We’ve all heard about the iPod lawsuits and the recent 15″ Powerbook issue, but it’s not the only apple related lawsuit brewing. Apple’s iBook appears to have a little issue. In fact, I myself have expierienced it…twice. The issue is with the logicboard on the icebook dual USBs, which causes various failures, including a black display when it is opened past a certain point (had this one; the backlight gives out when you open it past a certain point), harddrive failures, and other display issues, such as the screen being covered in lines (I’ve got this one right now). A picture of the last issue is available in the videos section of BlackCider.com.
Both a petition (which currently contains 1315 signatures), and a class action lawsuit are brewing.
When mine died I was amazed at how easy it was to find others who had the same problem. My solution was to take it apart and sell the pieces on ebay. The pieces went for almost as much as if I had sold the entire thing used (about $600). Still pisses me off though. My first macintosh and it lasted for only a little over a year (died 1 month out of warranty). I liked it enough though to give it one more try with a 15″ powerbook – so far so good, but then again the iBook was perfect until the day it died.
it is with the previous version. there is a problem with the wire placement for the video. the wires get pinched by the hinges on the screen which after a little while will cause spots and you will loose video all together.
they seem to have figured out the kinks and fixed it with the G4 version, perhaps they will offer free upgrades to people who bought their iBooks in the last year or so.
Given these failures in certain models, I’d say it’s a very good idea to wait with buying an iBook or PowerBook until it’s certain that that model doesn’t fail. I’m looking for the right iBook model to buy, but can I be sure yet that the G4 iBook won’t fail? The 12″ Powerbook seems solid.
Also the petition is growing fast. 1806 signatures as of this time.
I’m not sure why a story about a manufacturing QualCon issue affecting a particular laptop computer qualifies as OS News either.. but then I guess given the proprietary nature of Mac hardware and software it’s relevant.
However for those with an interest in the matter, the following page is linked from some of the articles
http://ibdf.mine.nu/
This shows some photographic evidence of the issue.
Lets hope the excess publicity for this issue in recent weeks spurs Apple publicly to provide a solution and recompense
will people stop calling Macs proprietary!!! oh my god, the OS is more open than Windows, the hardware is standard PC hardware there is nothing in a mac that is mac only, except that OS X only runs on a Mac.
I have a 2001 iBook, the first version with ‘dual USB’ I believe.
I have not had a single problem with it after 2 years of heavy
use. I have replaced the lithium ion battery, but that’s it.
In reading the discussion the issues appear to apply to
more recent versions of the iBook.
Sean
that the ibook i just bought was the brand new IBook G4, great laptop too, its a shame that it has to have mac os x right now.
There does seem to be a homemade fix for this, but it will void your warranty, if you’re still under warranty:
http://www.macintouch.com/ibook2001pt12.html#jan02
better hardware does not mean that it is infallible.
“So, is this the same forum where I hear non-stop that Apple has better hardware than the competition?”
I suppose that still counts. Because we don’t hear here, how the failure ratio of the iBooks are compared to other non-Apple laptops. So far there have been failures reported on a few thousand iBooks. How many have been sold? 10k? 200k?
Let’s see if the failure number keeps rising.
i have a dual usb iBook as well (it might be a 2001, i’m not really sure) with the “crystal” white casing. despite almost 2 years of abuse (i’m a student and it never leaves my side) its still going strong.
also, when my friend’s powerbook had the dvd drive problem , apple were extremely helpful and replaced it free within a couple of weeks. but this seems to show a different side of apple?
the only thing about my iBook that i would change is that i wish i had gone for a bigger hdd when i bought it!
Well, you don’t exactly hear Sony laptop users up in arms because their products are unreliable. Apple definately has some QA issues to work out. I love my iPod dearly, but in the six months I’ve owned one, I’ve already had to replace it once.
“will people stop calling Macs proprietary!!! oh my god, the OS is more open than Windows, the hardware is standard PC hardware there is nothing in a mac that is mac only, except that OS X only runs on a Mac.”
id like to see you find a 3rd party replacement for those logic boards
im not a mac user so if i missed something here… by all means please correct me
I really think this is a customer service issue and not a wide spread issue with the hardware. I have 2 iBooks (one from 2001 and one from 2002) and have never had an issue with either. I *know* that I have had worse failure rates with PC vendors (cough, cough DELL) but I think Apple is really dropping the ball on customer service. I don’t know how stepping up their customer service effects their bottom line but it is another place they can better than other vendors whose customer service is quite horrible.
that is Lame. the logic board does not make it proprietary.
find a replacement for a Dell logic board. you can’t because the companies design the case, then get the parts to ft inside.
all the parts that matter…memory, hard drives, optical drives, expansion ports, etc, are STANDARD parts.
no ok.. yea it was kinda unfair.. being that we are talking about a laptop.. but i allways put my own pc together… as far as i understand you still cant do this with a mac
i hear great things about OSX – now if they would only port it
hehe
they only thing that keeps some one from doing this on a Mac is that no one makes them, and the Open Firmware would have to be flashed on the board.
all the specs are known, in fact, PagasOS uses PPC motherboards, but there is a different Open Firmware so OS X will not boot.
open firmware lets you use forth to program what you like into the bios, on top of the standard stuff that is in there.
almost every other Computer architecture uses it, and if PCs would use it, there would be no need to flash the ROM chip to make it work on different platforms.
I had the exact same problem with my iBook about 3 months ago. AppleCare replaced it with no qualms- and this was before I had even purchased full AppleCare coverage.
“will people stop calling Macs proprietary!!! oh my god, the OS is more open than Windows, the hardware is standard PC hardware there is nothing in a mac that is mac only, except that OS X only runs on a Mac.”
