Apple update 10.6.8 and Lion (10.7) cause Kernel Panics on MacPro 1,1

I bought my MacPro (MacPro 1,1) in September 2006 and nearly 5 years down the line it’s still going strong, or at least it was.

Some recent projects I’ve been involved in have required some serious processing power to render gigapixel images and the original 2xDual Core XEONs weren’t up to it. I found a matching pair of cheap E5345 QUAD core processors on eBay and fitted them (that’s another post that will be on here soon along with photos of the CPU swap out process). I threw some SSD’s in a RAID array in there for good measure too and the combination of those two things made a phenomenal difference to the rendering times. My Snow Leopard 10.6.7 install was nice and stable, not a single crash/hang/kernel panic or reboot.

Then Apple released a Snow Leopard update 10.6.8 to “ready you for Lion” so I dutifully upgraded the 10.6.7 I had installed on my SSD’s and it all went terribly wrong. The system now erratically rebooted itself and a look at the logs showed Kernel Panics all over the place. I have a second OS X 10.6.7 for emegency situations, booted into that and ran that for a few days and it was all fine. I rolled back my 10.6.8 to 10.6.7 using a TimeMachine backup and everything was stable again.

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Replacement iPhone procedure walkthrough

I picked my iPhone on launch day in the UK (November 9th) and after making a few calls several friends complained of a “creaking” sound coming down the phone.

I eventually narrowed the sound down to the plastic housing for the speaker and microphone, applying gently pressure to the sides of the housing when holding the phone caused the plastic to flex and creak. As the microphone is housed in this area the small sound was greatly amplified down the line to my friends.

I took a trip back to the Carphone Warehouse the next morning, explained and demonstrated the problem and they instantly agreed it was a fault and would issue a replacement. The problem was none of the sales staff were able to talk me through the exchange procedure for the iPhone as I was the first to return a faulty iPhone. They seemed to be under the impression when I connected the replacement iPhone to iTunes I would have to start a new 18 months contract and ask for a refund and termination of the previous contract. This seemed ludicrous to me so after an hour wait in store whilst they called somebody for advice they finally gave me a new iPhone but removed the SIM from my old faulty phone and installed it in the new one.

That was it as far as they were concerned, it should just work! WTF of course it won’t, I powered it on in front of them to prove my point, and sure enough the phone was in Emergency Call only mode until I connected to iTunes.

Somebody then reassured me that iTunes would recognise the phone as a replacement and I’d simply have to enter my old number to migrate my account to the newer handset. This brought up a new problem, since I was migrating from Vodafone to O2 and was porting my number, I had been issued with a temporary O2 phone number for 7 days. Did I enter this temporary O2 number or my number being ported across if iTunes asked?….blank faces from all the staff again!

I left the store and decided to just try it and see what happened, and for the benefit of anybody else wandering how the replacement iPhone process differs from the new sign up procedure I took screen shots at each stage:

Step 1: First Screen shown when replacement iPhone connected.


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UK iPhone users cannot upgrade to the White iPhone 3G

19 days after it was initially launched, it still appears Apple have restricted the White iPhone 3G to Apple stores and “brand new customers only”.

There are only 3 official sources for the iPhone 3G in the UK:

1 – Apple
2 – Carphone Warehouse (CPW)
3 – O2

If you are an existing iPhone owner and wish to upgrade you cannot go to an Apple store! All upgrades for current iPhone users have to be done through Carphone Warehouse or O2.

The problem is, Apple have so far not given any stock of the White iPhone 3G to either O2 or CPW. This effectively means that existing iPhone users cannot upgrade to the White iPhone 3G and must, for now at least, settle for the black version.

I’ve made near daily visits and several phone calls to both O2 and Carphone Warehouse trying to confirm a date that they’ll be receiving stock of the White iPhone 3G so that I can upgrade and some of the responses I’ve been getting are shocking:

“oh no sir, there’s no white iPhone only black, you must be confusing it with the iPods?”

“the White iPhone is going to be exclusive to the Carphone Warehouse, O2 won’t have any”

“the White iPhone is going to be for Pay As You Go customers only”

“The White iPhone will launch between October and December along with the PAYG version”

For Pay As You Go customers only!! Don’t talk rubbish, why would a PAYG customer (who’s going to be paying well over the odds for the phone in the first place) be restricted to getting the White one, which is 16GB only? Christmas time? Really? The Apple store has plenty of them in right now.

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