New iMac unresponsive and crashed

[swamyg1]

I have a brand new maxed out 2015 retina iMac, I'm running 32gb of Crucial Ram with 1tb SSD and M395x graphics. Today I experienced an off problem today that concerns me. Machine is about 1 week old.

I was working in Photoshop and had quite a few apps open, but both my screens froze (iMac and dell u3011) and my mouse became unresponsive. I was not doing anything overly intense at the time. I could still hear sound. I then saw some very bright twinkling artifacts on my iMac screen, about 5 inches long and an in inch high. Could be a graphics issue? My screen then blacked out and I saw the spinning shut down icon.

Any ideas what's happening or if this is a common issue for others? Thanks!

 

[Cheffy Dave]

I have a brand new maxed outg2015 retina iMac, experienced an off problem today that concerns me.

I was working in Photoshop and had quite a few apps open, but both my screens froze (iMac and dell u3011) and my mouse became unresponsive. I was not doing anything overly intense at the time. I could still hear sound. I then saw some very bright twinkling artifacts on my iMac screen, about 5 inches long and an in inch high. Could be a graphics issue? My screen then blacked out and I saw the spinning shut down icon.

Any ideas what's happening or if this is a common issue for others? Thanks!

Why post here? Get to an APPLE Store, and drop it off, WE arn't going to fix your MAC, with guesses, Apple will , under warranty

 

[\-V-/]

As Cheffy said, get that to an Apple store ASAP.

 

[swamyg1]

Why post here? Get to an APPLE Store, and drop it off, WE arn't going to fix your MAC, with guesses, Apple will , under warranty

Ok, I will do that. To answer your question, I thought I would post here because this is a forum for Mac users with Mac problems. I thought others might have some insight into this problem, but I hear your suggestion loud and clear.

It seems other users have posted similar questions and have received useful feedback. My bad luck I guess.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

While I agree that with an iMac that age talking to Apple is best as its brand new, they could have been far more useful.

It could be your RAM not seated properly or a dodgy stick of RAM though. If it reoccurs then swap back to the original RAM and see how that goes if that fixes a recurring issue then it's the RAM.

 

[Weaselboy]

Ok, I will do that. To answer your question, I thought I would post here because this is a forum for Mac users with Mac problems. I thought others might have some insight into this problem, but I hear your suggestion loud and clear.

It seems other users have posted similar questions and have received useful feedback. My bad luck I guess.

Just a suggestion before you head back to the Apple Store. You mentioned Crucial RAM. You might try going back to just the factory RAM and see if that fixes anything. Even if it does not fix this, you would want to go back to the factory default hardware anyway before heading to the Apple Store. IMO it is just easier since you avoid Apple trying to blame your aftermarket RAM for this.

 

[Fishrrman]

Weaselboy is right.

Put the ORIGINAL RAM back in.
Run it that way for 3-5 days.

Do the problems persist, or do they disappear?

 

[Adam552]

http://www.macworld.com/article/2362040/do-you-have-bad-ram-how-to-find-it-and-how-to-fix-it.html

 

[^^BIGMac]

I don't know what's going on but yesterday I upgraded my 2015 iMac from 10.11.1 to 10.11.3 and got this black screen. Only the mouse pointer was on the screen.They had me rewet the PRAM and then boot into recover and reinstall OS X but after an hour of waiting for it to install the same thing happened...

After several techs at Apple I finally got a Senior Advisor who had me boot into Single User and enter a bunch ff code. Holy ****.

In any case it fixed the problem!

Not for the faint of heart but for those who are interested in that sort of thing, here is the code that fixed the issue...however I don't recommend anybody mess with this single user mode unless you really know what you're doing (I don't)...

mount -uw /
cd /Library/Preferences
mv com.apple.loginwindow.plist com.apple.loginwindow.plist.old
reboot

 

[swamyg1]

I suspected the ram after your suggestions so I put the stock ram back in, and even tried with just one stick.

Unfortunately, it looks like my problem was much more serious than I anticipated. I wiped my drive and tried to do a TM restore and a fresh install. In recovery, I kept getting error messages that the install could not complete, components could not be downloaded, etc, etc. Then my SSD drive would completely disappear from Disk utility. It was nowhere to be found. I would keep restarting into recovery mode, sometimes I would see the disk, sometimes not.

I have a genius bar appointment tomorrow but I'm thinking I'll just return the machine and buy a new one. I'm not really interested in having a repair done on a machine that's brand new. I'm still in my 14 day window.

It's a real bummer. I just bought 2 maxed out retina iMacs, one of which is faulty and the other of which I received today. I'll hope for the best on this new one, fingers crossed. My previous machine was a 8 core Mac Pro that had failing components as well. Apple had that machine for nearly 2 weeks trying to diagnose the problem. They then offered me a full refund, 4 months after my purchase, I took them up on the offer. A little disappointed in my experiences thus far.

 

[maflynn]

I have a genius bar appointment tomorrow but I'm thinking I'll just return the machine and buy a new one. I'm not really interested in having a repair done on a machine that's brand new. I'm still in my 14 day window.

Good luck and you're right. You should need to deal with getting that machine repaired but rather getting a new one and Apple usually does that.

Report back on how it went.