When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Michael Smith

Thu Jul 17 15:58:08 -0700 2008

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These folks believe so strongly in the Macintosh software that when their system stops working, they decide that the hardware is broken, and often replace it, when it's really software that is the problem.

I think non-technical people generally don't make a distinction between hardware and software. The computer for them is the complete product. And anyway. If it breaks you can go out and buy the latest and greatest.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Kai Howells

Thu Jul 17 18:51:16 -0700 2008

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 If you're talking about really old Macs (ie, running Mac OS 9 or earlier) then, yes, the disk does need to have all sorts of driver partitions on the disk. If you use the Disk Utility that's either on the hard drive, or on the Installation CD, and initialise the disk, this will automatically put the appropriate drivers on the disk.

Earlier versions of Mac OS X would also offer to install OS 9 drivers on the disk, but they're no longer essential. Current versions of Mac OS X don't even use the old-skool Mac partition tables, and instead work off GPT (GUID Partition Tables) and don't require any special drivers.

If you initialise a disk under current versions of Mac OS X, as a GPT disk, there will be a hidden EFI firmware partition of 128MB (?) at the start of the disk, formatted as FAT.

Before about 6 months ago, this hidden EFI partition wasn't used for much, but now currently shipping Macs all have the Apple Hardware Test pre-installed on this hidden partition. You can boot into this by holding down the D key at startup. You used to need the installation media in the optical drive for this to work (and the instructions were printed on the disc) but now it will boot off the HDD for the AHT. Neat. This is exactly what the hidden EFI firmware partition is supposed to be for.

There's also a great project called rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit that can live on this partition and provides a graphical boot menu to select alternative operating systems (Linux, Windows etc)

All that aside - if anyone hears of people ditching otherwise working Macs - I'm always on the lookout in Melbourne ^_^

Reinstalling the OS is easy - insert the disc that came with the Mac, hold down C on the keyboard as you boot and off you go. No pesky serial numbers (for non server OS installation) and it's a pretty straightforward install from there...

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Bruce Perens

Thu Jul 17 21:25:30 -0700 2008

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I've seen this disk-looks-broken issue on the titanium PowerBook.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Kai Howells

Thu Jul 17 21:42:04 -0700 2008

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 Interesting - the PowerBook G4 Titanium was a machine that could well run Mac OS 9, and used Open Firmware, not EFI, as it's firmware layer.

Machines with Open Firmware, from memory, need the appropriate driver partitions on the disk, so if the disk was totally b0rked, then it could quite conceivably show up as broken.

Using the Disk Utility should still quite happily show the disk as physically present, whereby you can initialise it and the driver partitions will be automatically created.

Having said all this, I've seen quite a lot of machines of that age, particularly the laptops, come in with physical disk errors (clicking, slow response etc) and replacing the hard drive will have them back up and running, as good as new.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Rex

Thu Jul 17 19:39:47 -0700 2008

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Do tell.  Where can I find one of these not-so-broken Macs?

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Bruce Perens

Thu Jul 17 21:26:30 -0700 2008

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Ask a current Mac user about their old hardware.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

rubycodez

Thu Jul 17 20:03:33 -0700 2008

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plenty of bargains in perfectly working macs adequate for normal office (spreadsheet, browser, word processing) for under $200.  as I like to say, don't need a giga anything but disk for that, not 1GHz of processor, not 1GB of ram, not giagbit ethernet.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

Kai Howells

Thu Jul 17 21:49:58 -0700 2008

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 Yeah, for sure, I've got friends and family still doing good work on old Graphite (dark grey) G4 towers. They can take a gig or two of RAM, if you can find it anywhere, and anything with an 867MHz or faster CPU can even run (walk?) the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X 10.5.

These machines are great for general home use and a bit of surfing the internet, and are now dirt cheap. They were built well, are relatively standard with their components, at least the components you'd want to upgrade (excluding the CPU) are - RAM, HDD, optical drive, keyboard, mouse...

I just upgraded my Dad from a relatively ancient iMac (the oldest model that still had FireWire) to a 2 year old Mac mini, and even this machine is more power than he needs - 1.6GHz CPU, 1.5GB RAM, and it's TINY... Thanks to FireWire and Target Disk Mode, it was so easy to transfer his stuff over, boot the old machine holding down T on the keyboard and it becomes dumb FireWire external hard disk. Plug into new Mac, copy stuff over. Done.

Same with windows

zogger

Thu Jul 17 23:36:52 -0700 2008

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You see that all the time, tons of mom and pop whitebox shops main profits is fixing "broken" computers that just have so much malware on them from folks being stuck with windows that it gets to the point they think the whole thing is "broken". I would bet right now millions of computers have been literally thrown away as broken just because they were running hosed windows installs. I saw this way way back DOS days when I switched to macs when I saw how easy they were to use. All, I mean every single one, of my still dos and then workgroup and then 95 running friends all went through holy heck constantly with stuff not working, viruses, whatnot, and I never had a lick of trouble, software or hardware. I had one single mac break on me (6400 performa), it took a direct lightning hit, the extension cord running into our camper took the hit really, popped everything running at the time, and the dang thing would still boot! After the hit, the mobo was crispy, charred, nasty, smelled bad, looked terrible, I took it outside, hosed it off, let it dry for a day and it still worked! Slow, took a LONG time to finish booting but it eventually did, pulled some junk off of it and scrapped it then though. I went to linux when I got a deal on a huge pile of rebuildable machines and parts, a young dude I knew gave me a copy of linux because I needed a lot of legal software to put on them, tried it, liked it, but it took me a full year to even grok FOSS, but then I approved even more, and stuck with it. Gradually used my powerbook less and less, now only when we have a storm..heh. I will say I am sorely tempted to go back to a big old mac, capable of holding a ton of ram, like one of their servers, and using that until there are no more browsers for it that work. Classic OS is just going to get safer and safer over the years, and the sheer amount of still usable software out there is outstanding. Old, but still works. It is a rough choice sometimes, modern linux is becoming impractical on dialup, there are just way too many megs of updates to stay current. It is many, many megs per day and while they are downloading you can't do a dang thing else with the machine, at least I can't, and not a dialup ISP out there that won't boot you eventually for running 24/7. Shoot, already been kicked off of two cheaper ISPs for running too much the last coupla years. I mean no login, with a nasty gram from them. Right now I am 150 megs behind on updates, I did almost 50 megs today during the work day downloading, but it never ends. Tommorow I will knock some more off of that, maybe 40 megs or so, but no idea what will be added to the updates list either, and I only have just gnome! I used to have both all the gnome and kde apps, that is just out of the question now, way too big and too fast coming all the time.

Same with windows

Uncle Entity

Sat Jul 19 03:57:02 -0700 2008

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Yeah, ya gotta love it when you get a multi-hundred megabyte update and the changelog says 'updated maintainer's email address' or something trivial like that.

What they really need is an update scheme like the original etree service, someone mails you a cd with updates and you mail it off to the next person on the list. Never used it myself because I had the broadband before I discovered the world of live legal music but from what I can tell it did the job.

When Mac Owners Think Their Hardware is Broken

squiggleslash

Fri Jul 18 13:05:04 -0700 2008

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Well, in fairness, the other reason might well be that Apple's hardware isn't as solid as their software. I've owned a variety of Macs over time, and all exhibited hardware faults.

Despite the opinions of most Mac-enthusiasts I've met, I honestly don't think Apple's talents are best spent on hardware, which is a shame, because right now they tie their software to their hardware. Which is why I left. Ubuntu's almost as good as Mac OS X anyway, and it's Free. In every sense.