Um… But Macs are proprietary. Why do you think BeOS dropped Mac support and focused entirely on x86 later on? Because when Apple gave BeOS the shaft (after having earlier stated the BeOS would be the next generation MacOS), they also stopped cooperating with BeOS as far as access to the low level programming specifications of the PowerPC Macintoshes. So BeOS basically decided to focus exclusively on Intel, which is far more open and far more friendly to people who want to do low level programming like writing an OS.
Make no mistake. Porting Linux to the Macintosh PowerPC arch. was not exactly an easy task, thanks to virtually no cooperation from Apple. Contrast that with Intel who when porters wanted to port Linux to Itanium, were more than happy to provide help in the effort, and who even provided some of their engineers to help work on the GCC 64 porting project.
I´m a very happy iBook G4 owner. No troubles whatsoever.. and i drag it through every hour of my day… In bags, friends places.. pubs… at work.. cafes.. busstops for the occasional warwalking… It already has coffestains and roadwarrior scars… Oh .. b.t.w Hi HMK get that amiga.dk stuff up and running soon? 😉 Don´t worry more about buying a iBook G4 and remember you got 1 years warranty!
you have no idea what you are talking about!!!
it uses the PPC architecture. it is no more proprietary than x86. it uses open firmware, it is as open as BIOS. all the parts in it are standard computer industry parts.
learn something will ya.
iBook is proprietary. As is a Dell machine that uses previously unknown to humanity connectors and weird logic boards. Just having a non-proprietary CPU architecture doesn’t make a machine non-proprietary.
>>>find a replacement for a Dell logic board. you can’t because(snip)
that’s the crappiest defense of apple i’ve ever heard… and i’m a fan.
let’s just get over the sensitivity to the word proprietary.
apple _is_ proprietary. you can’t build a similar machine running their OS. period. only apple can build apple.
and i don’t see why that should be a bad thing…I’ll keep buying them. (just not an ibook soon)
-“You keep saying that word(proprietary). I do not think it means what you think it means.”
I heard about the issue with the iBook on the web and wondered exactly what it was about. I’ve used my G3 iBook nearly continuously for over a year and a half without any problem.
Obviously things can go wrong with hardware, and some things better designed; but I wonder what percentage of the machines experience problems. I read that the petition website had about four hundred signatures. A significant percentage?
My hope is that Apple will take care of their customers when things like this happen.
being able to build a machine and proprietary are TWO separate things.
you can’t build a dell, you can’t build a gateway, you cant build an HP, you can’t build an IBM.
proprietary == not open.
is working fine. I’m not that afraid of it dying on me either since I have a three year waranty. Maybe I’ll get an iBook G4 if in exchange if it does happen 😉
Oh… almost forgot:
> you can’t build a similar machine running their OS. period. only apple can build apple.
No, you can build a PPC-based computer and get OS X running on it. It’s not like you can build yourself a Compaq or Dell either down to the last bit. You can install MacOS on a do-it-yourself PPC-box, that’s good enough for me to qualify them as non-proprietary.
Ive been an apple fan for awhile, and its a shame to hear about the defectiveness in the ibook and that apple doesnt use a better battery system in which you can just easily replace the batterys.
Apple I hope doesnt start screwing up any more and I hope they at least show some empathy towards their own customers. ~_~. Though as far as im concerned this is only a recent apple problem. In fact, im still running my 1999 imac using Mandrake Linux 9.1, and it still works like a charm, though i wish i hadnt lost my Mac OS CD otherwise id be able to enjoy macromedia flash and adobe photoshop on a partition.
“you have no idea what you are talking about!!!
it uses the PPC architecture. it is no more proprietary than x86. it uses open firmware, it is as open as BIOS. all the parts in it are standard computer industry parts.”
Tell you what… Go to Apple’s Web site and see if you can find specs that would allow you to implement efficient assembly code on an Apple PowerPC system.
Apple’s firmware is relatively closed, and Apple has been historically very uncooperative with third parties that want to write an OS for the Mac.
“you have no idea what you are talking about!!!”
You clearly don’t know very much about system’s level programming do you?
you want PPC specs? GO TO IBM who makes them, you don’t go to Dell for the X86 specs do you?
OPen Firmware is an open standard and it allows OEMs to add code to it in fourth. APple has added code so that OS X can not be used on a non apple system. so what!!! that doe snot make the system closed.
if you want to say “apple has proprietary code in their firmware” fine, I agree, but to call the entire system proprietary is a lie, and a BIG ONE.
the only thing in a Mac that is proprietary is the fourth code in the firmware. that code keeps OS X from being used on non apple systems.
so what!!,. by calling a mac a proprietary system, you are suggesting that it is not compatible with anything on the market which is totally false.
again, as I said above, you want to tell people what your real problem is, then do it. you problem is that the firmware in a mac has some proprietary code in it which makes it hard to develop another OS for.
remove the firmware and you have a system that is easy to make another OS for.
“Apple’s firmware is relatively closed, and Apple has been historically very uncooperative with third parties that want to write an OS for the Mac.”
And just before i posted how i was using mandrake linux 9.1 . Fair Historically things might have been different but lets see. Open BSD, FreeBSD I think, BeOS at the time, Mandrake linux 8.2, 9.1, Virtual PC though not an os allows an os like windows to be run on macs in emulation mode and apple didnt aparently seem disgruntled by it, are all oses on Apple. Hmm they dont seem that closed do they?
“OPen Firmware is an open standard and it allows OEMs to add code to it in fourth.”
You can’t write bootstrap code in Fourth.
You know what else Apple’s proprietary firmware code does? It makes it difficult to get other OSs to run on Apples.
“And just before i posted how i was using mandrake linux 9.1 . Fair Historically things might have been different but lets see. Open BSD, FreeBSD I think, BeOS at the time.”
BeOS because Apple was cooperating with the BeOS people at the time. But as soon as Apple reversed their decision about BeOS being the next generation OS for the PowerMacs, they also stopped cooperating with BeOS. And BeOS decided rightly decided that without any documentation from Apple, it was going to be a major pain to get BeOS to run on the G4.
