New iMacs Emulate Windows --- with UI Freezes

Now you can emulate Windows without Parallels --- at least the crashing part. Apparently the snazzy new iMacs Apple recently introduced are having some issues with UI freezes.

Three front page threads on the iMac support forum highlight the issues (here, here and here). I'll bet there are others, but these are the most obvious.

One of them says:

Since upgrading iTunes earlier on today I've had problems, and now, my entire system has frozen. I still have keyboard and mouse functionality and the programs that were running are still there but I cannot get to any menu.

This is fairly typical of the issue. What is happening is a basic freeze of the UI, although the mouse and (sometimes) keyboard work. The system is frozen until you reboot.

The theory is that the issue lies in the video driver code, as a) recent updates for the new iMac included video driver fixes (but did not fix this issue) and b) some (but not all) say they get the freeze when pushing the video card hard.

The humorous part of this (for me) centers around the Apple vs. PC commercials which, though I am a PC person, I find clever. One of them, if I remembered correctly, indicated that PCs were prone to crashes, while Macs were not.

While I would agree Windows like to get a "rest" (reboot), I also think the fact that Microsoft has to support so many combinations of hardware are part of the problem --- and they should be admired for getting it right anyway. And while OS X is less "crash-prone", it's still software, and there's always the potential for a bug.