Apple releases iMac freezing fix, MacBook Pro software update

Where did you see that? Software? What does the upgrade do?

Thanks for telling us! It's such a great news for me because my iMac is coming in couple of days and was worrying what to do with freezes

Does it also magically remove the condensation in the right corner of the screen?

Apple late Thursday released a software update for owners of its new aluminum iMac line who have been experiencing intermittent freezing issues, though the patch has produced mixed results. Meanwhile, the company also released a software update for its newest MacBook Pro notebooks.

iMac Software Update 1.2 and 1.3

As was first report by AppleInsider last month and than subsequently acknowledged as a known issue by Apple, owners of new aluminum iMacs have been suffering from a flaw that randomly locks up the interface, rendering the all-in-one systems all but inert until a reboot.

On Thursday, Apple released two small software updates that were intended to remedy the issue -- iMac Software Update 1.2 [13.3MB] for users running Tiger and iMac Software Update 1.3 [21.6MB] for those running Leopard.

While some members of the AppleInsider forums are reporting that updates alleviate the freezing issues, others say it has had no effect on their iMacs, which continue to experience random freezes.

MacBook Pro Software Update 1.2

Meanwhile, Apple also released MacBook Pro Software Update 1.2 [14.4MB], which improves graphics stability and is recommended for all 2.2/2.4GHz MacBook Pro models running Tiger.

Login & Keychain Update 1.0

Earlier this week, the company released Login & Keychain Update 1.0 [22MB] for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which it recommendeds for all Leopard installations.

The update addresses issues users may encounter when:
Logging in with an account originally created in Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier that has a password of 8 or more characters.Connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks.Changing the password of a FileVault-protected account.

Hey, does anyone know a good website out there which tracks known issues with Apple products? I've seen one-off's which track particular issues (i.e. RSS http://www.macbookrandomshutdown.com/) but nothing which tracks and categorizes issues by product. I'll be getting an iMac soon but I want to know what issues people are having before I purchase...

That's all fine and dandy, but what about those of us with a Late 2006 White iMac (20" 2.33GHz C2D, 3GB ram, Radeon 256MB x1900, 500gb HDD).


Seriously, it locks up almost daily, and it's gotten to the point where 1 in ever 5 lockups corrupts the drive. I've called tech support, they're at a loss as to the cause, and I can't really afford to give her up for 2-3 weeks (graphic art on a notebook = suck).

Hopefully the macbook fix means no more low frame rates in world of warcraft...

Sometimes when I put my iMac to sleep, the screen will go black like it normally should do but when I come back a few hours later, the screen is lit with just a plain dark gray screen. I have to push the power button and then it goes black like if it's asleep. Has anyone experienced this?

This patch fixed nothing. If anything, it made the problem even worse.

I am having the same problems, and spent 5 hours on the phone with Apple yesterday.They do not even acknowledge there is a problem, did not mention a fix. I installed the fix this morning and still have the same problem. I am truly disappointed. No problems on my new MacBook though.

I support Macs for a county, and Apple's turn-around on portable repairs is seldom more than a week. The iMac uses many portable parts. Call in your case, see if they'll ship you a box to return your Mac, or recommend you take it to a local Apple store. They'll return it overnight (if you ship it to them) when it's fixed. Don't forget to backup before you turn it over for repair.

Lock-ups are usually a hardware issue, most commonly third party installed memory whose timing is slightly out of sync with the Mac's logic board. If you've done that, put your old memory back in to test it. If your old memory works, return your memory upgrade to your source for a replacement.

Crucial and OWC guarantee their memory, so it shouldn't cost you more than the temporary addition to your credit card while they ship you the replacement, and confirm your return to credit your card back.

I have the same freezing problem on my Macbook Pro. Although as of late it is not as much a problem and so far I have not seen it on Tiger. Maybe it was fixed?

Lore! Please explain what happened? did you apply the patch and it didn't resolve your freezing issue? If you want help you"ll have to explain what's happening and we might help you solve it..

Welcome to AI.

I have the 24" alu Core2 Extreme 2.8ghz. I Have never experienced the lockup problem in OSX but once in Bootcamp windows. I use OSX 99% of the time, should I install this new patch?

Please do, and let us know how it works, especially if you notice any differences. Since you have a stable iMac, it would be good to know that the update, which is recommended by Apple, is OK for iMacs not having the video card hardware issue. New drivers to better take advantage of the ATI card's features would be very welcome.

