I was tweeting a bit about this topic already, so I decided to write down the complete story.

Yesterday was Saturday, 20th of November 2010. 3 weeks before, on Saturday, 30th of October, I brought my iMac “late 2009″ 27″ Core i7 (2.8GHz) to the Apple Store in the mall “CentrO. Oberhausen“.

I had written down those notes of what does not work and presented this to a “Genius”.

• iMac wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn’t go back to sleep
• programs behave very strange, a lot of beachball-activity, everything is very slow
• when running a VM (doesn’t matter if Win 7 or Win XP), the VM nearly freezes – and the OS X also
• can’t install programs. For example: I was not able to install iWork ’09 – the installation went well, but the applications were appearing with a crossed circle above them and are unable to start
• the BlueTooth devices (keyboard, Magic Mouse & Magic Trackpad) are loosing the contact to the iMac pretty often

Of course, I tried to fix it on my own, running the disk utility and repair permissions, reboot the system, PRAM-reset and even reinstall the system SEVERAL TIMES – nothing helped. Apple Care was not helpful on my phone call, but I have to do my work, so I ignored those issues for some weeks.

At the end of October 2010, the iMac was again pretty slow and meanwhile also “third party” tools like Photoshop started to behave strange. Selecting another tool from the palette, it froze for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Replicateable. This was the moment when I got really of it. I had just bought the iMac back in July (and a few weeks before the “Mid 2010″ model came out). I’ve spend 2.500€ for it with RAM upgrades and the Gravis warranty extension (bad idea as I noticed later).

The next day, we were in the CentrO. for fashion shopping. Before we went to the mall, I made an appointment at the Genius Bar in the Store to get help. The result? Hm.. try another keyboard and mouse, remove ALL cables and boot the system – this will reset it (huh!?!?). Well, of course it didn’t helped, so I made a new appointment on Saturday 30th of October and brought the iMac to the Genius Bar and also brought my failure notes with me. The (other) Genius was a good guy to talk with, I explained him that I know how hardware works and also did a couple of years of support in the past.. this helped and saved us time to go through the “DAU” questions. He agreed with me, that it’s the memory, CPU, HD or logic board. He wrote a repair request letter and noted to replace the logic board. It would take up to 1 week. Yikes! Seriously? I mean, I have to do my work. But I want that to be fixed, so I accepted and left my “Verne” (that’s the iMacs name) in the store and was looking forward to get a repaired Mac back.

Of course, they didn’t repaired it in 1 week, but a few days later, on Monday, 8th of November, I got a call from the Apple Store. This woman told me that it’s repaired and ready for pickup. I asked what they had done. The frustrating answer was: “There were a lot of bad file permissions – we fixed it.”. Uh!?

Ok – you should know that I had reinstalled the OS the morning before I brought the iMac to the Store. I don’t want that they were able to read my eMails, my company data and so on. So how the hell can those files been corrupted from – lets say: 30 minutes running the OS without installing anything or so!?

I told her, that this will NOT fix the problems and that I had reinstalled the OS several times in the past. She agreed that the technician would call me back so that he and I could find a quick solution. Until 8pm, when the stores are closing in Germany, I got NO call back.

The next day, I called again, asking for the call back. I was told to hang up, the technician would call me in a couple of minutes. That was around 1pm, at 5pm, still noone called me back and I was really pissed. So I called the Store again, very angry about that kind of treatment and asked for the Store Manager, who luckily found time to talk to me. A very nice guy and excused a lot of times. I told him that I understand if someone forgets to call. We are all humans and this happens, but two times is annoying. He agreed and asked me why I think that the permission-repairs does not help. I explained why and he agreed again. He asked me if I have a backup of my data. Sure I have! I smelled the chance to get a new iMac. This would be great, because I was trying to find a retailer of technician to built a SSD into my iMac for months – without success and the iMac “Mid 2010″ has a special port for that. The Store Manager asked me to hang up, he has to check some things and would call me back in 10 minutes. I said Ok and really, called me back.

Before he started talking, I said that I was thinking about a deal: I get a new iMac and he can keep the old one, repair it and sell it. It was the same though he had. He also asked me to come to the store the same evening. Huh.. ok – the mall is just 25km away and my wife just came home, so the car was available. So again, we drove to the store and asked for the manager. After a few minutes, he appeared with a technician and asked me to explain what’s wrong with my old iMac. Huh? I thought I would get a new one and can leave the store. Of course, I brought the invoice from Gravis to the store to show that I’d really bought it. At the end of the talk, he said that I can get a new iMac “Mid 2010″, they will grab my 8GB or RAM out of my current iMac and put it inside the new one.