Linux runs on the G4 partly because hackers like the challenge of trying to crack a closed standard.
again, that does not make the computer a proprietary system, it makes the firmware code proprietary. BIG DEAL.
for the vast majority of users, it does not affect them at all. so saying a blanket statement “it is a proprietary system” leads them to believe it is not standards compliant and will not work with other computer users.
stop misleading and be precise or don’t speak at all.
“I said you can add code in fourth!!! and I also said that the code keeps OS X on apple systems and off others and does make it harder (but not impossible as is evident by the number of OSs that run on macs) to write an OS for it!!!”
And that is EXACTLY MY POINT! Apple goes out of their way to make it difficult for third party OS writers to port to Apple. And they are extremely uncooperative when it comes to offering any kind of assistance. Contrast that, once again, with Intel, who not only welcomed Linux porting efforts to Itanium, but even provided engineers to help with porting GCC to ia64.
Yes, I consider Apple a closed standard. Because that is EXACTLY what Apple is trying to do by preventing OS X from running on other systems, making it difficult to get other OSs to run on Apple, and not providing any help at all with those who want to port.
I’m not ignoring anything. You just don’y want to accept the fact that Apple very much tries to keep their platform closed to external developers.
“for the vast majority of users, it does not affect them at all. so saying a blanket statement “it is a proprietary system””
Ahh. But it is a proprietary system.
I could, given enough ambition, write my own BIOS for a PC, because the standards are very open. Apple’s are not. I couldn’t easilly write my own Apple firmware beause apple’s extensions to the OpenBoot firmware are closed and proprietary.
By the way, Only late model G4s and G5s use OpenBoot. Early model G4s and G3s did not. They used a completely proprietary firmware.
my point is that you are using a broad brush. say that the firmware keeps OS developers from easily creating a 3rd party OS for the Mac. that is accurate and does not lead people into thinking that they are using some weird video card or sound card or drive connections.
when people hear proprietary, they thing “does not work with anything else.”
“when people hear proprietary, they thing “does not work with anything else.”
Ok. Then we seem to have a semantics issue. When I say “proprietary”, I am looking at it from a developer’s perspective. Not a user’s perspective.
What I mean is that if I am a third party motherboard maker, I can’t make a motherboard that is Apple compatible, because Apple won’t give me the specs I need to program compatible firmware, etc.
A user is never going to notice something like that, obviously. A user is quite happy to accept Apple’s philosophy of “You don’t need to know, or want to know what goes on under the hood. Just trust us that it works.”
However, for a developer, that is unacceptable.
I can agree with you on that. and the way you put it this time is much more accurate.
At last count, there are over 1,800 people on the petition.
Apparantly, Apple knew of video problems with iBooks as far back as July, 2001. They are replacing boards through AppleCare, but still will not acknowledge the problem:
http://www.macfixit.com
And as far as third party OSs, I would also hazard a guess that porting Linux to the G4 required a fair amount of reverse engineering on the part of the developers. And that if a commercial company had attempted the same thing, Apple probably would have sued them.
Apple has probably sued more companies than any other computer vendor in existance. At times they have even threatened to sue individuals who made Windows blinds theme, or a KDE theme that looked a little bit too much like Aqua.
I think what Apple really needs to realize is that they cannot protect their dwindling marketshare by suing every company that produces something that resmembles something Apple produced. They need to protect their dwindling marketshare by realizing the same thing that Bill Gates realized, which is that money is in software, and not in hardware. Software, after the initial development costs are paid for, is a cash cow, because it costs you virtually nothing to mass produce software. Hardware, on the other hand, has a substantial production cost.
these iBooks came out in 2001. if they knew about it back then, and it was not fixed, that is a problem, however, it is an allegation that they knew about it, not an apparent fact.
most hardware issues like this caused by design flaws are not caught until the first person has a problem that is diagnosed as being related to the design.
Apple is replacing the logic boards of units that have failed. Even multiple times at a severe cost to their bottom line.
What more could you ask for? IF it’s under warranty and it breaks they fix it. Why do you care that they publicly admit there is a problem? Big deal!
Apple isn’t ignoring this issue, they are dealing with each individual customer who has the problem on an individual basis, I’ve read that several people have gotten replacement, upgraded units too (not the iBook G4s, but still they are new replacements).
IF Apple was truly ignoring this “problem” then they wouldn’t be fixing the people’s iBooks over and over again. Public admittance of the issue doesn’t mean squat… Apple is notorious for not publicly admitting anything!
Get real!
they are not protecting their market, they are protecting their trademarks and patents.
and their market-share has no effect on the profitability of software sales on their platform. there are more than enough Mac users that a company who has a good application can make money on the mac, just as a good application makes money on the PC. number of users is what counts, and when a critical mass of desktop users is reached, no matter the share of the market, it is worth wile to sell software to the users.
I agree with those who say it is not exactly fair to pick on Apple over design flaws like this. After all, in the long run, they have probably had fewer design flaw than PCs have.
The Pentium long division bug comes to mind, as does the overheating Pentium60, and and the overheating and very short lived 486/DX4. Apparrently clock quaddroupling the 486 was not such a hot idea after all.
And then there were the early “crotch burner” Pentium laptops, etc…
Relatively speaking, Apple comes out looking pretty good when it comes to design flaws.
Do you want to know why? These boards shouldn’t die in the ammount of time that they are!! Esspecially the replacements. It’s obviously NOT quality hardware. I’ve used PCs all my life except for my iBook. It’s obviously a HARDWARE QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE – sorry for the caps – that needs to be taken care of. I can smell the lawsuit coming..
“D3M0N wrote: It’s obviously a HARDWARE QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE – sorry for the caps – that needs to be taken care of. I can smell the lawsuit coming..”