I have the same machine (Core2 Extreme 2.8ghz with 4Gig of Ram) and hadn't ever had a freeze UNTIL I downloaded the patch. When I came back to check on my iMac, the computer had become FROZEN and the screen image COMPLETELY GARBLED. I haven't had time to use the machine much since rebooting but I am ... concerned.

It shouldn't be the memory, it's not 3rd Party, I got the 3GB directly from Apple when I ordered her. I would have responded earlier, but I had to reinstall OSX again (the lock up earlier today corrupted my drive beyond what AHT could fix.)

they problem is far from fixed, it's crashed 4 times since thursday, better than before but not much.

I've been having a lot of crashes recently as well. I thought it may be heat related so I got a temperature widget. Turns out my video card was getting up to 67C (152.6F) and the CPU was 55C (131F)! Since then I've downloaded a program called smcFanControl and bumped up the CPU fan from a default of 1000rpms to 2700rpms. It's a little louder, but I haven't had any crashes since. Temperatures now average at 38C for CPU and 46C video.

It looks like there is some sort of disconnect from the heat sensors to the fan controls. That's my guess at least.

http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/

Actually, heat in the new iMacs could be very relevant. I've even noted in my older G5 iMac just upgraded to Leopard the hard drive is getting hotter than before. I have no idea why, perhaps Leopard has more going on in the background.

In any case, heat could definitely cause lock-ups as the hardware stops responding, or acting erratically. I think your suggestion of using a tool like smcFanControl to try to keep the system cooler is an excellent idea. When my new 2.8GHz iMac gets here next week, this will probably be one of the first extras I download and install.

From all the postings I've been reading on this issue this past month, it seems pretty clear to me that the ATI video card is the culprit here, whether it's defective in some way, or overheating, or bad drivers, is unknown, but heat is an easy issue to check out at home.

Thanks for the idea.

Temperatures are not a concern unless they are in the 80-100 degree range which is considered 'hot'

Celsius or Fahrenheit? My G5 Tower and iMac are always running over 100º F. If the hard drive gets over 135º F, utilities will advise you to let the device cool down first.

You expected apple to acknowledge there was a problem?. Where do you think mac fanatics get their attitude from (try posting something bad about the mac and see how hated you are). Apple not only never acknowledges there is a problem (until they fix the problem) but frequently delete post on their support website complaining about the problem. I assure you, apple has acknowledged this internally but will never admit to anything until they release a fix (and they you might be lucky if they told you what the fix was for... other than some generic "fixes prolem with imac).

Actually, while slow to acknowledge this current iMac video freeze issue, Apple did so when the public was beginning to notice. No company acknowledges liability for any issue with their products until they have a solution at hand, or are forced to by overwhelming visibility of the issue.

It's still not clear to me just how many people are having this issue, while it IS clear that a vocal minority are. I've been reading the forum discussions on this issue for over a month, and see multiple postings of the same user's comments over and over on different discussion boards. However, my queries with AppleCare reps I know tell me that they've actually had very few support calls on the issue, compared to their day-to-day issues like the new Leopard release. It's easy to jump on the hardware failure bandwagon when one's issue may actually be a software corruption issue of key files on their hard drive. Many people on these forums who initially thought they were sharing this issue eventually came back to post the problem went away when they did X (some OS or application fix, or removing problematic USB devices, or other hardware configuration issue).

I've just moved ahead and ordered a new 24" 2.8GHz Aluminum iMac, so I'll know soon enough if it's common enough to affect my order. I'm pretty conservative with my Macs, performing regular routine software updates and utilities maintenance/backups and the like, so if my new iMac starts freezing sporadically, it will quickly become clear that the fault lies with the hardware.

Hmm, no.. companies do acknowledge problems even when a solution is not at hand. This is just apple way of doing business. I know of no other company that deletes complaints about their product as consistently as Apple. That is way beyond just not acknowledging a problem.. that is also attempting to prevent your customers from also acknowledging a problem. It's like Apple think if they delete the messages, means there are no problems. Leave the messages alone, reassign the people responsible for deleting the forum postings to actually fix the damn problem.

As to the cause of the problem, that is apple to figure out really. I suspect it's an hardware issue for a couple of reasons.

1. It doesn't happen on other machines (possibly ruling out software)
2. It happens on some Imacs suggesting a component quality issue (probably not all imacs have this defective component).

