The house of death
Another mac died today – Julie’s work mac went spinny cursor, shut down, and then came up to a blinking question mark folder, which, of course, meant that the disk had died. Option confirmed this; after a loooooong time it popped up an absolutely empty disk selection menu (just the mouse cursor.)
Ugh.
Our house now contains, in the department of dead macintoshes;
- One macbook with a dead battery (I let it run down and left it for a week, so the battery decided it was dead) and a crumbling case.
- One powerbook with a dead hard drive (I have not yet had the patience to do the 50 step process to take the machine apart down to the level where I can replace the drive)
- One macbook air with a dead keyboard (it had water spilled on it, so it’s possible I could just clean the keyboard and get it back to life, but, once again, it’s a 50 step process to take the machine apart down to the keyboard)
- One first-gen macbook pro with a dead nvidia chip (that died 4 years 2 months after it was purchased, so Apple’s extended warranty for the chip is no longer valid)
- One macbook that I’m looking at for the parents of one of Silas’s friends (super-dead battery, plus a dead wall wart)
- Julie’s work macbook, which will be returned to PPS (and probably returned to her with a different ancient hard disk, ready to die)
- Another powerbook, this one with the dreaded video chip liftoff syndrome. I bought it in pieces, so it may not count, but it’s still dead.
Before the first macbook died I managed to shatter the screen once (I bought a replacement on ebay and replaced it); before the macbook air died it managed to shatter the lid hinges (which, fortunately, were replaced under apple warranty because this was a known defect); and before I shattered the first macbook’s screen the battery died and was replaced under warranty.
Ugh. That’s a lot of dead computers. Admittedly a bunch of them were donated to us after their previous owner upgraded to newer macs, but it’s still a lot of dead computers.
Comments
I unloaded the son’s computer graveyard at Free Geek. They were very happy. So was I.
Free Geek wants a donation to take old computers, and most of these computers are still usable (once I’ve replaced hard disks/set them up as servers/scrapped them for repair parts) so I’m going to keep them for a while. I’ll still look sourly at the pile of dead Macs every now and then, though.
Comments are closed
Planned or unplanned, obsolescence is the life blood of our economy. I mean, how are the very wealthy to increase their wealth if the less wealthy aren’t constantly buying replacements for crap that should not have failed in the first place.
And to make damn sure you have to buy a new one, rather than supporting technicians who might otherwise repair things, we will make it very difficult to repair and even more difficult to get parts.
Oh, and we will make sure the latest and greatest new operating system won’t run on the older hardware even if the older hardware is perfectly serviceable. And we make sure you can’t just keep the old OS, because the last update of the application you use on that OS no longer supports that version of the OS.
We use QuickBooks on a virtual XP running on OSX. QuickBooks crashed on start up yesterday. The problem was fixed by upgrading Internet Explorer.
I say I don’t like computers, but what I really mean is that I don’t like computer companies. As much as I like my iPhone and my iPad, I am growing evermore irritated with Apple. I would gladly swap for a different smartphone but I’m on a family plan. :)