Why does that mean automatic lawsuit?
My point is that APPLE IS FIXING THE UNITS, SOMETIMES REPEATEDLY.
If Apple were refusing to repair the units under warranty then I could smell a lawsuit coming.
Apple is doing what it should be doing, fixing the broken units that are under warranty.
What more would you want them to do?
“and their market-share has no effect on the profitability of software sales on their platform. there are more than enough Mac users that a company who has a good application can make money on the mac, just as a good application makes money on the PC.”
What I mean is that Apple needs to realize the money they could make on software if they weren’t a monoplatform company when it comes to Apple’s software division. They need to do something more substantial then porting Quicktime and iTunes to PC.
Apple missed the boat several times on software. They missed in in the early 90s when PCs actually became powerful enough to run a GUI, and Microsoft was struggling with IBM over the direction of OS/2. They missed it again when Microsoft parted ways with IBM, and then struggled with the horribly designed Windows 3.x. They missed it a third time when they could have taken advantage of the void created when OS/2 went defunct.
And finally, they missed it when it came to the Linux desktop. Apple could have backported OS X to the PC (most of it was ported from the PC anyway since it used microkernel that was originally written for the PC, and a subsystem based on FreeBSD. The port would have cost them virtually nothing, and it would have been a cash cow.
Sure, Apple claims they are protecting trademarks and patents. But the courts have told them multiple times that “fashion trends” cannot be patented or trademarked. So Apple needs a new system that does involve translucent cases, or computers that swivel around like desk lamps and such.
you don’t have to be an apple lover to know that apple has had far fewer problems than PC computers have had.
and since when is supporting the use of facts being an apple lover?
so, in order to be a fair minded person in regards to apple, you have to generalize, use lots of hyperbole, and bash them even if you have to lie to do it?
you miss apple entirely….they are a hardware company that just happens to made damn good software. they did not miss any boat, the chose not to go the Microsoft rout. if they had, they would not have made it out of the 80’s.
Sure, Apple claims they are protecting trademarks and patents. But the courts have told them multiple times that “fashion trends” cannot be patented or trademarked. So Apple needs a new system that does involve translucent cases, or computers that swivel around like desk lamps and such.
copying their interface is enforceable since it is their artwork and their trademark. sure case design is not protect-able, but the stuff they are enforcing has little to do with that since the original iMac case.
“you miss apple entirely….they are a hardware company that just happens to made damn good software. they did not miss any boat, the chose not to go the Microsoft rout. if they had, they would not have made it out of the 80’s.”
Either that or Microsoft wouldn’t have made it out of the 80s. It’s hard to play revisionist history here, but Apple did have a desktop that was superior to anything Microsoft had. IBM failed to capitalize on OS/2 because their marketing division couldn’t have sold bottled water to a man dying in the desert. Their on again/off again support of OS/2 for home users doomed it fo failure. First they pushed OS/2 as a multimedia gaming platform because it’s thread support and such was vastly supperior to Windows. Then they said they didn’t care about the home user anymore, and focused exclusively on corporate desktops.
Apple could have capitalized on IBM’s failure, and on Microsoft’s inferior product. It’s too late for that now because Windows technology has caught up to the rest of the industry.
But just maybe… Apple will captitalize on the masses of people who are going to refuse to upgrade to Longhorn because of the forced managed code environment and such.
Sun has seen the light, and is eroding into Windows territory with Java desktop. Will Apple see the same thing?
“copying their interface is enforceable since it is their artwork and their trademark. sure case design is not protect-able, but the stuff they are enforcing has little to do with that since the original iMac case.”
True. But inspired works are not copyright violations. If you take screenshots of MacOS widgets and then use those in your own theme or GUI toolkit, you are violating copyright. But if you are inspired by the Aqua widgets to create your own widgets that look similar, you probably haven’t violated copyright.
I’d want them to give my iBook some quality hardware to begin with so that:
1) It’d cost them so much less money. Replacing logicboard after logicboard after logicboard on one computer because you give the person hardware you know is defective (it’s obvious, they have to know there’s hardware flaws by now) will eventually cost you a lot of money in the long run.
2) It would actually assure the user that apple is a good company with good hardware.
I think you are right…Apple will see a surge in new customers because they are not locking down the OS as MS is with its home-grown protocols and DRMed EMI firmware.
the second that a windows user tries to use music or software that they downloaded and it not working (non geeks that is), or the second that PC motherboards are locked down and will not run “untrusted” OSs, you will see all the geeks building their systems and all the regular users buying apple or getting a geek to build a system with Linux on it.
“I think you are right…Apple will see a surge in new customers because they are not locking down the OS as MS is with its home-grown protocols and DRMed EMI firmware. ”
I think for Apple to capitalize on it though, they are going to have to port OS X to the PC. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they are planning to do that. Rumors abound that OS X already runs on a PC locked in a vault at Apple. On top of that, Darwin already runs on the PC thanks to the efforts of volunteers and Open Darwin.
Could it be that Apple open sourced Darwin so that they could get a lot of the PC porting work done for free by volunteers?
It started just recently (late 2001 model iBook, 10.3.2). At first I thought that computer died but because I was in bright light I could see all my apps are still open and even the cursor is moving so I found a temporary solution: take your machine to sleep and then wake it up. If you can’t see the menus easiest way to do this is to press option-command-f12(eject) (keep it pressed for a little longer) key combo and machine goes to sleep.
Is that anyone in their right mind gets the extended warranty on a portable. These things pretty much exist to get abused, and though the quality control issues should (and probably are) be addressed, a person really shouldn’t complain about a one year old laptop dieing and not being under warranty.
Pretty much ANY service on any brand of laptop is going to cost you at least what you pay for a three year warranty. All it takes is one accidental fall and that extra expenditure pays for itself.
