I was a Mac user long ago. I remember upgrading to OS 7.5, 8.0, and the horrendously error-prone upgrade to OS 9. In the years following that, I went back to Windows. While there were some problems, the nice thing was that the overwhelming majority of things simply worked.
A few years ago I started work linux in various flavors into my work. At first, there were a lot of things to get used to, and I had my fair share of complaints. As I grew accustomed to it however, I grew to love it and a few years ago started using it almost exclusively while keeping a Windows box around for things like Photoshop.
A few months ago, I decided that I was going to try one of the new iMacs. I went out, shopped around, and finally purchased a 24-inch iMac for hardly a paltry sum of money. Within twenty minutes of setting it up and turning it on I had my first complete system freeze, requiring a hard power cycle. This continued while I was having problems connecting to the internet, installing applications, keeping disks mounted, stopping the machine from muting itself, installing MacPorts, and so on.
Not being one to give up on computers easily, I scoured the internet for solutions, read through email lists and talked to people at work. Some problems I was able to fix and I got to a point where the other ones really didn't bother me that much anymore.
Today however was the straw that broke the camel's back. Since 4am this morning my iMac has locked up SIX times and the only thing in any of the logs is a cryptic statement of "KernelEventAgent[23]: tid 00000000 received unknown event GPU" followed by about a hundred lines consisting of hexadecimal codes. While this leads me to believe that there's some problem with the graphics card, one can't effectively Google hundreds of lines of hex and get meaningful results.
I can't reliably do anything that involves an application other than Firefox (speaking of which, Safari is about as useful a web browser as a slice of cold pizza) without the machine completely locking up.
So Apple, you have been officially added to the List Of People And/Or Organizations Who Can Suck My Balls.
This is not normal and the machine is obviously faulty. Return it.
*Philip Says...*
If only it were that easy. The geniuses in the Apple store who seem to think that coffee is a way of life said that it couldn't be returned since I had performed 'hardware modifications outside the 90-day return period' - for the record, I doubled the RAM.
So, remove the extra RAM and bring it back to them?
Also, adding RAM doesn't void the Apple warranty, so they should at least fix it for you.
*Philip Says...*
I went back and talked to a different 'genius' who told me to try just wiping it and starting over, which I did. I just hit 24 hours of stability. It turns out though, the installer of Mac Ports doesn't modify the $PATH variable, so to get it to work you have to either use the full path or change $PATH.
That is ridiculous! Well, at least tell them the machine is faulty and you want it fixed. There is definitely a hardware problem, you should not be having this kind of experience. I'm a mac user and while I wouldn't call myself a fanboy, I can tell you that this is not at all normal - we're not all just putting up with this kind of thing.
I would try and take it back again - maybe take out the RAM this time - and let them know of its constant problems. They have a legal obligation, right? If they're still being pricks, your best option might be to buy AppleCare for the machine, which they do take fairly seriously. Not that you should have to for such basic problems.
Good luck!
I totally agree with you man. In fact, Ive devoted an entire site to telling Apple just how much it and all its pandering, whine ass, lemmings wannabe users can suck MY balls. Check it out:
http://apple.cansuckmyballs.com