Well, there goes the resale value of that Macintosh
About 18 months ago, I killed the display on my 13" Macbook and decided that if I was going to replace it I might as well replace it with the lightest possible Unix machine I could get (and, no, a Linux box with G-dd-mn X11 doesn’t count. I’ve done my time fighting with X11, and my tolerance for crappy software with even crappier apps has worn down to nothingness.) So I bought a first-gen Macbook Air, which, aside from becoming obsolete approximately 30 minutes after I copied a link to Terminal.app onto the dock, served as a perfectly acceptable development machine (and, thanks to not having X11, as an even better machine to run web browsers on.)
A couple of weeks ago, one of the screws holding the back on started to work loose, and, after a day or two of ignoring the creaky sounds, I screwed it tightly back in. This, apparently, wasn’t quickly enough, because I noticed the lid starting to get a little bit springy, and then, just the other day, I noticed that it wasn’t closing properly.
So I looked a little bit closer, and lo and effing behold what did I see but this plastic thing stripping out. And when I unbolted the back of the machine to try and see if I could fit it back into place, I saw that there’s a little floating metal hinge unit that’s twisted 90° out of the way, thus forcing the lid up and away from the case.
So I can’t actually close my Macbook any more. I’m guessing that I could cut some of this plastic away and then reach in with a pair of pliers or Vice-Grip®©™s and twist the hinge back into place, but I don’t know if it would actually stay there without the (now bent and cracking) plastic panel.
Mind that this hasn’t happened with any of my other macbooks, including the super-ancient Powerbook 100 I bought from a friend on soc.singles, then surgically replaced the display with one from another PB100 I bought for parts, so I could always just roll back down to one of them. But, ouch, it is sad that my tiny and lightweight FreeBSD workstation is no longer nearly as portable as it used to be (at least without an expen$ive trip to Apple technical support or a risker DIY hackjob at home.)
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Here’s what used to happen to the hinges of the original Powerbook G4, aka “Titanium” or “TiBook”:
http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/DSCN1566.jpg.html
http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/DSCN1568.jpg.html
I fixed it by buying some replacement hinges on eBay, but unfortunately it involved taking apart the screen, which was never meant to come apart after it was manufactured, and it was never the same again. Too bad, because I was pretty proud of the way I’d decorated it:
http://gallery.xcski.com/v/misc-pics/powerbook/DSCN1562.jpg.html