FWIW, I had a hosed Leopard installation on my 24-inch iMac and decided to do a complete reinstall of the original software - wipe the hard drive, restore the software as it shipped, no 1.1/2/3 updates, no Leopard. The machine has been stable since Wednesday. I bought my iMac the week it was released and never had a problem until the 1.1 update, so we'll see how it goes.

Do you really get condensation on your screen? I'm planning to buy one of the cute new iMacs, but with all of these reports, I'm considering to wait for the second generation. I hope I don't need to wait for a very long time :-(

True, but you also have to consider the limited space inside the iMac. The heat doesn't really have anywhere else to go except spread to neighboring boards and components.

While I suppose Apple may remove the most inflammatory posts, I count over a thousand posts with over 50,000 views currently active on the Apple Discussion Forum in multiple threads related to this freezing issue, and they have been continuously active at least over the previous two months.

I acknowledge that Apple has been accused of removing posts before, but I've never seen any evidence of this being a policy beyond some posting's language being over the edge, speculative about possible future products, or clearly substantially and factually inaccurate, which could confuse some Apple customers about Apple products.

I agree that this patch doesnt seem to have fixed the iMac freezing issue. Certainly when I installed it I had 2 further freezes. Since then I have disabled TimeMachine and not had a further freeze( fingers crossed ) and am now up to 2 days 5hrs running. Not sure if that is just fluke but I am beginning to think TM has something to do with this.

--
Scott
http://ukmac.net

i read on someone's link somewhere, apple is working yet again on another fix.

lets hope the next one works.

Looks like I spoke too soon earlier ! Shortly after I posted I cam back to revive display from sleep and guess what ? Yep, locked up tight... So not Time Machine then...

I installed 1.2 last week. So far no hanging for me while in Leopard, but that was what I expected (and hoped) since I haven't experienced any hanging to date. I haven't tried bootcamp windows yet but will give it a try later tomorrow night. If I see any problems I will post it here.

At this point I am thinking the hanging issue has something to do with how the new iMac is handling heat inconsistently between various identical iMac units. My guess is the internal heat sensors may not be working correctly in all iMacs the same way, thus the reason why some folks have the hanging issue and some don't. This is just my theory...

Hello

I used the updater to "improve graphics support" but now my MBP clicks after I perform an action....not always consistent. It reminds me of my old Powerbook 170 that would click whenver there was "beep" and I had my sound turned off...it would still send out a signal to the speakers which I could hear as a pop or click.

Also, my fan is running non stop now (low speed). That also didn't happen before. Has anyone else had these issues since updating? Is it possible to roll back the firmware update? I wasn't having trouble before the update.

Thanks

Greg

I have the 24" iMac running 2.4 core 2 duo and 4 GB of RAM. Got it in the end of Sept. My machine worked great until I installed Leopard the other week. Since then, the performance has been terrible. I get the spinning wheel of death too often to recall (this never happened before) and simply opening the system preferences has become a challenge. I used to be able to open many applications at once, but now am limited to just a few before serious performance hits occur. I've experienced hanging in nearly every application at one point or another. I am considering uninstalling leopard (yes, the performance really is this bad). How was your experience in doing this? Anyone else reading this have any thoughts on this approach?

Thanks.

Leopard has not slowed down any of my Macs. I suggest rebooting from a Tiger partition and running DiskWarrior to rebuild your directory structure, then running iDefrag (Coriolis-Systems) to defragment and optimize the organization of files on your hard drive. Something other that Leopard is hosing your performance.

If you don't have those utilities, try booting from the Leopard DVD and running Disk Utility from the Menu bar to (1) Repair Permissions, and (2) Repair Disk to assure nothing's amiss in the disk structure (not as powerful as DiskWarrior, but good first pass).

If that finds nothing, I'd suggest you rerun the Leopard installer and select Archive & Install (this will retain your accounts/apps/file folders, but replace your System). This may affect Adobe apps (and require you to copy stuff from the Previous Systems folder or running the Adobe installer disk to fix).

You have a powerful iMac. There's no software reason for Leopard not to fly on your machine.

Dave,

I ran repair permissions and repair disk as you suggested. After booting up and opening a few apps, things definitely seem faster. I'll see how this goes before rerunning leopard. If I do the rerun, would it be optimal to completely erase (copying files first of course) and do a clean install?

Thanks,

TGoss