“And I wouldn’t be surprised if they are planning to do that. Rumors abound that OS X already runs on a PC locked in a vault at Apple. On top of that, Darwin already runs on the PC thanks to the efforts of volunteers and Open Darwin.Could it be that Apple open sourced Darwin so that they could get a lot of the PC porting work done for free by volunteers?”
I strongly doubt that Apple is planning to put OSX for the PC. They have had chances in the past and have not capitalized because that would mean an ENTIRE change in the way they have been doing business for almost 28 years. If they were to do it though, now would be an ideal time because Microsoft’s next OS won’t be out until 2006 (or maybe later) and it would be a good time to go on the attack. As you pointed out, that is what Sun is doing and something that Novell will also soon be doing. These kinds of oppurtunities don’t come up too often and Sun is doing a good job by taking the fight to microsoft at the right time.
“At times they have even threatened to sue individuals who made Windows blinds theme, or a KDE theme that looked a little bit too much like Aqua.”
I remember that they threatened the developer of Y’z Dock [http://yz.designtechnika.com/software/yztoolbar/index_en.html] wich was a dock clone for win32.
“I strongly doubt that Apple is planning to put OSX for the PC.”
I think eventually, they won’t have a choice. Apple has the same problem with the PowerPC processors that Sun has with the Sparc processors. Basically, that problem is that there is not enough demand for either CPU to mass produce them at commonity costs. Furthermore, there is not enough demand for the CPU manufactuers (IBM in Apple’s case, and I forget who makes the Sparc CPU. It might be National Semiconductor.), to keep the CPUs on the cutting edge. The result is that both processors keep falling further and further behind on the technology curve, but without the accompyning drop in price that Intel CPUs experience when they are behind the technology curve.
I mean look at it. Apple’s 64 bit dual G5 held the title of the fastest personal computer for what? A month? But it has already been eclipsed by the latest dual processor P4s. The demand for the PowerPC processor isn’t high enough to keep it on the cutting edge of technology. It also isn’t high enough to mass produce them at comodity prices.
So I think that if Apple wants to stay competitive, they won’t have a choice but to support x86.
My ibook (800mhz g3) screen began having strange display issues.. Eventually the display simply died. I took it to the apple store and it was still under the standard (not applecare) warranty. It was fixed and back in my hands in a week — the repair doc indicated the logic board was replaced. I suppose I was lucky. I still like apple hardware and I think they make the best laptops out there and a pretty nice OS (though I only ran debian on my ibook) but it sounds like they have some serious screwing-over-customer issues with this and the recent ipod issue.
Zack, I think you need to “get real”. I did say Apple is replacing the boards – if they’re under warranty. It does matter if they acknowledge an issue. If they had acknowledged this earlier, they wouldn’t have an 1,800 signature petition threatening a class action lawsuit splashed all over the tech news. Who needs that kind of PR? It’s all about credibility. They could have totally avoided this. I’ve been an Apple buyer and user since the early 80’s, so I’m no anti-Mac person. I want to see them be the best company they can be.
“Zack, I think you need to “get real”. I did say Apple is replacing the boards – if they’re under warranty. It does matter if they acknowledge an issue.”
Do you know how long Intel sat on the Pentium long division bug? Basically, they sat on it until a scientist revealed it by publically demonstrating it.
And even then, Intel did not replace all of the defective Pentiums. They only replaced ones where people were likely to have a serious problem because of the bug.
Luckily I had purchased an extended warranty.
Have all of these definitely been logic board flaws, or are people just assuming that because the logic boards in their iBooks were replaced?
At least for machines under AppleCare, I think it’s pretty standard to swap out the logic boards for pretty much any repair. The repaired machine can then be tested without worrying that a potentially slightly defective logic board is skewing the results.
In the meantime, the original logic board is tested at the technician’s leisure and either scrapped or verified as ok and eventually gets swapped into a defective iBook.
Well it kind of has to be something to do with the logicboard because if it’s replaced and it works after (but soon to break again), then it’s obviously the part that was replaced, in this case the logicboards….
If this were ford, they would have had a recall of any and all machines sold during the time the batch was sent out. But it isn’t.
Surely its going to be more cost efficient simply scrapping the one batch the once and leave it at that, then doing major repairs maybe upwards of 4 or 5 times that in the end cost maybe twice as much as the machine is worth?
Seems to me at least that they are taking a very short sighted view of this by not replacing these machines with say last years powerbook leftovers or something similar…
blah, can you take OS X and *legally* install it on another system? Can you take the Mac basics and build a clone, ala PC clone?
No? And again, no?
Guess what, the Mac of propreitary. Nothing bad to the word, wonder why people get so upset with it.
that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. IBM has been developing powerPC chips for their own use for a long time. the PPC970 is a chip that they are developing for their own products and Apple has decided to buy chips from them. IBM would have to drop all their PPC product lines for Apple to have a problem. I think it is far more likely that as power consumption becomes more widely used and Linux gets more desktop penetration that Chips like the PPC 970 will be used by systems builders for Linux systems as an alternative to x86
Rajan, I am not going to rehash that entire argument with you. it comes down to this…the only proprietary part of a mac is the Firmware code that keeps OS X from running on any machine that Apple does not want it to. that is it. the rest of it is open and standard. from a user perspective, it is no more closed than a Dell PC.
from a system developer’s stand, it is a closed system.
a blanket statement that the system is proprietary is false, a lie and misleads people.
but little can be expected form some one who is religiously attached to his PC.
blah is going on an on about how Mac is as open as the PC.
a) Define a Mac. Need help? A PowerPC computer that uses Mac OS. It is the universal meaning of the Mac. Says “Mac” to someone, the thought of Apple comes to mind.
b) Define a PC. Most would associate “PC” with an IBM-compatible. Most run Windows, except for a fringe minority of OS/2, BeOS, Linux and [insert hobby OS here] users.
c) Who makes Macs? Apple. Only Apple. Nobody but Apple. For PC? It could be that Korean store down the street, could be Dell. It could be anyone in between.
