No doubt most people that land on this page are here because they are suffering the same issue, well I thought I would share my letter to Steve with you about it (dated 26/08/08). I will update this post or create new ones to let you know what happens, if you too are suffering from this issue please leave a comment as I will be referring Apple to this post when the time comes.  

Steve,

First, I hope your well.

I am having a consistent issue with my girlfriends iMac that is frankly getting beyond a joke. Her iMac is the first of the 24″ aluminium iMacs, it was bought on launch day. It started off fine but rapidly the issue appeared, if put to sleep for an extended amount of time (ie overnight) the machine will not wake from sleep. This carried on for a few weeks before i submitted a bug via the developer connection bug reporter with my ADC account. The engineers requested I send them the logs, which i did, they didn’t show anything. No sleep or wake event was in the logs when this issue occurred. They then asked me to SSH into the iMac via my laptop set up several lines of terminal commands sleep the iMac and then wake it up taking a snapshot of any data. Nothing happened, when this issue occurs there appears to be no bus power, the keyboard is rendered useless so how would the firewire port be any better!?

I tried in vain for weeks to get this to work and nothing, in the end I had to tell them that I couldn’t get it to work and the bug was closed! Despite the issue not being resolved! Anyway, I tried all matter of things, PRAM and SMC resets, changing the sleep modes, clean installs…. the list goes on…… making her follow procedures of ‘unplug this’ and ‘do it in this order before sleeping it’. Not surprisingly that was all to much for her. She isn’t tech savvy, she switched from windows and got a mac because she wanted it to ‘Just Work’. However the few days where she had followed my advice at this point seemed to pay off. It was waking from sleep again! This lasted a month or so before it started again.

Just 2 weeks ago I was staying at hers watching TV with EyeTV on her mac and boom, the machine powered off and rebooted. There was no proper shutdown procedure it just clicked off and rebooted. It did this twice in as many hours before we shut it down for the night. The next morning she was using it whilst i was out at University and the machine died, this time it would not power on. Upon hearing this i presumed the logic board had died. I booked us and appointment at the local genius bar and in we went. It was accepted straight away for repair no problem and out 7 days later with a new logic board and a new 24″ screen!! (The screen was fine before). In total, off the top of my head) I think the repairs came to £750-850! That’s fine as you picked up the tab thanks to the 3 year warranty.

The first time the repaired machine was put to sleep it wouldn’t wake from sleep again! So here we are now with me writing this email. I am writing you this email before I waste my time and money getting this machine to a genius bar to be told they won’t accept the machine as nothing shows as an issue in the logs, and i’ll be honest, despite the fact it happens every single time I know they will turn around and say it cannot be reproduced! You only have to look at the iMac and Macbook Pro discussion forums to see this, hundreds of people are suffering from this issue Steve, and I saw loads of them in the Apple store being told to go away (in a polite way) when they told the genius their macbook pro or iMac is not waking from sleep. The genius looked in the logs and said ‘there is no events in there there is nothing wrong’!! That is so not true! This issue does not for some reason show up as a sleep wake event or as anything else in the logs! My Macbook Pro has this issue! There is nothing in the logs, and funnily enough I saw most of these people when I was at the genius bar trying to convince the genius to give me a new battery since mine was clearly faulty, I had to sit there for 2.5hrs whilst my battery ran down to 30% full and powered off in front of him and then let him test it in another machine before he would believe me! Anyway, I digress….

I am writing to you because I want this issue resolved. I want my girlfriends iMac to work as it should, she paid enough for it and she is wanting to buy one of your notebooks and an iPhone, though is hanging fire on the notebook due to this issue. It costs us a lot of time and money to take the mac into one of your stores Steve (its not easy to carry either), I appreciate that these things happen, its the nature of technology. However, this machine was already meant to be fixed once, its clearly not the case, it has the same issue (though not dead yet!) and we can’t keep expending time and money going round in circles either being told the problem doesn’t exist, it can’t be reproduced or getting replacement parts after replacement parts and having to keep taking it in. I’ve seen the attitude of the geniuses in our local store and I know this is how it is going to pan out.

I’d appreciate a response from you or one of your staff regarding this issue. Given the contact i have with macs both with the machines themselves and the number of others i know that have contact with them I think this is a fairly serious widespread issue. I am tending towards faulty SMC’s but I can’t be sure and I don’t want to play a guessing game. The best outcome for us would be a direct instruction from above for the apple store to carry out a thorough (not an ‘it doesn’t exist’ or ‘it can’t be reproduced’) investigation and a replacement of the relevant parts (Probably logic board and PSU) OR a better solution is a complete replacement machine and you take this one and send it to your engineering department so they can play with it to their hearts content to find the issue and try and find a fix for the hundreds or thousands of others that have it. The later option would also cost you less as replacement of all the parts again is going to cost almost the same as a replacement machine!

Regardless, I want to work with you on this one to get a resolution for us, but also maybe to help you find out what is causing it. What i don’t want is to be fobbed off by Apple geniuses and have to commute with the machine backwards and forwards multiple times. It costs us over £30 per trip so you can understand why having just had it repaired we are not thrilled at the prospect of another round trip to the Apple store!

Kind Regards,