Apple iMac Display Problems Reported

[jjblanche]

JJBLaanche-- Ati hasnt put out perfect drivers, but for versatility of use i will go red over green any day of the week. (and for stability too).

...

it just makes me laugh when lemming-like consumers blindly attach themselves to companies--who's sole point of being is to make a profit. This isnt bad--just life.

Do I even need to say anything?

 

[echofoxtrot]

i have never seen an ati commercial bashing nvidia, so you can hardly justify my preference of vga cards equates to the hysteria that is mac lovers. sure you have some fanboys, but this comparison doesnt come close.

But for vga cards the hd3xxx series was a good value--and ati cards seem to retain their value beyond nvidia cards (in my opinion and experience--still have a x1900xt that can eat up some games!)

I openly admit that phenom is crap. intel is a better deal. Thats why i bought a c2d, but if you would like to draw that comparison to apple fans, then i would have bought the phenom (even though it screws the consumer at the price point) over the intel chip which is a better value.

What mac fans are demonstrating now is pure dedication to the company rather than the product--and what does that get you? the situation we are in now, with macs going downhill!

 

[razor512]

the apple fanboys just need to face it, apply sucks just as much as microsoft and every other company,

people create companies to make money, not look out for the consumer
either way your getting screwed no matter which road you take. the only thing we can do is the the road that involves the least amount of screwing and that road is building your own PC, theres more competition in that field, and this increases quality

apple knows who the fanboys are and they know that they will buy crap because it is made by apple, so they exploit this by building low quality items with no ill effect from the fanboys because the fanboys have their face firmly placed on jobs butt.

crappy lcds is apples way of telling the customers to give us your money and leave.

their crap already costs much more than any other pc out there, the least they can do is add a better lcd

the key is to never become a fanboy of any company, never stay loyal to any brand because once you do, you just gave them the ok to lower their quality because they now think that you will continue to buy their product even at lower quality

 

[jjblanche]

I was just critiquing your argument. In more than one post you laud the superiority of ATI, (ie: "i will go red over green any day of the week"), which to me seems like a "blind attachment to a company." That's all.

My point was not to turn this into a poo-flinging contest. I'm trying to call out Celeste on his obvious bias, which I think we can all agree casts a shadow on Tom's Hardware as a whole.

 

[jjblanche]

Razor: If you're going to engage in a civilized discourse, at least clean up the grammar and vulgarities.

 

[echofoxtrot]

JJ- good form! I understand what you are saying and did not mean to sound hypocritical. But my preference is based on my past selection of cards, not company fanboyism.

anyways, i agree, tom's should deliver the news in an unbiased manner as to let the reader make his/her own assumptions of the material at hand.

but being human, thats hard to accomplish 100 percent of the time. maybe celeste should write an article about how great the iphone is? to make up for all the apple bashing???

haha.

good form indeed.

 

[Douche]

I've been reading Tom's Hardware for awhile but never felt the need to register and post a comment until now...

I generally like and rely on this site for opinions and honest reviews but Celeste's reviews are really poor journalism and completely unprofessional. It's sensationalism at it's worst.

No doubt Apple's products aren't perfect but there's is no doubt that they do make quality products... the few issues that Celeste points out seem to be overblown to me... it's like he has a personal vendetta. How about an honest review Celeste??? Especially when most reviews fall all over themselves to give positive reviews of apple products. Weak, dude.... weak.

I personally own a macbook pro and an older emac as well as a custom Red Hat rig and a Alien box. At work I administer Solaris boxes and have a Sparc station for fun!

I feel no personal affinity to any one OS or computer company but I must say that the hardware/software that gives me the least issues and actually gives me pleasure to use are my Macs.... even the old eMac! Whats wrong with having a computer that requires ZERO administration! Hell, I get PAID for that! When i get home I want a comp that doesn't give me headaches! I can connect to work or other remote servers, parallel into XP if i want or just do my internet porn thing right from 1 computer (macbook pro). Its pretty versatile!

My mac makes me happy... my other computers just perform their function.

 

[razor512]

one of my friends has a mac book pro and it runs great, over priced compared to other laptops that have faster CPU's and more memory for the same or lower price, but it still runs well. the quality in their laptops is still at a good level, (better than some of the dell laptops I used) it seems that apple is focusing more of their time into their portable devices instead of their desktop devices

(i don't hate any companies but i hate when a company decides to screw their customers over and does nothing to help fix the problem)

 

[Joe_The_Dragon]

This is why AIO suck if apple had a mid-tower then people would be able to get there own screen and the mini is too weak for it's price and the macpro is over kill for a lot of uses + it is a $2200 system with a 7300gt and 1gb or ram base.

