I finally got the right e-mail for Steve from a friendly (thank you) MR member, and I sent this letter this evening:
Dear Mr. Jobs -
Id like to start off my saying I am an ardent supporter and big-time fan of Apple Computer. In fact, many of my friends believe I really did drink magic Kool-Aid at some point. I own three iPods, a PowerBook, a Power Mac G5 and a 30 Apple Cinema Display. And yes, I have an Apple sticker on the back of my car. I'm one of those nut jobs that waits outside stores for software releases and new store openings. I'm an active Internet user and participate actively on many Apple-based fan sites.
I've not had a good nine months with Apple, unfortunately.
In July of last year, I purchased a Dual 2.7GHz PowerMac G5 and two 20-inch Apple Cinema Displays for my burgeoning photography business. Within three months, hairs and dust were appearing behind the protective LCD covers of both displays and in fact, one was so bad (serial # 2A5204N5PKK) I finally decided to take it in for repair. It was fixed under warranty on repair number R5505110. With a couple of hairs in the other display, I decided to cut my losses, sell both displays to private parties, and on October 9, I purchased a 30-inch Cinema Display to replace them. I brought the unit home (serial # CY52408JPKM), and within four hours, there were small pixel anomalies flickering across the whole panel (not dead or stuck), so I returned it to the store for an exchange. I brought this unit home, and after an hour of use, it (serial # CY526135PKM) literally burnt up and stopped working. Now counting three trips to the local Apple Store in Annapolis, the second defective unit was exchanged for another new unit (serial # CY5370*****), which has worked successfully to date. It is currently covered under Apple Care protection.
Now the matter of my Power Mac G5, which I have only had for nine months. Since the day I got it, its had more than its occasional share of application shut downs, unresponsive Apple applications and Apple software that had to be forced to quit. Really only minor inconveniences, but bothersome nonetheless, but nothing I felt warranted a visit to the Apple Store here in Annapolis.
In February of this year, the Power Mac started to exhibit some disturbing behavior that I simply could not ignore. When trying to restart the computer from a cold start, the unit would only make it half way through the power on self-test and would only sound a partial bong. When this happened, I took all the usual precautions I ran FSCK in single-user mode, reset the PRAM, reset the NVRAM, reset the firmware in Open Firmware, and as a final resort, I purchased a copy of DiskWarrior and ran it in from the CD. It still had problems both booting and shutting down. Also at this time, the computer stopped sleeping automatically, and in certain cases would not sleep at all. It would shut down, never fully sleep, and then I would return to the computer later to find the cooling fans running at full speed, requiring a hard shutdown via the power button. I reinstalled the OS several times on two separate internal drives and even swapped the drives into different internal bays to rule out the possibility of a bad SATA cable. Id say I had reinstalled the OS in the neighborhood of about eight times at this point. As a last ditch effort, I ran Tech Tools and Apples own hardware test, and the machine passed.
In early April of this year, I finally took the unit into my local Apple Store to find out what the problem was. Unfortunately, the unit would not exhibit these problems and I was sent on my way (visit #1). I came back a second time when the problems persisted, and again, the computer would not duplicate the symptoms (visit #2). After these problems persisted, I made the hypothesis that the unit would only exhibit the failed boot/sleep issues when it was warm, so I took the unit back to the Apple Store, and asked Adam Stevenson at the Genius Bar to make an exception and keep it for the day and run it through the paces (visit#3). Luckily, the unit did fail to boot while it was the Apple Store and a repair order was initiated under repair number R7790826 to replace both of the processors. I picked up the unit five days later (April 14) and was on my way.
While I noticed that the unit was booting properly when I got home on the 14th, it was intermittently locking up on restart commands, kernel panicking and it would not sleep automatically. It would, however, sleep manually from the Apple menu. The morning of the 15th, I woke up to the fans running full blast after manually initiating a sleep command the night before, so I immediately decided to reinstall the OS. Again.
I reinstalled OS X (the disk that came with the unit), and only left the DVI connector from the monitor plugged in (I was trying to isolate a peripheral I/O being the issue). I slowly added peripherals (first the FireWire connection from the Apple Cinema Display), let the unit go into a deep sleep (allowing an hour to pass between each wake up), and then continued add peripheral devices hour-by-hour to the chain. By the time I was done, I had the FireWire from the Apple Cinema Display plugged into the back, USB from the Apple Cinema Display plugged into the back, a FireWire 800 external HDD plugged into the back, network cable plugged into the back, an iPod plugged into a FireWire PCI Card and a FireWire Compact Flash card reader also plugged into that same PCI card. Up to this point, there were no issues with sleep etc. I then plugged in my iPod nano into my USB 2.0 PCI card, and the unit refused to sleep. I took it out, and it would sleep, so I removed that card entirely.
At this point, I decided to run all the recommended software updates provided by Apple through Software Update, and slowly add the applications that are most vital to my work piece by piece, trying to sleep for an hour between the additions of each application. Eventually I had all of my applications installed and got back to work. On the April 17, the machine kernel panicked. I restarted the computer and continued working in Aperture, Word, Safari and Mail. I tried to sleep the machine before running some errands, and I found it had run up to full bore on the fans upon my return that afternoon.
Honestly frustrated at this point, I took the unit back to the Apple Store in the Annapolis Mall (visit #4), and Adam Stevenson ran a full diagnostics test on the hardware (while I waited) that took four hours to complete. It passed all tests. When Adam went to restart the machine, it kernel panicked. When he tried again, the screen started flashing. He told me that since it had passed the hardware test, it must be software related and, again, sent me on my way.
Upon getting home I went through the whole same routine again, slowly and cautiously reinstalling my apps, OS X first. In the middle of the erase and install, the machine kernel panicked, so I tried installing it on a separate internal drive and booting from the lower B bay. I also tried running a fresh install from the upper A bay. The unit still refused to sleep automatically, and would still lock up on waking from deep sleep.
At this point, I decided to get AppleCare involved (Case #62186661). Tom was the first gentleman I spoke with, and he quickly went down a list of things to try, which I had already done. He decided to transfer me to a specialist, and John picked up the phone to help. We reset the firmware and NVRAM, and it seemed to operate OK after that. About an hour later, I left my desk to run some errands, the machine slept on its own, and would not reawake.
I phoned AppleCare again. This time Harley answered the phone and after a series of questions passed me on to Chris. Chris finally recommended that I install the OS as it is on the disc (remember I have reformatted a couple of drives at least a dozen times at this point), not run any software updates, do not install any of my other software, remove all the RAM, except the Apple RAM and see if it will duplicate the problem. He told me that if the problem persists with only Apple RAM and the bare essential OS in the system I would have real merit to take it back into the Apple Store for more diagnostic work.
