DOA

normal, sorry

I sold Macs for two years, we had in-house Apple certified Tech's. The fail-rate of high end machines is always a bit high in the first month. The assembly process has to have it's kinks worked out during an actual production run because there are so many things that go into it all that it'd take just as many units put through to find all the tweak points if you ran it "cold".

The highest fail rates are the custom builds in the first two weeks followed by the fastest or most extreme designs. Apple is very good about replacing DOA's and it's important not to focus too much on it.......There seems to be a wierd but consistant correlation between you're emotional attatchment to unit failure and fail-frequency. Every time (without fail, no lie!!) a customer would get all tweaked in the head about a failure, they'd get a series of DOA replacements. We had one lady that had to be talked down by two or three staff members every time she came in because replacement units that we'd pick out of a random fresh shipment, test in the shop, and send a consultant over to set up would have critical failures within days.

I've come to the conclusion that something with so many parts governed by Quantum physics is very sensitive to strong manifestory energy (IE bad vibes=a dead cat in the box).

The less mystery and emotional content you weave around your machine, the more reliable it will be. Strange but true.

Symptoms

no chime is a board-level failure. Either bad RAM, bad logic board or bad start-board. Bad start board was always the most common. The thing won't chime if it doesn't get appropriate responses from all it's primary components. Does the Drive spin up? What does the start-button do (light up, Pulse, change colour, etc.)? Is the RAM seated? A bad start board or logic board, if you take it in for service, could take as little as 3 days if the problem is known to Apple and Parts are available. Otherwise, work on trading it in on one that varifiably works. Of course if your local retailer doesn't have them yet yer SOL until they do. Stay calm it's just first run jitters. When you call Apple, (provided they haven't changed procedure significantly) get past the first person to "the G4 Group". These tend to be closer to real techs.