That’s the difference. No one else can make a Mac but Apple. I could open a PC store and make PCs every minute of the day and nobody would care. Thus, PC is the open one, and the Mac is the propreitary one. Being proprietary doesn’t mean it is bad. Because Apple has control over the hardware and the software of their proprietary platform, it is in theory easier to develop.
They aren’t merely protecting their trademarks either. You can’t buy a Dell from anyone but Dell. The same goes to Compaq. But you don’t have to buy a PC from Dell. Or Compaq. Or that Chinese store downtown. As for patents, keeping a open platform doesn’t mean that your patents are completely useless. Microsoft have a tonne of patents, the same would go to Intel, AMD, IBM, etc.
If you ask if Windows was propreitary? Hell yes it is. But you are comparing the Mac to the PC. You can’t just take out parts and say this and that is open so thus the platform is open. It is the combination of parts that matters. If I get a PowerPC machine, say from Pegasus, does it mean I just bought a Mac?
Oh, BTW, I am not religiously attached to my PC. I currently using a Duron desktop because at time of sale it bets anything coming out from Apple. If Apple desktop provided more bang for the buck yet I still bought a PC, then you could say I am religiously attached to my PC.
And besides, unless there is some price cuts at Sony or IBM decided that SOHO is a good place to target, any notebook I would buy anytime soon would be a Mac. Because Apple laptops provide more bang for the buck than Sony.
I don’t know why I argue with you. you always use technicalities and your own definitions to make arguments that are just bad.
I’m done, I have made my case, and the fellow I was arguing with has come to a consensus with me over it. live with it, that is how it is. you can argue until the cows come home how as general statement like “the mac is proprietary” but that while technically has merit does not have any impact on the end user who buys a Mac to use it with Mac OS X or even Linux as a Mac uses STANDARD peripherals, STANDARD protocols, and is able to interoperate with MS Office on windows using MS Office on Mac.
the ability of a systems developer to get into the firmware code has no impact on anyone using the desktop system. if you want to keep arguing over semantics of what proprietary means to you, then have fun, just know that what proprietary means to the rest of the world when speaking of the Mac is not in line with what you have in your head and all you do is mislead people into thinking the Mac is harder to use in a mixed environment or is harder to buy extra stuff for, which is a lie.
have a nice day.
I guess some one thought I was lying, but I wasn’t, so I am reposting it.
it is funny that you say that.
I have heard that Sony’s have had problems, at least at the time I was looking for laptops, I looked into sony, about 2 years ago, but not only were they not able to produce the products so most were unavailable, the stuff I read about the models I was looking at ere not encouraging.
I later learned that Viaos have weird problems with peripherals like cameras and camcorders etc, that are not made by Sony, it seems random, but I have seen people complain.
so, Like I said, better hardware does not mean infallible. Sony is defiantly on the level of Apple and Alienware. (though because alienware is much more a boutique type PC, it is much more likely to work well from individual attention it gets during construction….and you certainly pay for that -_o )
My PowerBook G4 500 – the original model – has been nothing less than a trooper. I dropped it in China from 30+ inches onto a tile floor and the powerbook has a small crack but works flawlessly, and speedy, to this day. It’s getting near on running out of the 3 year warranty and it’s been great. What about these models? No one is perfect some won’t last this long… some will.. does this mean a class action lawsuit is really in order? I don’t think so… and no one made these people decline the Applecare program. They could have had a replacement for free if they would have just purcased the extended warranty. And no one can convince me that Apple has any worse failure rates than el cheapo PC plastic laptops… because to think that is to live in dreamland.
Well duh! They won’t be affected by the lawsuit. The iBooks DO have a hardware issue. This issue so far from what I’ve seen does NOT affect the Powerbooks in anyway!
The replacements are the same logicboard as the originals and have been failing at about the same rate as the originals. Essentially your little applecare warrenty won’t do to much if all your doing is shipping your dead iBook back to apple every half a year. That doesn’t sound very productive to me.
Ok, why do you have to be so thick. I thank ryan r for putting things so well. You rambled on a great bit clearly showing you have no idea what your talking about. Someone takes the time to straighten you out and it bounces right off your skull.
“”Do you know how long Intel sat on the Pentium long division bug? Basically, they sat on it until a scientist revealed it by publically demonstrating it. “”
There’s a big difference between a bug that affects a tiny number of division instructions (And by a fairly miniscule error anyway) and a manufacturing problem that stops you using the computer completely. Intel may have handled the FDIV bug badly, but the fact remains that the vast majority of people simply weren’t affected by it whatsoever.
I have owned two iBooks so far. One manufactured in 2002(12 inch) and the other manufactured in 2003(14 inch). I use it very heavily. They are in my school bag everyday with me biking to school and are under VERY heavy uses. It is on 24/7. Regular use during the daytime and cryptographic calculation at night.
In the school that I am going to, there are a huge number of Macs on campus. I am a friend of the the lab system administrator. I have not heard any complaints from him as well.
There are a lot of people complaining online though. I guess that there are some problems existing with some iBooks that were shipped. Maybe Apple QA team had been drinking tooo much apple juice and got hammered at some point of time this year…but I believe that they are working hard and trying their best most of the time…because I personally have not yet seen any quality issues myself.
And as far as third party OSs, I would also hazard a guess that porting Linux to the G4 required a fair amount of reverse engineering on the part of the developers. And that if a commercial company had attempted the same thing, Apple probably would have sued them.
Funny enough, a good number of them actually had some foresight and looked through the Darwin code on how the firmware interacts with the operating system.
To what possible benefit does Apple get by pushing out third party operating system vendors? So you have Linux on PPC, but where are the Adobes, Macromedias? they don’t exist in the Linux world thus making the whole endeavour of porting Linux to PPC nothing more than a grand brain masturbation competition.
