Myriad of issues with brand new iMac 2020, freezing, visual artifacts

[rachelcenter]

I ordered a brand new souped up iMac 2020 desktop from Apple.com. It arrived on 4/29/21 and it’s bundled with issues.

ISSUES:

• Intermittent freezing at least 4 times a day (when it keeps freezing, I'm able to move the mouse but nothing else. If I'm in the middle of playing a timeline in Adobe Premiere, the audio of the timeline keeps playing but everything else is frozen besides the mouse)
• Visual artifacting flashing across the screen for a fleeting moment at random times
• When I restart the computer, and get to the login screen, the apple-provided user icon that I chose to represent myself is really low-res looking. (If I log in, and then log out again, without a restart, the icon is now full resolution looking)

SPECS OF COMPUTER

• MacOS Big Sur 11.3.1
• iMac Retina 5k 27-inch 2020
• Processor 3.6 GHz 10-core intel core i9
• Memory 128 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
• Graphics AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB

SCREEN SHOTS

one screenshot i managed to take of visual artifacting that lasted a moment and then went away. (those pink lines)

The baseball picture with the orange background is the low res icon i'm seeing for my user name when I do a restart. After I've fully booted up and don't perform a restart, but rather a log out, the icon is now high res looking, which is featured above in the baseball picture with the blue background. You can see the difference in quality! this picture was taken with my phone because apple doesnt let you use command shift 3 or command shift 4 on the login window to do a high res capture. Look at the nasty artifacting around the edges of the baseball in the picture with the orange background.


INTERACTIONS WITH APPLE
I first called Apple on May 4th or May 5th about the visual artifacting that is randomly flashing on my computer for a fleeting moment

The first woman I talked to wasnt very knowledgeable. She would try to give me commands to boot in safe mode for instance. When her key commands didnt make sense, I said "how am i supposed to take both hands off of the keyboard to reach behind the computer to press the power button like you’re asking me to? she goes why would you reach behind the computer? I said where else is the power button on an iMac???? Then she was silent for a bit and goes oh sorry I was reading the instructions for a macbook pro not an iMac...." She had me run a diagnostic test on the computer which didn't find anything wrong.

Then I asked to speak with a senior advisor. His name was Jacob and he told me that if I updated from 11.3 to 11.3.1 that it would solve the issue of artifacting flashing across my screen and told me it was a software issue not a hardware issue. I did that. And it didnt solve the problem. So I called back to Apple and another senior advisor basically told me that I either misunderstood or was told incorrect information and that I'm at the mercy of whenever the next software update comes out. Who knows when that'll be. And theres nothing Apple is willing to do to make me whole as customer. I didnt pay close to 8 grand for a computer that flashes visual artifacting on the screen at random times. I'm really unhappy.

So then on Thursday I decide to call Apple again, this time about the freezing issue I keep having. I spoke with someone named Wayne. He had me zap the pram, he had me start a new user account to try and reproduce the freezing issue but I said you'll be here waiting for hours for this thing to freeze again. I did a computer restart with him at that moment. When I did, both user icons on the login screen were really low res looking. Which isnt normal. I downloaded some software that he asked me to, to sniff out for malware, even though I know this isnt the issue, and of course the software couldnt find any malware. He questioned if I purchased the computer from a 3rd party vendor. I told him I bought from Apple.com!!!! He wanted to see what was going on with activity monitor when the freezing happened. I said you can move your mouse around during the freezes but I can't pull up activity monitor until after the freeze and Since I can't reproduce the freezing issue on the spot, let me get back to you when it happens again. He gave me some special email to send him voicemails and to contact him again when the freezing happened and I have that activity monitor info. The freezing happened again at 5/6/21 at 7:53pm and then 8:08pm. I took screenshots of activity monitor at that point. Happened again 5/7/21 at 9:07am. Usually the only thing I use this computer for is video editing, but when the freeze happened on 5/6, I was using the Facetime app on the desktop and wasnt using premiere. So I dont think premiere is the contributor to this freezing. I think it's hardware issue. But again, I ran diagnostics with that woman at Apple the other day and it didnt find anything wrong. Wayne wants me to wipe the computer and reinstall the software from scratch, but this doesn't sound like a software issue to me. This sounds like a hardware issue.

