Apple sucks
A friend of mine asked me to look at her Imac G5, she was having prolems with the keyboard and mouse not working after boot up. Well, I don't normally work on Macs, but made an exception for her since she's a friend. I boot it up and sure enough the mouse curser is off in the upper right hand corner but doesn't move when you move the mouse, same with keyboard, no keys work after boot. So I reset the SMU, nothing, reset the Pram, nothing, reseat the Ram, nothing. I put the OS X disc in and boot it holding C to boot to the disc and run the hardware tests, but it boots up to the language selection and still no mouse or keyboard. Now the stupid disc is stuck in the slot load optical drive cuz it's a stupid Mac with no button to eject the disk and the media eject button on the keyboard doesn't work, nor does turning it off while holding down the mouse button.. yikes. I extract the disk using two slim cards as pliers.
Off to the Internet I go to research this and I find literally thousands of posts about the Imac G5 and bad caps. Also read that Apple extended the warranty to cover this for one more year, but that ended in 2009. Read on Macworld where some guys were getting their G5's repaired by Apple still as late as June 2010.. so I called Apple Care to see what they would do and basically they said "The computer is over 5 years old, time for a new one. They will not even fix it if she pays for it. They said to take it to an Apple authorized repair shop. The Apple Stores or the Genius Bars won't help.
Way to stand behind your product Apple. They knew they had a capacitor problem, many vendors did in 2006.. remember the Asus bad cap issue? Dell financed $300 million to replace the system boards in all the 2006 Optiplexes, Sony had a recall on all their Viao's, but Apple? All they do is fix whichever ones break up to 2009, no recall no total replacement policy, so if you're unfortunate to have a machine that doesn't break in the time allotted, you're screwed.
Off to the Internet I go to research this and I find literally thousands of posts about the Imac G5 and bad caps. Also read that Apple extended the warranty to cover this for one more year, but that ended in 2009. Read on Macworld where some guys were getting their G5's repaired by Apple still as late as June 2010.. so I called Apple Care to see what they would do and basically they said "The computer is over 5 years old, time for a new one. They will not even fix it if she pays for it. They said to take it to an Apple authorized repair shop. The Apple Stores or the Genius Bars won't help.
Way to stand behind your product Apple. They knew they had a capacitor problem, many vendors did in 2006.. remember the Asus bad cap issue? Dell financed $300 million to replace the system boards in all the 2006 Optiplexes, Sony had a recall on all their Viao's, but Apple? All they do is fix whichever ones break up to 2009, no recall no total replacement policy, so if you're unfortunate to have a machine that doesn't break in the time allotted, you're screwed.
Comments
Anyway, wonder if you can find a replacement board on eBay or something.
I have an 8 core, dual Xeon + RAID Mac Pro. I am a computer scientist and have been buying, building and repairing dual Xeon + RAID systems for over 10 years. The motherboard (they have to call it the Logic board--why?--because they are better and smarter than those idiots who sell PCs) was not charging the battery on the RAID card (who puts a battery on a RAID card? Apple do.)
The first level of support had no idea what a RAID is--so I had to take a couple of hours to get to someone who should. From the first call I told them the problem was on the Mobo (Lobo) but they ignored my and followed their SOP. So three new batteries (not cheep) and a new RAID card (also not cheep) later and they finally agreed it was the Lobo. I was on support for all this, but it took at least a week of my time on the phone and driving back and forth to the Apple store to get it resolved over 18 months.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Apple when Jobs dies. Most cults die when the charismatic leader exits. APPLE IS A PC with a different OS--not that much different.
But it has its benefits and its drawbacks compared to the rest. Since I have to deal with hardware/software problems all the time, I do not get emotional about them. I DO get emotional when I am treated like an ignorant while talking to someone who is.
Apple believes it's carefully manicured image is what sells their products. Maybe/probably, but it is also what drives intelligent users away.
I agree with everything you said. It is not difficult to build a PC, and it is made much, much easier when you use top grade parts. Apple does gain some advantage in security because of their closed system, but not much. They do not really make much $$ from their workstations because people who buy workstations usually know more and compare more, so they have to keep the price down to compete. The more good stuff you add to a Mac Pro, like a RAID card, the fewer people at Apple know anything about it. Still, Macs are now Intel machines. That leaves them open to messing with, just like every other PC.
If she plans on just dumping this Imac and gets another one, then maybe I'll stick a spare drive in it and putz around to try to fix it.
Or not.
I'm too lazy to go out and fix a mac myself, but look forward to vicarious satisfaction following your experiences.