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27" iMac Shipping Times Slip to Two Weeks Amid Screen Flickering Complaints

ceedees said:
I am not saying that they are all still running - most of them have gone to the great computer graveyard in the sky long ago. Though I do think my Powerbook 120 with 2 megs of RAM is still out there somewhere. My point was that during their typical useful life (about 3 - 4 years, though some lasted much longer) they all worked fine except the 17" MPB, and a Centris 610 from the late 1990's.
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I do agree with you in a way, as the macs i had since 1990 were rock solid, upto my favourite 12" MBP, since the switch to intel, production moving to china and Apple's fascination with ultra thin, I have had nothing but problems. The current products look fantastic, though I have replaced 2 Airs, and 3 MBP 17 due to faults, I had a logicboard replaced on a 24" LED ACD, 2 powersupplies blow go to computer heaven and awaiting my replacement i7 due to flickering. The last apple computer i bought that I still have to this day without problems is a 15" powerbook.

I still love using a mac, but now I expect to get one that is faulty due to bad QA. I have stopped buying BTO as its so much faster to take it back to the store for this reason. The exception being the i7, and I am actually expecting the replacement machine that arrives tomorrow to have issues also, which will put me at about 8-10 weeks without an imac since ordering one, not good enough, Apple has now got more money then ever so why is the QA utter crap? My housemates MBP 17" arrives with big scratches on it, I mean comeon, so damn obvious, its like they do not even check.
 
star-fish said:
Lie consistently? Sounds like you had a bad experience once, and Jigsaw's sales staff go by dates they are told by Apple, so if it's anyone's fault it's Apple's. I've shopped with them for years and never experienced anything like what you're talking about.

And the Apple Store ones did say shipping in five days, but that was a lie too. The truth is that nowhere in the UK has reliable and fast shipping on the i7s because there are no stocks. Whoever you bought from you'd have had the same experience...and now you've made it worse for yourself by being impatient because you're at the end of an even longer queue.
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Yes, I've had a bad experience; Jigsaw's comments were that "Apple's ETAs are never reliable" - so to have one of their salesmen (Andy C, say hi to him if you want) say he could definitely have the machine to me for a given date was misleading, or "a lie". And then, when asked when the machine would be in, following further delays to be once again told "we're expecting them in 10 days". And then to find that they'd taken money on the credit card, for items they don't have in stock.

One bad experience is one too many with any retailer. And I have been reading the various forums and seeing when people got machines, and when they ordered; had i ordered from Apple I would have had my machine on the 28th November.

They don't actually get an ETA from Apple until 5 days before the machines are being shipped; so any of their sales staff offering a 10 day ETA are - by their own explanation - lying.

I haven't made things "worse for myself" by being impatient - allegedly the order is still open, they've only refunded my money, not cancelled the order, and have apologised for taking funds for something out of stock and misleading me with regard to the dates; but the experience still stands. Whether Apple are mistreating their resellers, or the resellers are buying from a channel which is less than efficient, I don't know and don't care - at the end of the day the only thing that matters to me as an end user is getting what I've purchased.

If Jigsaw then mess me about further by cancelling the order and losing my place in the queue, so be it. There are plenty of other sources, and my issue was not so much with not having my Mac NOW, as having PAID for it and not had it for a month. Even if I do get this iMac (and we ordered two, but the other order has not been such an issue - they didn't take payment for that one in advance) I will not be buying from Jigsaw again, because there are plenty of other retailers who have yet to let me down. However, I also won't be recommending them again. Which I used to do in print quite often ;)
 
Ordered mine on November 15th. Arrived December 1st. It's been without issue since then. No problems here - for those of you worried that you might get a lemon, well you might - but I think that the flickering screens are a minority issue rather than a headline grabbing majority issue.
 
THe 27" iMac (i7) I ordered on Dec 9th shipped today (15th) from Shanghai. The original projected ship date was the 23rd. Lets hope it arrives in good working order. Projected arrival date is the 17th (I ordered "slow" shipping, but appears like Apple upgraded it. The Apple online store still shows 2 weeks as estimated ship date.
 
I got mine for over a month now.

Thank God I haven't experienced any hardware problems (for now)! I did have a few software glitches in the beginning, but i think that was because i hadn't installed yet the update: Office for mac. (imac got stuck everytime i used Office)

Now it works very smooth.