Screen Shot 2021-05-06 at 7.53.12 PM

Screen Shot 2021-05-06 at 7.53.19 PM


EVERYTHING ELSE I’VE DONE / TRIED, AND OTHER DETAILS
-I ran disk utility
-It's not like I'm running tons of applications when this freezing is happening.
-3rd Party Softwares installed: Google Drive, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud (adobe premiere, adobe after effects), Slack, Firefox, RedGiant Application Manager
-This is not a space issue on the computer. I souped up this morning to have 4 TB worth of space on the computer. Right now computer says I have about 3.7 TB free.

Does this sound like a video card issue to you guys? Or something hardware related? Bad ram? I would love people to weigh in and tell me what they think is going on here.

CONTINUATION OF THE ISSUE
5/7/21 9:50pm now Wayne is having me reinstall the operating system. We shut down the computer, and when we booted back up I pressed command R to go into recovery mode. Then chose to reinstall MacOS. During this process the graphics were still low-res looking. I've never seen a mouse get stuck with a black box around it even during recovery mode on any macOs operating system ever. Look at the blue outline around the mouse icon. That's not normal. Nor is it normal to have the password dots be square instead of circular.

After all was said and done and the reinstall of macOS was complete, the login icons still looked terrible. I did a computer restart and it took FOREVER to restart. It gets hung up on this screen and puts a nasty brown tint down the middle of the screen and covers the whole left side of the screen

After it took a very long time to not be hung up on this screen, it restarted. I logged in. Then I was standing a few feet away from the computer, using my laptop while on the phone, and the computer shut down itself. Out of nowhere. the only reason I noticed was because I heard my external hard drive click off.

MAY 8TH
Only one instance of freezing so far today. Hours later I was editing video in premiere and I saw this big pink line in my footage. So I pulled out my iphone to film it, instead of screenshotting it. I put a marker on the exact frame where the pink line was showing up. I asked my freelance coworker in a different state to download the same clip and go to the exact same timecode to tell me if he saw the pink line. While I waited to hear back from him, I continued to edit some video. When this person got back to me, he said he didnt see the same pink anomaly when he downloaded the footage to his computer. So I went back to the clip, and went back to the same clip marker / same timecode and the issue was gone.

I walked into the apple store on the evening of 5/8. Gave them my computer. They told me: for how new it is, it would just be better to return it then us spending the time trying to find the problem. So I said ok wipe it.... As I was sitting there waiting for them to wipe it, they had me on the phone with Apple trying to get my Apple Care refunded. I was on the phone with them for 40 minutes and they said they had a glitch in the system and couldn't refund me. But as I was on hold on the phone, the Apple guys in the store were wiping my computer and the computer literally died on them. They could NOT find a way to turn it back on. The end. Now I get to start all over again from scratch.

Justin with Apple Support told me over the phone on 5/8/21 that there was a system glitch so they couldn't refund me but he would keep up with the case and reach out to me tomorrow. So I walked away with no computer (fully refunded) and a case number to refund my Apple Care. Justin called back on 5/9 and said their system still had a glitch. I didn't hear from him all of Monday 5/10 so I left a message via email. Never heard back. Maybe its his off day? Then I didnt hear from him most of Tuesday 5/11 so I called Apple support and they said they've been giving refunds all day, so the refund system works, but when they enter my serial number into the system, it doesn't come up with anything. So he has to to reach out to his senior engineers to see why. And gave me a case number and a way to reach him and said he should have an answer for me within 5 days. This whole process has been exhausting.

I ordered a new computer online on 5/10/21 I think. I want to mention there is a computer chip shortage right now and a gas shortage of the east coast so that should make this whole process of getting a new computer even slower.

 

[TwoH]

Is your 128GB RAM from Apple, or did you install some yourself?