Apple has probably sued more companies than any other computer vendor in existance. At times they have even threatened to sue individuals who made Windows blinds theme, or a KDE theme that looked a little bit too much like Aqua.
Nice to see yet another anti-Apple zealot giving a false re-run of history. The fact that in EVERY case where Apple claimed “look ‘n feel” violations, it was done on the basis that the ICONS and THEMES were DIRECT rips from MacOS. Not mearly “MacOS enspired” but straight out IP infrindgement.
But of course we have zealots like you claiming that it was you who were the poor innocent artist trampled upon by the “The Very Big Corporation of America Ltd”.
Crips, using your logic 99% of themes developers out there should be sued. The fact is there is a CLEAR distinction between “enspired by [OS]” and saying, “bloody hell, those icons look great, I’ll simply copy them from [OS], bundle it up and claim as if I developed them myself”.
I think what Apple really needs to realize is that they cannot protect their dwindling marketshare by suing every company that produces something that resmembles something Apple produced. They need to protect their dwindling marketshare by realizing the same thing that Bill Gates realized, which is that money is in software, and not in hardware. Software, after the initial development costs are paid for, is a cash cow, because it costs you virtually nothing to mass produce software. Hardware, on the other hand, has a substantial production cost.
That has always been the case. Are you some sort person who thinks that you’re the *ONLY* person who has thought this way? Apple is already expanding their software business just as SUN is pushing software. The only company who may survive out of the “PC Wars” will be Dell. HP has no software, a hand full of dying operating systems and a service wing which makes UNISYS look like a powerhouse.
“I strongly doubt that Apple is planning to put OSX for the PC.”
I think eventually, they won’t have a choice. Apple has the same problem with the PowerPC processors that Sun has with the Sparc processors. Basically, that problem is that there is not enough demand for either CPU to mass produce them at commonity costs. Furthermore, there is not enough demand for the CPU manufactuers (IBM in Apple’s case, and I forget who makes the Sparc CPU. It might be National Semiconductor.), to keep the CPUs on the cutting edge. The result is that both processors keep falling further and further behind on the technology curve, but without the accompyning drop in price that Intel CPUs experience when they are behind the technology curve.
SPARCs are produced by a number of vendors and a number of vendors sell SPARC machines, not just SUN. SUN’s problem ISN’T volume but a crap foundry. Scott should stop sucking up to TI and push their whole hardware production off shore to China. CPU’s produced by TSMC/UMC and assembled on the mainland then send them out via a courier firm.
I mean look at it. Apple’s 64 bit dual G5 held the title of the fastest personal computer for what? A month? But it has already been eclipsed by the latest dual processor P4s. The demand for the PowerPC processor isn’t high enough to keep it on the cutting edge of technology. It also isn’t high enough to mass produce them at comodity prices.
Dual processor P4? you really are clueless aren’t you. The P4 is not available in an SMP configuration because it would cannibalise Intels Xeon sales. Get a clue mate and actually read some news before making such stupid statements.
So I think that if Apple wants to stay competitive, they won’t have a choice but to support x86.
So using that logic Intel should just give up on Itanium and adopt x86-64?
It’s bad luck that the iBook has all these problems. I’ve got a PowerBook and it’s been flawless for the entire year that I’ve owned it, through MacOS 10.2 and now 10.3 upgrades and everything. I really like the OS and the hardware both. Apple should offer an upgrade plan so people can move up to a PowerBook.
I picked up an IBook G4 about a month ago, and then saw the website 2 weeks back on the Register I think. So far the iBook G4’s just been fine – its fast and does everything that I want and it doesn’t even get too hot. However, has any new IBook G4 owners had any of the issues outlined in the petition ?
HarjTT
:o)>
…Apple admit there’s a design flaw but if your warranty has run out…tough luck! What a joke. If it’s a design flaw then it should be taken care of whether the product is under warranty or not. No questions asked.
As far as I can see, co’s like Apple get away with this simply because no-one is physically harmed. Car co’s don’t have the same luxury. Can you imagine the furor if someone like General Motors came out and said something like “Yeah, we know we stuffed up with the design of the fuel hose and yes, it will probably wear through and catch fire if it’s over a year old…but you’re out of warranty so you’ll have to pay to have that fixed”.
..only tech companies seem to be able to get away with fundamentally flawed (and acknowledged by their own creators as flawed) products.
As for the comparisons with the Pentium bug…geez…we are digging deep aren’t we. What was that…..9 years ago? Production processes have come a long way since then and this issue should have been picked up by QA. The best comparison would be with the P3 1.13ghz issue that Toms Hardware discovered a couple of years ago. Result? Near instant recall once the bug was found and a replacement or money back offered to affected customers.
Let’s see Apple match that!
I’m done, I have made my case, and the fellow I was arguing with has come to a consensus with me over it. live with it, that is how it is. you can argue until the cows come home how as general statement like “the mac is proprietary” but that while technically has merit does not have any impact on the end user who buys a Mac to use it with Mac OS X or even Linux as a Mac uses STANDARD peripherals, STANDARD protocols, and is able to interoperate with MS Office on windows using MS Office on Mac.
I use plenty of propreitary stuff, and as long it works completely the way I need it to, I’m completely happy. Mac is propreitary, but like I said, nothing wrong to that. Only Apple can make a Mac – nothing wrong with that. It is hard for non-Apple companies to port their OS’s to Macs – again, nothing wrong with that (if I was a Mac user, whether or not BeOS could run on my Mac would be the least of my interests).
Take for example Sony’s propreitary Memory Stick. Unless Sony license it, you can’t implement it on your products. Why? Because it is propreitary. But that fact is the least on my mind if I was shoping for a digital camera. But still, it is propreitary. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, especially if you are a all-Sony person.
You claim to be making my own defination.