I use it several hours per day, always put it in sleeping mode, power the mac off once a week...
 
underattack said:
THe 27" iMac (i7) I ordered on Dec 9th shipped today (15th) from Shanghai. The original projected ship date was the 23rd. Lets hope it arrives in good working order. Projected arrival date is the 17th (I ordered "slow" shipping, but appears like Apple upgraded it. The Apple online store still shows 2 weeks as estimated ship date.
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Do you know where it is now? Any ideas whether he is still in the airport or not? Mine has been sitting overthere for 2 days already, probably in some cold room without the love or the warmth he would get if he'd been here already.

Poor fella, he'll better work perfect whenever he's here or I'll dump him!
 
Editor- said:
Do you know where it is now? Any ideas whether he is still in the airport or not? Mine has been sitting overthere for 2 days already, probably in some cold room without the love or the warmth he would get if he'd been here already.

Poor fella, he'll better work perfect whenever he's here or I'll dump him!
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hehe. Last info from Fedex is "in transit", Dec 15, 2009 9:16 PM, with a location of "Shanghai". So my guess is that it is on FX90 which left Shanghai 9:24 pm for Alaska to arrive around noon. But who knows. It is easy to get confused among dates around that route. Sometimes export or import customs can throw a curve ball. Maybe they picked your system as a "sample" and are now making sure it doesn't include any contraband, which I hear is best done by playing Call for Duty 4 or watching Hulu/Netflix on it for a couple days in the customs break room.
 
Ouch....

I have to agree that Apple's QA has gone way downhill since the move to manufacturing everything in China ... but it sounds like you've also had especially poor luck.

The last Macbook Pro I bought has been trouble-free for me so far, as have both Mac Pros I purchased (a 2006 and a 2008 model). An aluminum 20" iMac (first generation) was also trouble-free for me. I wound up reselling that one to a woman I was friends with, but I believe she's still using it to this day without any issues.

That being said, I know several Macbook owners with multiple issues, and one of my friends who bought a white 17" Intel iMac has LCD panel issues, just outside the factory 1 year warranty period. (It draws vertical lines down the screen in a couple spots ... apparently happening to quite a few 17" white Intel iMac owners, but no recall or warranty extension on it to date. Frustrating.)

When you outsource production to China, I think this is what you can expect. You're simply not going to get their assembly line workers to care about things like shipping a machine with dents or scratches on it. You're also going to find that when all the products ship from that far away, they're more likely to get damaged in shipping. Of course, practically all the "big box" computer makers are having their products assembled over there these days, so I guess one question might be: Why do THEY have fewer problems than Apple does?

I suspect part of that answer lies in the simple fact that most of them aren't trying to build a stylish, elegant machine in the first place. You look at your average dark gray or black plastic tower like a Dell or HP, and you realize it's just not as likely to SHOW a scratch or ding from poor handling. But I *also* believe most of them don't ship products direct to consumers from China like Apple typically does. If I do a "custom order" for an HP system or what-not, I think the order still gets fulfilled from a USA based distribution location. So maybe they're taking in all the Chinese-assembled products and doing some final QA on them before they ever reach the end-user (thereby hiding the true number of defects).


MH01 said:
I do agree with you in a way, as the macs i had since 1990 were rock solid, upto my favourite 12" MBP, since the switch to intel, production moving to china and Apple's fascination with ultra thin, I have had nothing but problems. The current products look fantastic, though I have replaced 2 Airs, and 3 MBP 17 due to faults, I had a logicboard replaced on a 24" LED ACD, 2 powersupplies blow go to computer heaven and awaiting my replacement i7 due to flickering. The last apple computer i bought that I still have to this day without problems is a 15" powerbook.

I still love using a mac, but now I expect to get one that is faulty due to bad QA. I have stopped buying BTO as its so much faster to take it back to the store for this reason. The exception being the i7, and I am actually expecting the replacement machine that arrives tomorrow to have issues also, which will put me at about 8-10 weeks without an imac since ordering one, not good enough, Apple has now got more money then ever so why is the QA utter crap? My housemates MBP 17" arrives with big scratches on it, I mean comeon, so damn obvious, its like they do not even check.
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underattack said:
Maybe they picked your system as a "sample" and are now making sure it doesn't include any contraband, which I hear is best done by playing Call for Duty 4 or watching Hulu/Netflix on it for a couple days in the customs break room.
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goddamned, you're making me insane! You are joking right? :eek:
 
Reading some of the posts here it almost seems that Apple has no obligation to build Rev A products that actually work.

As if it's "OK" for the iMac to arrive defective because it's the first product iteration... ridiculous.
 
