems to be extremely inconsistent.

The screen is gorgeous. I bought the 24″ model, added another gigabyte of RAM, and have been thoroughly impressed with the system performance and the display. Watching videos — especially HD content — makes this beast well worth the price; it would probably rival some decent televisions, and it works perfectly for my small apartment. The new keyboard design is nice, but it’s nevertheless just a beautifully-designed ergonomic nightmare, and I’m letting my co-worker borrow it instead (since I have a better keyboard anyway). The Mighty Mouse is also neat, but I use a trackball, and could never use that mouse properly since its cable is so ridiculously short. Regardless, it is teh sexy for watching video podcasts and DVDs, and doesn’t hang when doing more than one thing like my Mac Mini did.

But, I’m running into some serious issues. Here’s the list thus far:

  1. It kernel panicked the first day, while I was setting it up. Now I was putting some stress on the system — hooking up 1TB of storage through three external drives — but come on. Let me at least install some crazy kernel extensions before it starts panicking on me.
  2. There’s a dead pixel, out of the box. It’s near the upper right hand corner of the screen, and thus out of the way, but still.
  3. The screen doesn’t feel like glass. Tapping it with my fingernail, it sounds just like a regular old plastic screen, it just looks a lot shinier. I hope I’m just being picky, and didn’t get screwed somehow.
  4. This is the kicker: WindowServer will intermittently hang. On Mac OS X, this means that the entire desktop freezes, and while you can still SSH into the system, to use the main display you need to reboot the machine.

    This has happened three times so far, and each time I was looking at the iTunes store in iTunes; I’m starting to suspect that it has something to do with the graphics card, because I can SSH into the system, and using sample can see that iTunes is hung off in the weeds in some graphics routine. Both iTunes and the WindowServer are stuck in uninterruptible sleep, presumably waiting for the graphics hardware to stop freaking out. There’s no obvious crash information, but in the logs I did see this:

    Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: ** ASIC Hang Log Start **
    Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x01019583 00009062 00009583 00000000
    Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
    Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x0011a010 00000000 00000000 0083106b
    Aug 19 15:02:40 rigel kernel[0]: 0x00f8fc00 00000000 00000001 00008a12

    which continues with a lot of hex values. Fun.

    From reading the discussion boards on Apple’s website, it looks like a few other people have seen this, usually while playing games, which typically means exercising the video.

Update: Rumor has it that the iMac Software Update 1.1 fixes the “ASIC hang” problem. It seems to be working for me.

Update (October 6): Apple seems to be working on the issue. Software update 1.1 does not completely solve the iMac hang problem.

Update (November 3): iMac Software Update 1.2 (Tiger) and 1.3 (Leopard).

Posted by Casey on Monday, August 20th, 2007, at 10:14 pm.

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