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Baked Apple
Aaron Steele writes "Okay, I work at an Apple Authorized Retailer and we just had a lady come in to see if we could fix her PowerBook G4. She walks in the store and comes up to me, 'Sir, I've got a baked Apple.' The top of the screen was a little brown and warped. The lady opened up the machine and the screen was all cracked, and there was not a single key left on the keyboard. It turns out she had the machine in the oven for 20 minutes, baking at 400 degrees. No joke. And what's even more amazing. The machine still works. Ethernet, Modem, USB, it all works. Plug in an external monitor and keyboard and it's good as new ... almost." Am I the only one for whom this conjures up images of Shrinky Dinks?
I'm more amazed that no one asked her why she did it... Do we look down on non-computer people so much that we don't even bother to ask anymore why they do stupid things?
i have this theory that 98% of consumer electronic
problems can be fixed by taking the device out of the plastic, and throwing it in an oven. it's more of a joke, but it does have truth, as the problems are usually cold solder joints finally failing. (most of the time, you can simply fix things by going over the solder joints that are high stress, such as the terminals mounted right on the board).
perhaps her laptop was broken and she fixed it, but forgot that plastic melts?
this is really probably a bad idea, once lead vapor gets in an oven, it doesn't really come out.. unless it's going into your food
Joke - She mistook the shiny laptop for a baking pan. And removed the stains with peroxide.
Serious-Her young kids/any young kids in the house put it in the oven and she turned it on for something else.
In all seriousness, although the par-baked PowerBook might still work now, I'm guessing that the chance of a latent part failure in the near future has been significantly increased.
-some weird story. Glad I got to see the pics with the correct URL. WHY did this lady do this?
--here's my tough as nails apple story. We run on solar here. The first year though I didn't have a proper buried power cable, my AC feed from the inverters was literally just an extension cord on top of the ground. Was running a mac 6400 tower at the time, through a surge protector/power strip (no, too dumb to send in warranty card when I got the surge, duh on me). Anywho, one day there's a thunderstorm, being reasonably cautious I unplugged everything. Storm goes away, cool, plug all the stuff back in. About 5 minutes later ZAP! Rogue lightning bolt hits I guess the ground nearby or the cord directly. Pooter goes POP, everything shuts down. I mean it was loud, a very close by hit.
I am steamed, think oh crap no pooter. Reset breaker, hit power button, CHIME, that nice boot up chord! Amazing! thing boots but ran sorta screwy. Just-screwy. surfing was a tad slower, would get occassional screen freezes, etc, but as it was at the time my "best" computer I just kept using it. Next day I open the case, WOW, the mobo is all crispy! I mean fried city, and the thing is still working. Hard to describe except it looked -lightning hit. there's burnt stuff all over. I cleaned it as good as possible and put it back together. Used it for a few more months in crippled mode, then upgraded an old quadra to use instead, then I bought a used pb 1400, then I just parted the 6400 out, kept the drives and those great built in speakers.
tough boxes for sure
Used to feature an Apple ][ recovered from a fire -- totally melted and still working.
There was also a story about a library in a village in Papua New Guinea that was flooded, and the Macs in the library were filled with mud. They hosed em off, dried them out, and they worked.
Finally there's an old BMUG article about "hanging your disks out to dry" after their shareware library was flooded. They opened the floppy disks, washed the disks gently with detergent, air dried them, and put them back in new cases. Voila they were readable.
I used the same trick on a floppy disk soaked with spilled coffee (far worse than flood water I imagine). No data loss.
Apple also did a demo similar to what you describe with the iBook, I forget if it was the initial introduction of the toilet-seat iBook or the Macworld directly after but they had a guy climb a ladder and toss the iBook on the floor, where Jobs proceeded to pick it up and boot it.
Anyone remember this?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
While I know he probably didn't mean it as such, it certainly seems a little sleezy. "Hey, this system's screwed, and will cost a loit to fix... so you might as well leave it with us and go buy a new one." Then he installs a new OS on it and runs it with a keyboard and external monitor?
This just seems wrong to me for some reason. I hope he at least showed how she could use it again without buying an entire new system.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
I ran across a client who excalimed that there was a problem with his 'starter chip'. Apparently, the battery had run out, and as those with Apple experience know, the most frequent symptom of a bad battery is a blank screen; the blank screen goes away with a warm reboot. So, as I watched in horror, the client showed me what he was doing: just after the computer started up, while it was on, he removed the RAM SIMM, and plugged it back in. Recoiling from the shock of having its RAM torn out and plunked back in, the computer restarted. The client, of course, was disturbed that 'this seemed to work less and less often lately'. Either the computer gods, or the patron saint of the feeble-minded, had clearly been smiling on him...
Perhaps it's carbon fiber. Whatever it is cracked easily and badly. There has not been a TiBook in my lab (I count 4) that has not had some sort of hardware issue. Perhaps they are rev. 1 or 2., although my advisor is a Mac madman and upgrades at almost every speed bump, so I doubt his cracked screen one was. As for the one I use (the one whose chassis cracked around the IR port), System Profiler says it is 667MHz, PowerBookG4 version 2.1. Maybe this corresponds to rev 2?
Anyway, I am gratified to know that they've gotten better.
I used a hair dryer on a 20K mixing console and a $5K digital piano that got caught on stage when one heck of a sudden rainstorm (you know, one of those ones that starts raining horozontally so the stage roof doesn't do anytyhing) came up without any warning.
The digital piano actually got taken into a trailer before it got too wet, but unfortunately it was left directly under a leak in the trailer. When we picked it up later the water ran out in big streams. It worked just fine.
The sound console was mostly fine, we just lost one of the aux returns on it. No problem. Gotta love Mackie.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?