 

[4sallypat]

Looks like a graphics card issue.

 

[pmiles]

I don't know what to say here other than, you just got the machine, return it. It's in the 30-day return window. If you drove a new car off the lot and it broke down on the way home, would you spend your own time and energy trying to resolve the problem or would you have them give you a different car?

It's not your job to make the machine work. It's their job to deliver you a working machine. Now if this machine were several months old, that's a different story, then you have AppleCare or the Apple Warranty to cover defects.

I do know the 2020 iMacs had issues with graphics and RAM when introduced. Very finicky with third party RAM and the graphics problems apparently were resolved with a Big Sur update. But the machine should have shipped with a version of the OS that already had that update.

 

[rachelcenter]

Is your 128GB RAM from Apple, or did you install some yourself?

Apple

 

[rachelcenter]

I don't know what to say here other than, you just got the machine, return it. It's in the 30-day return window. If you drove a new car off the lot and it broke down on the way home, would you spend your own time and energy trying to resolve the problem or would you have them give you a different car?

It's not your job to make the machine work. It's their job to deliver you a working machine. Now if this machine were several months old, that's a different story, then you have AppleCare or the Apple Warranty to cover defects.

I do know the 2020 iMacs had issues with graphics and RAM when introduced. Very finicky with third party RAM and the graphics problems apparently were resolved with a Big Sur update. But the machine should have shipped with a version of the OS that already had that update.

That’s what I’m probably gonna have to do: send the computer back or take it to the Apple mall store to get something replaced in it. We have to identify what the issue is though so they can fix it.
And I have to mention how much of an inconvenience it’s going to be to have to pack this up and have it repaired.
I have so much full-time and freelance work going on that it’s gonna be a real setback

 

[HDFan]

Did the unit come with 11.3.1 installed, or did you do an update? After the 11.3 > 11.3.1 update I had a ton of problems. Did a fresh install (keeping all of my data) and some of the problems went away.

 

[rachelcenter]

Did the unit come with 11.3.1 installed, or did you do an update? After the 11.3 > 11.3.1 update I had a ton of problems. Did a fresh install (keeping all of my data) and some of the problems went away.

unit came with 11.3, and I upgrade to 11.3.1 per jacob's suggestion. which did not rectify the issue. @HDFan, which problems went away for you and which stayed?

 

[theadder]

That’s what I’m probably gonna have to do: send the computer back or take it to the Apple mall store to get something replaced in it. We have to identify what the issue is though so they can fix it.
And I have to mention how much of an inconvenience it’s going to be to have to pack this up and have it repaired.
I have so much full-time and freelance work going on that it’s gonna be a real setback

Return it and do not let them troubleshoot it. If it's this broken right from the box, it isn't worth keeping. Once you've returned it, Apple can mess around with it and see if it can be sold as a refurb.

 

[wilberforce]

Return it and do not let them troubleshoot it. If it's this broken right from the box, it isn't worth keeping. Once you've returned it, Apple can mess around with it and see if it can be sold as a refurb.

Agree, just return it and order another one. You don't even have to give a reason. (Assuming it is purchased directly from Apple, within 14 days.)

 

[rachelcenter]

Return it and do not let them troubleshoot it. If it's this broken right from the box, it isn't worth keeping. Once you've returned it, Apple can mess around with it and see if it can be sold as a refurb.

It's not broken persay, but theres something definitely wrong with it and i'm convinced its hardware related. They cant just give me a brand new one, they would have to rebuild the whole machine from scratch with all the bells and whistles that I've ordered which would take another 2 weeks. this needs to go to the apple store for them to replace the gfx card or whatever the hell is going on. they keep trying to run tests on it to isolate whats wrong with it. and its a waste of time. just have the apple store physically look at it.

 

[wilberforce]

Is your 128GB RAM from Apple, or did you install some yourself?

