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Lawsuit Shows Dell Hid Extent of Computer Flaws
Geoffrey.landis writes "According to an article in the New York Times, documents revealed in a lawsuit against Dell show that the computer maker hid the extent of possible damages due to a faulty capacitor in the computers it shipped from 2003 to 2005. Dell employees were told, 'Don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' and 'emphasize uncertainty.' (PDF) 'As it tried to deal with the mounting issues, Dell began ranking customers by importance, putting first those who might move their accounts to another PC maker, followed by those who might curtail sales and giving the lowest priority to those who were bothered but still willing to stick with Dell.' In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment."
This will surprise precisely no one who's ever done business with Dell.
Wow who would have thought that some company in America was covering up, down playing, putting the blame on someone else, etc... on some bad news? Did anybody notice that the sky was blue today?!
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/index.php
It was more than just Dell having capacitor issues left and right.
Morphing Software
And take the lowest bidder from China...
And outsource your inspection, testing and QC,...
You deserve what you get. I am actually sorry to see this happen. I expected more professional management system.
Hopefully someone is going to be going after HP next.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How is it possible for the free market to not result in better products and service?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
IMO, the important thing about this article is they finally reveal the source document their claims came from. This is important, especially because of the kind of comments the last Ars Technica article about this lawsuit had.
This isn't just capacitors. I almost stopped doing business with dell completely after a client came to me with a clearly failed nvidia chip on a model that had the warranty extended for just that problem. They had called dell during the warranty period and were told it was an issue with the OS and they needed to reinstall. They trusted dell. They reinstalled. They updated their firmware. The computer lasted another few months with the problem getting progressively worse until there was no video at all. I tested the system and determined definitively that it was the nvidia chip and asked dell to replace the board. I was given the runaround being told how do I know and its out of warranty. I pointed out that the warranty had been extended and my customer had called them during that timeline and was given bad information by their support team. They fought it and fought it and fought it some more until I called the rep that I do large orders with for corporate clients, and apologized to him that I would not be ordering anymore servers etc. from him. I explained the situation and was called back by dell corporate the next day offering to swap the bad board for a refurbished one. It solved the problem, but it really shouldn't have to go that far. I love using dell servers, but having experiences like that do not make me want to use their products.
Get a web developer
The US Federal Government buys more Dell machines than any other major customer. And Dell sucks, really really hard.
Sure, their server hardware is OK, but it's just off the shelf stuff which is more expensive than a lot of competition, including the superb Supermicro. So, the only conclusion is that Dell has employees that suck a really good dick.
Now this comes out. I wonder what the total damage done to the taxpayer was? Probably in the hundreds of millions when you figure in the lack of services caused by downtime, contractor handoffs of parts before they actually get the problem fixed, and subsequent testing which is mandated at many facilities.
In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
Political parties do much the same thing. The so-called base voters who would never consider voting for the other party (or staying home) can be and generally are ignored by candidates because they know their votes are secure.
Loyalty is a terrible position for a customer (or voter) to take. If you want results, insist on getting them up front, before you fork over the cash (or votes, or, in our political system, both).
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Of course they prioritized the situations with the most impact to them.
What's wrong with that?
However, selling computers with an enhanced probability of failure at the same price as if they didn't have that is fraud.
And "reassurances that no data loss would occur when a PC failed" is just gob-smackingly stupid fraud.
i get the analogy, but dude, get a throwaway phone - lots cheaper and no contract... hope your dad is OK, btw
Well telling them the truth was a never an option, that would had involved telling them that "Sure we used cheap or substandard components in our machines and you pay a premium for a quality product... Sucks to be you!"
That was option 1 option 2 would have been to pay a bit more for better quality components in the first place and while I would say pass those costs on to the customers they already had done that.
I haven't been able to recommend Dell to home buyers for years now to be honest. If your a corporate customer and can afford the gold warranty support and buy in a large enough volume to pressure them when something goes wrong your golden no pun intended.
Dell may have been more customer-antagonistic than other manufacturers, but even alleged luminaries in the business were tainted by this issue.
My first Apple base station was based on a Lucent design that Apple put a graphite-colored plastic enclosure around. Naturally, the Job/Ivs-ian approach to mechanical design did not allow these base stations to have ventilation holes in them, even though they had a comparatively big internal linear power supply and were using a 486 chip. Combine that with all the remaining hardware and you had a nice hot little box, especially if you used the dial-up modem. A year later, and the marginal Lelon capacitors powering the the base station started bulging like Champagne corks or popping off altogether.
Naturally, Apple told its customers that the they were SOL if the unit was out of warranty after a year of ownership. Those who had AppleCare warranty could get refurbished units - usually in marginal cosmetic condition - and only if they mentioned that AppleCare covered attached peripherals. Apple never proactively contacted owners of graphite base stations to acknowledge the issue and to point owners towards repair options.