 

[xerodiac]

I've been affected by a lot of Apple quality issues.

Machine bought in early September 2007 (aluminum model).

- 20" display is cheap as cheap can be: washed out gradient effect clearly visible, horribly tight viewing angles. If I stand right in front of the iMac I see every white color as a light blue. Colors shift almost constantly if I move my head even if I sit in front of the screen. The real viewing angle is more like 20 to 30 degrees and not the 160-whatever that Apple states. I went to several apple stores and ALL the 20" displays had the same issues. I don't believe for a second that there is even one 20" display that has an acceptable quality. I previously owned a white 20" iMac and there is a huge, huge difference when it comes to the display quality.

- Random freezing issues (seems to be solved with the latest updated but it took them more than 3 months...)

- After upgrading to Leopard I was unable to login and had to reinstall the hole darn thing with a "archive & install" option. It took me some days to find this solution somewhere on the internet while I was unable to use my iMac.

- Wanted to connect my USB drive in Leopard for Time Machine. When I tried to format the drive it just reported an "input/output error" and the drive was gone from the desktop. I had to format the drive on my other windows XP PC with a special Mac-Partition-Format software. Can you imagine?!

And now someone please tell me something about high Apple product quality!

 

[Douche]

Xerodiac... interesting... you say you bought your mac in september w/ leopard... Leopard came and u waited 3 months for leopards 1st patch? Leopard came out in the middle of october. By my count the first update came out after a month, not 3. As far as the washed out issue, i have no idea, i've never looked at one of the new iMacs. If the problem was so obvious to you why didn't you return it immediately? I would have.

These issues are probably real, but I'm skeptical of that poster.

 

[pip_seeker]

If the issue is serious enough to warrant a recall, I would expect Apple to do the right thing. Otherwise, the repairs/replacements would be on a case-by-case basis, and I doubt Tom's Hardware has a wide enough sampling yet to determine just what kind of job Apple is doing in taking care of their customers at this time.

Eventually Apple will be forced too, as far as Tom's sampling goes it will always be miniscule because Tom's is predominantly PC... and most of anything that paints apple in a bad light on a form they control is censored. So a timely fix is pretty much out of the question.

And yes, they locked threads on THEIR forums hosted on THEIR servers. It's not a fascist dictatorship. It is, in fact, a point of ownership. They locked the threads. Did they delete them? So, if they aren't deleted, they are still in the forum? People have had their say, then. Who knows why their moderators locked the threads. But it is completely within their rights to lock THEIR threads on THEIR forums hosted on THEIR servers, right? If they were locking threads on someone else's forums (or taking legal action to do so) then I would have serious issues with this. But moderating their own forums? That is their legal right. Even deleting the threads are within their legal rights.

Ok so you're willing to give up your first amendment right to free speech? You have a right to say what you want to say provided you do it in a tasteful matter. I really have a hard time understanding why you so freely give up this right just to support a product / and or company. I could understand if people were posting vulgarities or flaming other users and creating havoc. That certainly wouldn't be tolerated on any form I were to control. So while it is their right to do this as time goes on it will be in their best interest to not do it anymore. The truth is the truth, if you can't handle it then your game is over. What ever happened to "The customer is always right" ??? I guess ballooning profits and a rampant runup in stock price has gone to apple's head?

Every article of Tony Celeste's I've read involve disdain for Apple products. From what I've gathered, the problems with Apple are not in-house. Rather, they stem from ATI graphics cards and inadequate Seagate hard drives (ie: nothing that Apple could have predicted).

LOL that's a new one, apple picks and chooses what to build a machine with jacks up the price of such items and then resells them in a 1 to 3 product spread. But when things "just don't work" they blame the problem on hardware they chose to put in a system that they claim "just works". Brilliant! :lol:

As far as Tony Celeste goes he's a journalist if there wasn't a story here you wouldn't be reading it. You shouldn't shoot the messenger. I think Tony has been more than fair with the reporting he's done on Apple. We bash Amd all day long over the Phenom release and smug little apple can't handle a small little weekly column and apple has 15Bil of your money sitting in an account. Meanwhile Amd is bleeding to death. So cry over your poor little apple all day long. You made them this way with your fanaticism.

I'm not bothering to write this post just because someone has dared to call Apple into question. Far from it: I understand Apple is not flawless.

That's not the problem, the problem is with apple and how they view themselves. How they paint themselves compared to the competition. Nothing more than fraud if you ask me.