Apple

Personally, I think this is a ~$2,000 "mistake" right there, unless you like donating to Apple.
Apple RAM is egregiously overpriced, and no different from quality 3rd party RAM (made by the same mfrs).
If you do reorder, I suggest order with the minimum 8GB RAM, and replace this with 64GB of Crucial RAM for about $370, instead of the 128GB of Apple RAM for $2,600. Almost no-one needs more than 64GB. (If you find you really do, you can add 2 more sticks later.)
Just a suggestion, which many on this forum have done.

Crucial RAM 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR4 2666 MHz CL19 Memory for Mac CT2K32G4S266M, Multicolor

CT2K32G4S266M is a 64GB Kit consisting of (2) 32GB DDR4 SODIMM for Mac that operates at speeds up to 2666 MT/s and has a CL19 latency. It is an Unbuffered SODIMM. It conforms to the industry standard DDR4 SODIMM layout of 260 pins and is compatible with systems that take DDR4 2666 MT/s SODIMM mem...

www.amazon.com

The Truth about Memory Manufacturers

Learn the difference between true memory manufacturing companies and organizations that only assemble the modules & why it's an important distinction.

www.crucial.com

If I had a choice between Crucial RAM and Apple RAM (which is simply assembled from DRAM chips provided by various suppliers), I would choose Crucial RAM even if they were the same cost.

 

[rachelcenter]

Personally, I think this is a ~$2,000 "mistake" right there, unless you like donating to Apple.
Apple RAM is egregiously overpriced, and no different from quality 3rd party RAM (made by the same mfrs).
If you do reorder, I suggest order with the minimum 8GB RAM, and replace this with 64GB of Crucial RAM for about $370, instead of the 128GB of Apple RAM for $2,340. Almost no-one needs more than 64GB. (If you find you really do, you can add 2 more sticks later.)
Just a suggestion, which many on this forum have done.

Crucial RAM 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR4 2666 MHz CL19 Memory for Mac CT2K32G4S266M, Multicolor

CT2K32G4S266M is a 64GB Kit consisting of (2) 32GB DDR4 SODIMM for Mac that operates at speeds up to 2666 MT/s and has a CL19 latency. It is an Unbuffered SODIMM. It conforms to the industry standard DDR4 SODIMM layout of 260 pins and is compatible with systems that take DDR4 2666 MT/s SODIMM mem...

www.amazon.com

The Truth about Memory Manufacturers

Learn the difference between true memory manufacturing companies and organizations that only assemble the modules & why it's an important distinction.

www.crucial.com

this is not mistake.

 

[wilberforce]

this is not mistake.

OK. It is just a figure of speech. Just trying to help.

 

[theadder]

It's not broken persay, but theres something definitely wrong with it and i'm convinced its hardware related. They cant just give me a brand new one, they would have to rebuild the whole machine from scratch with all the bells and whistles that I've ordered which would take another 2 weeks. this needs to go to the apple store for them to replace the gfx card or whatever the hell is going on. they keep trying to run tests on it to isolate whats wrong with it. and its a waste of time. just have the apple store physically look at it.

I’d suggesting ordering the replacement now and keeping the old broken one until the 14th day; then you can have the minimal time without it. Otherwise, you may have a lemon.

 

[rachelcenter]

I’d suggesting ordering the replacement now and keeping the old broken one until the 14th day; then you can have the minimal time without it. Otherwise, you may have a lemon.

But i dont know whats broken. it has to go to Apple now in person for them to figure out what they can't rememdy over the phone. What exactly is this 14 days you're referencing? I have AppleCare, I have well over 14 days for this to still be covered

 

[BarredOwl]

But i dont know whats broken. it has to go to Apple now in person for them to figure out what they can't rememdy over the phone. What exactly is this 14 days you're referencing? I have AppleCare, I have well over 14 days for this to still be covered

Nothing is “broken” with the machine in regards to hardware. You have software issues, nothing more.

Just order a new one and return the one you have within the 14-day return window. Done.

However, your issues boil down to software, including the notorious True Tone bug with the 5700 XT, and perhaps some network latency.

P.S. Those screen shots of activity monitor have nothing to do with your “issues”.