I ordered an i7 iMac with 8GB on Black Friday at 7:30 am from a West Coast reseller and I still have no idea when it'll ship. Co. was first supposed to receive the unit on 12/4 then 12/14, yet today it still shows on backorder.

What's chapping my arse is that it seems Apple is giving reseller orders a much lower priority than orders through their own stores.

I am not going to be a happy camper if it takes until 2010 for my order to be filled.
 
Mine Shipped out Today in the morning from China. Still no delivery date....I think it'll be on the 18th. Up until last night it had said Ships: Jan 6th, then was suddenly "prepared for shipment" mid-day yesterday. Unfortunately I have no way of seeing the Serial number because it's under the resellers account....so i can't see any invoice. I'll bet its a week 50 though. Simply Mac is where I got mine...they are getting 2-4 in at the end of the week so if you got your iMac i7 from them yours might be coming in this same Shipment.
 
i7 from MacMall

I ordered it on the black Friday and they are telling me the ETA is going to be Dec 28, so its going to be a month of wait for me. :mad:
 
Hm, how would you guys feel if you knew that your iMac is somewhere stuck in Shanghai Airport for the last 2 days? Or am I acting like a little crybaby who's drowning in his own tears right now?
I bet that at this time of speaking those customs boys are watching porn on my brand new iMac!
 
You know I'm starting to wonder after hearing about the cracked screens and flicker problem if APPL is having QC issues in their China-factories. It seems pretty obvious actually. I really am thinking seriously about getting an i7 27" iMac by the end of 2010 but I don't want to experience a lemon. Maybe APPL better beef up their packaging as well.
 
This love for Apple is so admirable

I do not know how representative the obeservations in this thread are for Apple service in general but if they are... wow, I am not sure one can find any other example of service being that bad at any US based retailer, vendor etc. In my personal online shopping experience, having dealt with dozens of companies (the likes of Newegg, CDW, DELL, Sears, Amazon and many smaller players - including Apple a few years ago) I have never experienced anything like what you are describing. The worst I got was a couple of days of delay or a call trying to sell you some extra stuff (usually from consumer electronics retailers). You must really like the product to stick with the vendor then ;)
 
The one thing that is appealing to me about an APPL computer is that "the buck stops with them", they write all the OS and drivers so they won't be playing games with the customer when something goes wrong. Also I have an Apple store fairly close to where I live, another plus.
 
There are numerous reports of buyers who purchased i7 iMacs after the date of my order who have already received them. There is no excuse for this, as it is my understanding the i7 iMacs are build-to-order units. It seems rather obvious that Apple is giving preference to orders from certain channels (i.e. their own stores) and giving lower priority to orders coming from the authorized reseller channel. If this is going to be Apple's policy when supplies are constrained, they should publicly acknowledge it so buyers can make informed choices.

Apple should ship orders in the order that they are received and not give preference to their own internally-generated orders. To do otherwise reduces MacMall and all of the other resellers to the level of second class or third class merchants. I would imagine that this situation is not pleasing to MacMall nor to any of the other authorized Apple resellers. It is certainly not pleasing to me, as it looks like it is going to take right at six weeks to receive my order.
 
Received my 27" i7 iMac earlier today. So far, it is just perfect.
- didn't find any dead pixels
- no tint (but I am not good with colors)
- no flicker after using it for a couple of hours now with some load on it
- no noise (maybe a slight fan noise, but nothing I can make out here in a normal office)

Ordered Dec 9th. Original ship date Dec 23rd. Shipped on the 15th (Shanghai time). According to fedex, it was supposed to arrive tomorrow, but arrived today ;-)

Overall I am very happy with the system and of course the fact that it shipped earlier then promised. This is a "week 50" machine.
 
Bottom line is that there have been WAY too many quality issues for me to feel comfortable purchasing an iMac. Maybe Apple will fix it in a year.
 
Lovely Undertaker!
Have you tried putting it into sleep-mode and taking it off again?

Small request, could you measure the space underneath the screen? When you put it in a 90° angle? I'm talking about the front of it. Want to find out if my front central speaker can fit underneath it.

Thanks man
 
lilo777 said:
Those who like the display in 27" iMac but do not want to get it as part of iMac (reasons may vary) might consider buying DELL's display which will use the same ISP panel from LG:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/dell-ultrasharp-u2711-release-soon-/8173.html
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Thanks for that, I'm wondering whether that would be matte or glossy... and I'm happy that the 2560 horizontal resolution is on its way to sizes smaller than 30", and hopefully, more will adopt these higher ppi displays...
 
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