A Cautionary Tale

Richard Walwyn sent this note to document problems he has seen on a popular version of the Mac. I reproduce it here verbatim, though I don't share his strong feelings about Apple service.

He does say that he can save some folks money by telling them how to do a simple repair - and that is a significant service to the MacOS community.

The Tale

Here is the text of my grumble (and I have found one more instance since writing it, on a 6320 this time)

Here is a cautionary tale about 630 form-factor Macs (630s, 6320s etc) and Apple service policy. I am posting this story partly to relieve my feelings of hatred for Apple service, and partly to inform owners of these machines of a potential hardware failure.

I maintain a couple of hundred Macs in a school, and am quite used to doing board-level repairs. This particular problem involves the computer shutting down for no apparent reason and subsequently possibly refusing to start up again. The symptoms are caused by a short-circuited capacitor on the small circuit board which has the reset switch, video-out connector and connector for the loudspeaker on it. It is called the video out board. The computer shuts down because the short-circuited capacitor is drawing excessive current from the power supply which turns itself off to protect itself.

Apple service will not sell a replacement board on its own, instead charging over 100 UK pounds for the whole sub-assembly (including fan). Of course they will not even sell that to mere 'end users' - you have to cart your computer off to the nearest service centre - 20 miles away in our case. Incidentally this particular circuit board has *no* Apple-specific components on it.

Being absolutely convinced that I was dealing with a short-circuit on this pcb (note - printed circuit board) I decided to investigate, and sure enough I found a failed 10 micro farad tantalum capacitor in just the right place. The replacement cost was 47 pence from Radiospares, together with some quite straightforward soldering. Two hours after making the repair it failed again, and now the horror story starts.

Most well-designed circuit boards have all the components the same way round - so that you can read the writing. I had assumed this to be the case here, as had whoever inserted the original component, because we both inserted this capacitor back to front. These things do not like to be reversed, and hence the failure. However, it appears that Apple must have been aware of this as a potential problem, because later versions of the same board have been slightly redesigned so that all the components *are* the same way round. In other words Apple are charging over 100 pounds to rectify a design fault which they have been aware of for some time!

I really am getting mighty fed up with Apple's service policy. Why must they assume that anyone who uses one of their computers is a technical incompetent? They appear to be quite happy to disseminate the most obscure software-related information, but they treat us all like complete idiots when it comes to hardware problems. One is reminded of the old Rolls Royce policy that "Rolls Royces never go wrong". Why are replacement parts virtually unobtainable unless you have paid 5000 quid to become a 'service centre' or whatever. They *are* very good computers, but they are hell to deal with when they go wrong. Those of us trying to maintain a few tens or hundreds of machines get no support from Apple UK whatsoever.

Anyway, if anyone comes across the 630-shutting-down problem I might be able to save them quite a lot of money.

End of Tale

Contacting Richard:

Unfortunatly, in this day of spammers, it is often best to just call someone or write them snailmail:

Thanks Richard for the information!

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Charles D Phillips
If you want to, you can send me mail.