However, the way these articles are presented, and the fact that it's one negative after another, makes me question whether or not Tom's Hardware is operating with a bias. Given that Celeste has authored all these masterpieces, I'm inclined to believe it's a case of one hack junketeer preaching to the choir.

If Tom's Hardware is to be believed it absolutely must tell the truth. If it's not true then give some evidence to support your claim.... How apple perceives to be the system that "just works" is by censoring what is bad with them. You do realize this is a lie. Lie by ommission is still a lie.

I'm not "hating" on ATI; they have some very nice products, especially the new HD 3870. However, everyone knows the drivers they write are crap. The drivers they wrote for Apple were doubly so.

Apple chose the product to put in their machine... so this is nothing more than calling the kettle black. If you put together a product and claim "it just works" then it should do that. But instead you are now saying it's 3rd party related problem. [I'm not saying it isn't.] But the claim it "just works" should be removed.

For apple to claim their product is superior to M$FT and control all aspects of how their machine is built, but yet have these kinds of problems really shows how much more superior M$FT is where M$FT is installed on 1000's of different configurations... and no wonder M$FT couldn't give a rats a$$ what poor little apple does.

anyways, i agree, tom's should deliver the news in an unbiased manner as to let the reader make his/her own assumptions of the material at hand.

I think they have, it's very hard to write an article and paint truths when you have someone on the other end deleting everything anyone says that paints a particular product less than what it was meant to be in the first place... especially when the said product has a $mil ad campaign attacking the company that virtually controls the market. So you can clearly see what this is really about is $$$ and apple obviously doesn't feel $15 bil is enough.

Celeste points out seem to be overblown to me... it's like he has a personal vendetta. How about an honest review Celeste??? Especially when most reviews fall all over themselves to give positive reviews of apple products. Weak, dude.... weak.

What's weak is apple censoring their forms. We probably wouldn't even be having this discussion if apple would wise up and do the right thing. I don't know about you but I think I am smart enough to decide what product I would like to buy regardless of what is said on a form about such a product. A company can't hide from the truth forever. Charma is like a beotch I once knew.

 

[xerodiac]

Xerodiac... interesting... you say you bought your mac in september w/ leopard...

Read again, I never wrote that I bought an iMac in September WITH Leopard. I figured that most readers get the point that I'm writing about the timeline from the purchase in september until now Freezing stopped a few weeks ago that's 3 months after the first freezing reports were published. Geez...

I was unaware of the (in my country) 10 day return policy. When I found out about it it was too late to have it returned. I could try to send it in to have the screen replaced but where's the point when every other 20" is as bad as mine. Waste of time!

 

[xerodiac]

Ok so you're willing to give up your first amendment right to free speech? You have a right to say what you want to say provided you do it in a tasteful matter.

Uhm, I don't think that's valid if you post on someone elses discussion forum. It's their house, their rules. I'm actually quite pleased of the fact that the don't close down all negative quality posts although a lot of critical posts/threads get deleted quickly. I would do the same if Apple was my company, honestly. My house, my rules.

 

[crom]

It's the constant bullying on the Apple forums as well. My girlfriend had that exact same Seagate problem. She shipped it back to Apple for them to repair, which they put in another Seagate drive. Of course, that drive failed as well. Thankfully this time I used good old linux to back up all her data onto a homebuild server so she didn't loose anything this time. When asking Apple about this when I brought it to her attention, she was bullied by users on those forums and then her thread was removed due to "speculation".

 

[razor512]

if you want support for a mac, go to a real tech support site and not the apple site, their site is just full of fanboys who refuse to accept that apple screwed people over and will deny it and flame people who think otherwise

apple will remove anything that gives them any negative image, if you so much as quote something from them and put it in a way that doesnt give them a good image, they will e-mail you to take it down or face legal action

apple makes good stuff but sometimes they really go overboard with their jerkiness and screw everyone over, then using the power of their fanboys, they completely deny the whole thing

 

[lp231]

Apple fanboys are retards! They should be ban from using any electronic devices Period!

 

[pip_seeker]

Uhm, I don't think that's valid if you post on someone elses discussion forum. It's their house, their rules. I'm actually quite pleased of the fact that the don't close down all negative quality posts although a lot of critical posts/threads get deleted quickly. I would do the same if Apple was my company, honestly. My house, my rules.

So it's "ok" for apple to make their product look superior and bash another product repetitively and cover up with smoke and mirrors when it "seems" their product is suffering bigger problems than the product they are repetitively bashing.