 

[rachelcenter]

Nothing is “broken” with the machine in regards to hardware. You have software issues, nothing more.

Just order a new one and return the one you have within the 14-day return window. Done.

However, your issues boil down to software, including the notorious True Tone bug with the 5700 XT, and perhaps some network latency.

the activity monitor screenshot was provided because apple asked me to look at the activity monitor right after the freeze stopped, to see if anything was bogging down the computer. So i'm trying to show evidence that I dont think this is a software issue.

All signs point to hard ware, not software. If I return it, I have to wait 2 weeks for them to rebuild a brand new one, only to have the same software issues. That doesn't make sense to return it and build it from scratch when I'm inundated with freelance and don't have that kind of time. Network latency is not causing these intermittent freezing issues. The computer shut down on itself yesterday. Apple needs to make this right and I'm going to hold them to it.

(plus if i returned this computer, they might ask for the $1020 back that they gave me when I did the trade in/buy back program for apple to buy my old computer. things are gonna get way too complicated and hairy if I do a full return. it seems senseless to return it when its covered. I'm holding apple to fix this)

But if this is truly a software issue like the first person claimed and you claimed, and theres no fix for it, they need to partially refund my money for this intermittent freezing issue. Returning this isnt a logical or easy option

 

[JuicelessMango]

0 chance I would be going through the hassle of trying to figure out what is wrong with a brand new machine I paid 8k for. Return it and get a new one.

 

[ADGrant]

I think you have a hardware problem with the GPU. The issues you are reporting are not the same ones everyone was having last summer. I have a 2020 i9 I bought last summer, has none of your issues.

 

[rachelcenter]

I think you have a hardware problem with the GPU. The issues you are reporting are not the same ones everyone was having last summer. I have a 2020 i9 I bought last summer, has none of your issues.

this is not a snarky question at all, so I had to give that preface first before I pose this question: if its a GPU/hardware issue, why didnt the diagnostics test flag it as being bad? I'm saying that out of sheer curiosity.

 

[theadder]

But i dont know whats broken. it has to go to Apple now in person for them to figure out what they can't rememdy over the phone. What exactly is this 14 days you're referencing? I have AppleCare, I have well over 14 days for this to still be covered

I’m referring to the 14-day return period, where you can return the iMac to Apple for any reason and receive a full refund. There’s no need to work out what’s wrong with it. As other people in the thread have said, other models of this iMac exist without these issues. You have a lemon.

0 chance I would be going through the hassle of trying to figure out what is wrong with a brand new machine I paid 8k for. Return it and get a new one.

Yep.

 

[ADGrant]

this is not a snarky question at all, so I had to give that preface first before I pose this question: if its a GPU/hardware issue, why didnt the diagnostics test flag it as being bad? I'm saying that out of sheer curiosity.

Diagnostic tests are not perfect. They will not detect every hardware problem. The video artifacting in particular looks worse than any I saw on my Mac with the same CPU & GPU.

I did notice though, on re-reading your post that you have an external drive attached. Have you tried using your Mac without the drive attached? Also if you added the RAM yourself, have you tried re-installing the original RAM?

 

[wilberforce]

It appears this iMac is mission-critical for your business, hence the problem with just returning it and waiting for another.
If it is mission-critical, best would be to have a backup system. Perhaps a complete duplicate iMac. Any computer could fail at any time. Something to think about, what the consequences of that would be to your work. If you had a backup Mac (perhaps you do?), I think it would be clear that returning it would be the best option.
If you attempt to get Apple to repair it, it could easily take even longer, with multiple attempts as they fail to duplicate the problem and tell you they cannot find anything wrong with it. This would be extremely frustrating.
At this point in time it appears you have little choice but to try and see if Apple can repair it quickly.
Or just buy another Mac off the shelf as a substitute while it is being replaced/repaired.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I agree with others. It's not your job to troubleshoot for Apple. Return it right away. Otherwise you could be stuck with a lemon, which could cost you even more time and money (re: work).