Apple does not give a F...

[umlaaat]

I'm a music producer who heavily relies on my G5 Quad 2.5 to mix, produce, record, arrange and sketch ideas.
Most of my day is taken up doing the above, and if not then I'm with my kids and/or taking care of family/home issues.
I'm a straight up dude, who's very thankful to be able to live out his dreams and have an amazing family to support me.

I take care of all my gear. This is my livelihood, I have to. I routinely dust out my machines, update my OS, maintain integrity of drives, keep unnecessary stuff off, etc..

Up until 6 days ago, I was in my zone, working on different projects when out of nowhere, my mac just died.
I tried every single thing i could think of and research. Including: swapping out drives, starting via firewire target disk mode, boot from dvd, swap out the 3v battery for a new one, swapped out ram, reseated video card, pmu reset button, safe boot, reset nvram, pram, spam, ham... even applied a hair dryer to the logic board (advice of someone), all of which did nothing.

Beyond confused and frustrated, i googled for about 5 hours and came upon board after board of people going thru the same thing. Their issues matched mine, mostly verbatim. And it turned out the G5 logic board was the culprit. Most of the people with this issue were running a dual, but there were a lot with quads like mine.

I'm going to quote someone on forums.macworld.com:


After reading the IBM techdoc, having another company do the r/r/r process might not be such a good idea.
The IBM doc explains that there was an enhanced process used for this that a 3rd party might not be aware of or capable of.

This could result in rapid degredation of the reworked connections if the underfill isn't performed along with the use of the right solder medium.

The G5 chip simply can't maintain integrity with standard soldering techniques because the 970 module and the actual G5 card have different thermal stress tolerances.

The document goes so far as to say that without the use of the underfill and the spring load, the life of the machine is a fraction of what it is WITH the underfill and spring load.

The problem is the thermal "cycling".

The G5 chip 'steps down' when you aren't running CPU intensive apps, such as design apps.

So everytime you switch between say firefox and final cut, the chip cycles between high power and reduced power.

Which causes thermal cycling.

This asks the question of what effect the CPU mode option of "highest-reduced" has on your machines tendency to break down from this problem.

If you were to set it to either reduced or highest power and leave it there, then theoretically the CPU won't step up or down and won't be subjected to thermal cycling.

G5's ship with this option set to "automatic" which seems to facilitate the breakdown.

That document makes it glaringly obvious that the stability and integrity of the G5 is a house of cards.

Apple should've went from the G4 directly to intel.

And that information was known prior to the release of the G5.

Apple(in typical apple form) wanted to recoupe all the money they put into the G5's development so they went with it.



I'm not a techie, but this did make sense as to why so many people were having the same problems as I all on the same basic chipset.

I called apple 3 times (so far). All of their responses were the same. You're out of warranty, so you're screwed. They were nice about it tho. But the message was that I could pay btw $900-1300 for a new logic board.

But this is TOTALLY unacceptable. From every point of view.
For me to cough up that kind of money (or any at all) when its the design thats the fault is not right to say the least and something that apple should rectify.

If my 10+ year old G4 went out, I would never call them and expect for them to fix it for free.
If my 15+ year old G3 went out, I would also never call them.

But they BOTH run fine. Daily in fact.

But if my (almost in comparison) brand new G5 thats only 1 year out of warranty DOES go out, and if I had spent TOP dollar for it, and if its a design flaw, then HELL YES, they should fix it.

This is regardless of the work that I'm missing out on (rather sludging by with my powerbook on).

 

[fryke]

Welcome to the forums. I've moved your thread to the appropriate forum (it's not _really_ about system software, is it...).

Sadly, there are three things to consider here...

1.) Apple is right about you being out of warranty, thus they don't have to do anything, really. Of course it might not _feel_ right, and maybe they could think of this as an image thing rather than anything else, but technically, you're simply out of warranty.

2.) If you're looking for problem A on the internet, you're _bound_ to find problem A on the internet. You're not focussing on all the success stories about how PowerMacs of the same generation dutifully work just fine, you're looking for similar cases in the hopes of finding a solution. That you _do_ find "many people" with the same problem is inherent to your approach. Did you find a dozen reports, two, a hundred or a thousand? Apple has sold a lot more of those machines, and as long as they're not *all* failing (or more than, say, 3 or 4 percent), it's simply not really a failing series.

3.) Apple _does_, when they find enough cases, adjust - and replace faulty parts even when out of warranty. But they have their guidelines (percentages) about when to react in a different way.

At the end of your post you're saying, and I'm quoting: "But if my [...] G5, that's only 1 year out of warranty DOES go out [...], they should fix it."

I guess it's one year out of the three-year protection plan, which is not the same thing as the one-year warranty. Apple does _not_ offer a four or five year plan. If the machine is four years old, their answer to your problem is, as long as they haven't acknowledged a design flaw (and they haven't), the correct one.

I agree with you that this sucks. And I hope that they and you will find a way to solve this without too much grievance. But things _do_ fail. Your G3 and G4 show you that not all of Apple's hardware is failing after a couple of years.

"The IBM doc explains that there was an enhanced process used for this that a 3rd party might not be aware of or capable of." - If IBM really failed to outline this to Apple appropriately, then Apple can sue them and start replacing motherboards with the money they get from that lawsuit (should they win). But apparently, the problem is _not_ (or not just yet) a catastrophical failure across the whole line of PowerMac G5s, which means that there's no reason for such drastic steps just yet.

 

[Jesse714]

I'm Going to agree with Fryke. Yes, it really does suck, but it isn't the design of the computer, Everycomputer is bound to have problems sooner or later, But i wouldn't advise you to replace the logic board. You seem like you use your computer alot, daily as you said, and i realize you don't want to spend anymoney, but you should consider upgrading to the Mac Pro, and get apple care, any problem, send it in, and they'll fix/replace it.

Its not Apples fault, the G5 was a great computer.

Good luck with your computer, I know exactly how you feel.

 

[rubaiyat]

The fact that you can not find huge volumes of complaints on the Internet does not mean anything. Apple has successfully kept a number of basic design flaws under wraps for many years until someone or other outs them.

Regularly unwelcome comments are removed on many sites even supposedly independent sites such as MacWorld. Recently a staff written article on continuing flaws in Snow Leopard carrying over from Leopard was quickly removed without trace when the public rapidly started adding to the list.

I am a major contributor to the Apple Pages forum and the problems with printing in OSX are frequently and quickly deleted despite the fact this is of major interest to users who will mistakenly attempt to print to commercial presses, lead on by Apple's deceptive marketing.

As a consumer you are at a distinct disadvantage, not having the broad overview of the true status of problems that the corporation has. The corporation uses this against you in its own interests.

The unfortunate tolerance of unacceptable short term failure in computing is a real problem in our society. It is the equivalent of shoddy 3rd world building practices and can have equally fatal and costly consequences.

3 years AppleCare warranty is no great measure of confidence in products which Apple claims as having above industry standard quality, justifying the premium that its consumers pay.

My personal impression, owning a large number of Apple computers over the last 25 years, is that the quality and reliability is going down not up.