While I believe it's their right to delete hateful, bashing type posts with no merits. I don't believe these are the tactics they are employing. If things get much worse it won't be long until people wise up and stop buying.

It seems to me Apple is acting Holier than thou... which only someone with blinders on would fail to see. [-Fanboi]

Sooner or later the bed you make will be the bed you lay in.

 

[ceres]

Well, I have had Apple replace a 24in unit that I initially received late october. The gradient issue was there along with backlight bleeding and a heavly yellow tint in the middle of the screen. The replacement unit arrived earlier today.
It is better but by no means as good as the previous 24in white model.
That´s the quality I was expecting. It is definitely not there. Not a single unit I have locally reviewed has an acceptable screen. The one that is currently on my desk is the best I have seen so far. The yellowish tint is reduced but still bugs the sh.it out of me as I paid 2400 Eur for the Machine and Apple prides itself on quality. With the AL screens it is just not there. I have heard of homogenous lit screens w/o gradient but couldn´t find one at retailers in a 50km radius. It´s my first Apple computer. I wasn´t looking to make any religious switch. I was intrigued by the overall package/ecosystem which I thought fitted my needs better than the monster pc I have built previously.
Right now I think the glossy glass in front of the panel is just there as some sort of visual equalizer. It makes for stunning colors and detracts from the core values of the grade b screen. I wasn´t expecting an EIZO. I was expecting quality Apple previously delivered in the white iMacs.

 

[Tjik]

Since I neither need Apple neither Windows I'm feeling relaxed reading all these articles. Nevertheless the frequency of articles published by the same author on the same subject does stick out more than the content of those articles. Maybe it's me not understanding what's going on, but I start to get bored and tend to view this as someone's crusade against a personally selected enemy.

Concerning comments about forums: members of any forum tend to be very defensive if someone suddenly stirs up commotion by questioning the quality of something, even if it's done fairly respectfully, there's always a chance that it attracts the attention of the less well behaved members who hence go berserk; the main problem being someone not being able to detach personal feelings or preferences, thus making a technical matter personal.

These unruly elements are present in every society, so there's nothing strange about having to deal with them on Internet forums. To moderate forums is a tricky task, to say the least; it's more a question of whom to make upset.

 

[jaguarskx]

Meh,

Nothing wrong with the Mac Monitor itself. It displays the typical characteristics of an LCD panel using a 6-bit TN panel. The poor viewing angles is a drawback of the technology itself.

The only way to avoid such problems is to skip past those cheap monitors and spend some more money on a monitor that uses a true 8-bit MVA/PVA or IPS panel technology. Doing some research is also a good idea.

TN panels have basically "infected" nearly all screen size categories because people want something big and cheap and many times you get what you pay for.

Yes there are many cases where LCD monitors are really defective, but based on that YouTube video, that 20" Mac Monitor is working within specifications. The guy should really blame himself because he clearly neglected to do his research.

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who buys cheap monitors using TN panels, and then complain about them.

 

[the puffin]

Why do people knock Apple?

Trust, that's why. Faulty iPod batteries, iBook screen failures, ibook PSU overheating problems and now another set of screen problems - Apple have denied they all existed until the courts deemed otherwise - and even then, they've only been willing to rectify the problem withing the jusidiction covered by the class action. So a sucessful class action in the US wouldn't result in a recall in Europe. In fact apple would continue to insist that no problem existed.

The IBM PC took over the world by accident - and IBM stopped building PCs a couple of decades ago. This has actually been very good for consumers. Apple - who made an excellent and arguably superior product years ago - now seem to offer style and hype over quality and function.

I'm still running the same PC I built myself six years ago. True, the processor is more powerful these days, there's a flat-screen instead of a CRT, I have six times the memory I had at the start and my hard drive capacity has increased from under two hundred gig to over half a terabyte - and the graphics card has improved a little - and I'm running XP instead of 98 - but as any Pratchett fan would understand, it is still 'the thing and the whole of the thing' - the same PC I built years ago

Macs have tended to be built too small to last. Good at the time, but memory and storage capacity simply can't be upgraded enough in the face of the amount of data that users want to manipulate today. It's the oldest problem Macs have suffered from. Good machines, but no real staying power.

I am NOT knocking Macs. I'm not saying the PC is wonderful : truth is that a Mac of a given generation usually feels slicker and smoother than the corresponding average PC. The difference has always been that you could upgrade the PC a bit at a time, while the Mac would always be a straight out complete new box.

And this isn't so awful, if you can afford it. But when the new product turns out to have a major flaw which the manufacturer refuses to acknowledge until absolutely forced to - Then things become a bad joke.