Webster:
Main Entry: 1pro·pri·e·tary
Pronunciation: pr&-‘prI-&-“ter-E
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -tar·ies
Date: 15th century
1 : one that possesses, owns, or holds exclusive right to something; specifically : PROPRIETOR 1
2 : something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker; specifically : a drug (as a patent medicine) that is protected by secrecy, patent, or copyright against free competition as to name, product, composition, or process of manufacture
3 : a business secretly owned by and run as a cover for an intelligence organization
Don’t like Webster? Try American-Heritage.
pro·pri·e·tar·y P Pronunciation Key (pr-pr-tr)
adj.
1: Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend’s house.
2: Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3: Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.
Don’t like American Heritage? What about Princeton’s WordNet
proprietary
adj : protected by trademark or patent or copyright; made or produced or distributed by one having exclusive rights; “`Tylenol’ is a proprietary drug of which `acetaminophen’ is the generic form” [ant: nonproprietary] n : an unincorporated business owned by a single person who is responsible for its liabilities and entitled to its profits [syn: proprietorship]
If Oxford had given free definations online, I’m sure I would post that too.
Who, again, was “always use technicalities and your own definitions to make arguments that are just bad”? BTW, I never said it was hard to interopolate with a Mac with the rest of the world.
“Apple is replacing the logic boards of units that have failed. Even multiple times at a severe cost to their bottom line.
What more could you ask for? IF it’s under warranty and it breaks they fix it. Why do you care that they publicly admit there is a problem? Big deal! ”
Heh, and yet when they’re denying there’s an issue with the iBooks, and when it’s outa warrenty (even though there’s a -known issue-), you have to pay.
This isn’t hurting their bottom line. They’re making us pay for their shoddy laptops.
“If Apple were refusing to repair the units under warranty then I could smell a lawsuit coming.”
Check out the “Letter to CEO” on Blackcider.com…
Legally (in the Mac OS 9/X EULA), you -cannot- run Mac OS on any machine other than an -Apple branded- one.
They’re proprietary. Case closed.
i saw one comment about linux being difficult to port to ppc b/c they had no help from apple… welll i can’t find the article now but it was from distrowatch.com “did you know?” yellow dog linux thing a history of linux on PPc and apple *DID* help. (MkLinux i think it was called)
despite personally siding w/ blah i think the moderators need to prune out that flame war.
yes PPC are not quite commodities but x86 is an ugly architecture. i all that effort that went into x86 had been out into a risc how much better off today would we have been? the fact that not even intel uses x86 for high-end work. so whenever you buy an x86 you are hurting the future of computing. mind you i’m uses a p4 right now but that doesn’t change anything.
btw even if Mac is closed/proprietary (i’m staying out of that one!) that doesn’t mean PPC is.
the maker of sparcs are Texas Intrument i believe and Fujitsu (Sparc64) who <rumour>might be making newer generations of Sun chips </rumour> according to what i’ve seen on ElReg
Having only scanned this thread, dunno if this has already been commented on…. but:
Apple has made two distinct types of Power Macintosh since they began using PCI busses. One we call ‘Old world’ the other ‘New world’.
Old world Macs do they ultimate best to stop other OS from booting from them. A portion of MacOS must have been executed to get an alt OS to work (see BootX for Linux and the OS Loader for BeOS.) They have an earlier version of OpenFirmware and their MacOS ROM is actually a ROM as part of the mobo.
New world Macs are different. Their Open Firmware lends itself to allowing alt OS from loading (hence you use a completely different Bootloader for Linux and Linux CD’s will boot without needing a ‘loader’ like BootX pre installed in MacOS.) They use a file to emulate the MacOS ROM, at least in Classic mode. All Macs after a certain date can no longer boot MacOS classic (9.x) directly, only from within MacOS X.
New world Macs are proprietry in so much as their logic board is not off the shelf. Old World Macs are proprietry is so much as they are fixed to using MacOS without hacks. However, consider that Mac Clones are exclusively, and historically now, Old World, and this clouds things. You could probably take a Daystar logic board and put it in a PowerMac case. Same with UMAX and other clones. Ports may differ slightly, but most (bar Motorola) were 100% based on specific PowerMac motherboards. (motorola Starmax had PS/2 ports as well as ADB.)
There you go..
I would hope Apple has fixed this with the new G4 iBooks. They did change processors and switched to slot loading cobo drives like the PowerBooks. One would think they would fix this problem too.
#Jumps for joy#
yay, I was right.
“Oh .. b.t.w Hi HMK get that amiga.dk stuff up and running soon? 😉 Don´t worry more about buying a iBook G4 and remember you got 1 years warranty!”
Hi, Jan, didn’t expect to see you here. 🙂 Amiga.dk is moving very slowly now, so I’ve told them to keep improving on the existing site, because I’m terribly busy with something else right now.
And I will be looking into getting an iBook G4. 🙂
On my ibook 12″ from 11/2002, sometimes I burn cd at 16x, but most of the times at 4x. Now I learnt that some ibook have problems on logic board and I saw on a french site that G5 with 1.8Ghz may have problem on mother board and kernel panic every 15 minutes (at least some of them).
It is clear that in these conditions to buy an apple request to be very confident, lucky or gentle.
The quadra that are still working (like mine) don’t mean that some quadra were not breakdown for the same type of reason.
On these points, perhaps the problem of apple is the user community that is strong and with heavy communication. And internet.
legally and practically, you can only run OS X and OS X apps on Apple hardware.
there are ways to get around that, but they are not legal and they are not practical.
if you want to run the Apple i* suite (iPhoto, iLife, iMovie, iDVD etc) you HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO BUY AN APPLE.
If you want to run any x86 software, and you don’t like Dell, don’t go blind trying to sort through the infinite amount of choices.
apple is proprietary. apple is it’s own little world.
end of story. no more out of you blah.
Glad I didn’t buy one, or the disposable iPod.