The next sentence was VERY frustrating. In my memories I can see and hear it in slow-motion. He said “Because of logistical reasons, Apple will build a new iMac for you in Cork, but that would take another 2-3 weeks to arrive.”. Boom! I was pissed, annoyed and pretty angry. I was reduced for 1 1/2 weeks to my MacBook 2GHz which luckily has this 80GB SSD inside to speed it up a bit, but it’s too slow for my regular workload.

I reacted cool, showing that I was angry, but understand that this was out of his scope. So I try to Poker again and asked if I could get an SSD instead of the HD for the waiting time. He disagreed – the new iMac itself is for the long waiting time… BUT he can put in the SSD and bill me the difference between the price I paid for my iMac and the complete price for the new iMac with the installed 256GB Apple SSD. This is around about 540€ – a lot of money, but SSD is worth it. So I agreed and came back the other day to sign it (yeah, 2nd day to drive to the CentrO. that week).

A bit unhappy with the waiting time, I was really looking forward for the new iMac with the SSD. That will be fun and a complete different feeling.

The next day, we went to the Store – again. To buy my wife a new iMac 21.5″ i3. That’s a complete different story but I tell you about, because you should see that I was peaceful with Apple at this time.

Cool machine! Was really fun to see my wife unboxing it, taking photos and blogging about it in english on the Klein2 blog here

I also got a little toy for myself – a 320GB G-Drive external HD with FW800 & USB2. I wanted that because of the wedding of my wifes brother in December – and I should take the photos. 80GB of SSD is a bit less for a bunch of RAW photos. Of course, this drive was broken (my luck… argh!), and I have to return it once I get my new iMac. That’s the plan.

Yesterday, Saturday, 20th of October in 2010, I was still in the mood of looking forward for the new iMac, but I wanted it. I wanted it quick, because I have to do a lot of heavy tasks on my poor, but brave MacBook at the moment. So I called the Store and the guy on the phone told me that the iMac has just arrived that day. Wohoo! I was very optimistic and was just waiting for my wife to return from her flower-shopping-tour so that we could drive to the mall and pick up my new shiny iMac.

She came back home, we had a quick breakfast and then I went upstairs into my office to find the invoiced and papers I would maybe need. At this moment, the phone rang – the technician I spoke with when I was the store to talk with the Store Manager – they need my credit card information. Huh!? I told him that I will arrive in an hour to pick it up and then he can have my credit card in real. He said, that the information the guy gave me before was WRONG! Ok – checked… sounds like NOTHING had happened yet! After another 1 1/2 weeks, it doesn’t look that I will receive my iMac soon. I was somewhat angry and made no deal of it! I told him. He said that he’s sorry but maybe it’s already shipped. Sure – I don’t believe in that. When they need my credit card information BEFORE they deliver it, nothing has happened yet!

You can imagine that I’m very pissed of Apples treatment of their customers. It’s cool to get the new iMac and I highly appreciate that the Store Manager has managed it that way, but it doesn’t matter if today, more than 3 weeks since I brought my mistaken iMac to the Store, I still have nothing powerful to work with.

Yes – it was one of the reasons why I wanted to buy my wifes new iMac right NOW and it really helps at the moment, but be honest – do you guys like to work on someone else’s machine? Me neither. It’s her’s and I don’t want to use it for my stuff. It has to do with respecting the partners properties, even if she say I could use his “Indy”

I admit, I freaked out a bit on Twitter when I got this message yesterday and yes, I was really calculating a DELL workstation and HP z600 in anger, but I think that this will not happen. I’ve invested A LOT into Mac Software over the last years and I don’t want to kick it into the bucket because their dumb logistics. But what I understood and learned from this “happening” was: You can not trust a machine like an iMac for business. Sure – I am ABLE to do my work on my MacBook (luckily), but a quick replacement like DELL or HP or IBM/Lenovo are offering it, is simply not available at Apple – and this let’s me think if it’s wise to use Apple in my business. Yes – they are mostly reliable, the OS is (in my mind) much better than Windows, but I also admit, that I often have to fight with little incompatibilities between customers with Windows and me and my Macs. Outlook for Mac which I bought with the Office:mac 2011 package a few weeks ago, helps to solve a lot, but damn.. there are still other construction yards.

No, I don’t plan to switch back to Windows nor to Linux, but I really ask myself if it was wise to buy an iMac and sell my Mac Pro back in July :/ Maybe just investing into a 27″ ACD would have made the deal. On the other hand: NUMA is still on the “missed” list of the Mac Pros and wastes 30-40% of the Mac Pro’s real performance. But that’s another story.

Many thanks for reading… and I will keep you updated on this annoying topic!