I have an iPod Shuffle, which I love (except that it's just too damn small - I've put it down somwehere, and I just can't find it - honestly! ) - it's the only Apple product that I've owned since an ancient Mac desktop I had that was old back in the 80's (the pre-JPEG era. It kept running out of memory manipulating bitmap files. See what I mean?) - some of the products are really very good.

The problem with Apple is that they've changed from heroic innovators producing quality products and bucking the tide, to hype-merchants who ride the trends just ahead of the field and know how to produce attractive products - but at a premium price and with a seeming contempt for the consumer. They no longer want to please you, they just want to dazzle you and get your money.

It isn't so much that people knock the products. It's more that with DRM issues, software changes and replacements, premium prices on hardware and the occasional generic fault being blatantly ignored - the overheads associated with owning Apple products is popularly perceived as being far too high by many consumers.

It's a shame. Oh - before you flame me, or anyone else - remember this. You can have your doubts about the integrity of the company while still admitting that they've made some good products across the years.

 

[tonyp56]

Honestly, this is nothing new when it comes too Apple computers. I worked as a Certified Desktop Tech for just over two years, around the time that the G4 and G5 came out. Within two months of the G5 being out, I had to repair about 6-7 brand new machines (couple hadn't even been used yet) (Five were ordered by one customer, out of those 5, 3 ended up having to be repaired) because the motherboards were fried. In six months or so of the first release of the G5, I had worked on over twenty G5's, most were less than two months old, and all were waranty repairs (so no customers did something wrong).

Now, on I-Mac's, when they went from the all in one CRT monitor form to the style they now use (round base with LCD monitor on top) there were several issues there too.

If everyone remembers when OS-X first came out (that was a long time ago, LOL) it was full of bugs and complaints, mostly because it was so different compared to OS-9 and below, and everyone had to relearn how to get around in a Mac.

Anyways, this is nothing new with Mac's, at least the ones I have seen. They always have bugs when they first release machines, but normally, and up to now, Apples weren't on the radar screen for most. (Not to mention, IMHO, no where near the amount of bugs for Win-Tel machines especially when it came to new Operating system--Windows Vista anyone?)

 

[V8VENOM]

Pip_Seeker,

You really are just a complete retard aren't you?! Go away, live in your fantasy land.

No ****, I'm getting sick of these purile attempts at picking on anything Apple. My list of where to start with Microsoft is so freakin' long (I'm a developer using their tools like VS 2008) it could easily crash the this site.

No please for the love of computing stop your stupid and purile campaign against apple and focus on the real issues.

Hype machines -- go suck your dick and tell me where there is hype?? These are **** based on Intel components, yes the same ****' components in your PC. Give me a break, you people are so retarded it is pathetic.

 

[nukemaster]

Pip_Seeker,

You really are just a complete retard aren't you?! Go away, live in your fantasy land.

No ****, I'm getting sick of these purile attempts at picking on anything Apple. My list of where to start with Microsoft is so freakin' long (I'm a developer using their tools like VS 2008) it could easily crash the this site.

No please for the love of computing stop your stupid and purile campaign against apple and focus on the real issues.

Hype machines -- go suck your dick and tell me where there is hype?? These are **** based on Intel components, yes the same ****' components in your PC. Give me a break, you people are so retarded it is pathetic.

That was a little too emotional don't you think?

It is a fact that Apples does like to bash "PC[anything thats not a mac]"(same damn hardware is TRUE...well i guess apples TMP chip must make all the difference in the world?)

Come on. You can say the PCs are for offices and macs are for music and blogging? and "fun stuff"....Remember pc crying its self to sleep mode? What was that. i have NEVER seen a PC that cant play music and blog.....but apple sure wanted people to think that......

People just want a computer thats intuitive and works like that do? yeah guess what for me that is Windows...

I have tried most of the other solutions(Solaris[i want to use more of this....its fast for what it is], Ubuntu, Knoppix[by far my favorite Linux] and many others too. And yes most versions of MAC OS....i remember the old PRE OS-X crashing plenty when the browser(Netscape, it DID not crash on windows 95/98) could not handle massive amounts of java. OS-X on to tiger was nothing special to me. nothing in there i can not do on windows.)

I am NOT saying mac(or Apple, IMO the old quick time, from the days of win95 was excellent and maybe even ahead of its time) is bad, but dont come in here whining about peoples opinions. Some like Apple some like Windows some like different Linuxes. Thats what makes the world go round.

back on topic. Only a few will be effected by the screens....lots of screens can be like this(all part of the LCD viewing angle..).....