I got mad enough to investigate the issue, discovered the bad capacitors and created a web-page to teach others how to replace them or have service providers replace the capacitors for them. Not that hard to do. I also gave folk instructions on how to add ventilation holes to help these poor base stations cool better. The Lucent design covered much of the board with an EMI shield, which exacerbated the thermal problems - it's like encasing the electronics inside two heat shields.
As the issue affected more and more customers, Apple started a non-publicized warranty program that allowed customers outside the warranty period to get their unit replaced - but only if they knew what knowledge-base article to point the Apple drones to. Naturally, just as the program appeared one day, it also disappeared after a while - without a press release, notice to customers, etc.
All along, the typical answer from an Apple phone-drone was that they had never heard of the issue before. So, if you did a little digging at Apple, I would not be surprised if the SOP manuals for phone-drones include the 'suggestion' that every issue reported by an irate customer is 'unusual', 'never heard of before', etc. It's one way to mollify customers, especially those who don't know of the myriad of other customers affected by the same issue.
The only times I had Apple admit something outright was with the Santa Rosa graphics chipset problem, and probably only because by MacBookPro was covered under AppleCare. However, by then, a lot of of other folk had already been affected by this issue and NVIDIA was presumably paying for the PCB repairs. So I'm not sure if I can give Apple a pass on that one either. The first sets of customers were probably told that unless the unit was under warranty or AppleCare that they'd be buying a new motherboard and paying Apple for the privilege of getting it installed too.
Would the base stations have lasted longer if Apple had elected to use name-brand capacitors instead of Lelons? Perhaps, but any electronic appliance last longer with lower operating temperatures. Sadly, this is an issue that seems to continue to haunt Apple - a desire to design pretty enclosures whose thermal performance is at the borderlines of what the electronic hardware can tolerate.
the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
In business loyalty is foolish. You always get better deal by shopping around. This is also true with jobs and women.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
We had almost 90% of our GX270 desktops (about 200 deployed at the time) fail due to the bad cap issue, and Dell Canada repaired every single one within 24 hours, no questions asked. Since then we’ve had near zero issues with any Dell laptops or desktops (over 1,000 deployed and in use), and the few failures we’ve had since then Dell has fixed without any hassle.
Dell Canada never gave us a hard time over repairs for the bad cap problems. Whenever we placed a support call all it took was a mention of “blown caps” and they immediately sent over a tech & parts for onsite repair. By all accounts we were a “loyal customer” but certainly did not receive “the worst treatment”.
Either Dell USA grossly mishandled the bad cap issue in their own backyard or there were a lot of Dell customers out there that didn’t arrange for proper support (by not purchasing through Dell Corporate) and purposely skimped on their warranties.
I have one of the affected models. I bought it used and it failed within months. Is there any remedy or am I SOL? It's probably not worth paying retail for a new MB that will likely fail as well.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
If they're willing to pay for it I suggest an iMac. If they want to spend less then any HP, Lenovo, Sony, Acer, etc machine will do. When you get down to $500 range they're all the same. Also I dont support family/friends unless they use OS X or Ubuntu. Windows users are a pain to support.
It clearly says "D-E-L-L" right on the box. Only way to get more explicit than that is Surgeon General's Warnings.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Rogers wouldn't even call me back when I was in the hospital with my dad who was going into major surgery.
I hope you're dad's okay now, but I have to ask -- what kind of cell phone problem hospitalizes your father and requires major surgical intervention?
~Idarubicin
Sometimes threatening is not enough. Some years ago, I realized that my company was paying way too much for our web and email hosting, so I called the provider and threatened to move unless they reduced the price. The provider would not budge.
So, I spent some time configuring a replacement and called to cancel the service. Now, the provider wants to offer a discount! I told them where to shove it, because I had already invested the effort in replacing them.
Was this a smart move by the provider? I don't know how many people would just accept that the provider would not discount the service and continue to pay the rip-off rate.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually Verizon is damn near the worst I have ever encountered.
Same brand of junk, different episodes.
"Let's bill your hardware charge to an account we'll close on you in 2 weeks from our side and then send it to a collection agency who sits on it for 4 months". That takes 4 hours to fix with your described Turbo Transfers. "Let me get you to billing. - No, we only handle Pennsylvania, let me get you your area - Oh, I am only billing, I can't take your credit card - I have no idea what that charge is, let me transfer you - ..."
Then they are just barely able to install a dry-loop DSL with 11 phone calls over 3 weeks.
The only thing is, the reputation of Comcast scares me more so I haven't yet switched.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I used to work as a systems administrator for the company suing dell, AIT, and to be honest from the setup we were required to use you could not tell whether the problem was because of dell or the high heat on the machines. The problem stems from the owner of the company's desire to cut costs anywhere he could. He stopped buying actual servers and went to buy desktops and sold dedicated hosting services on them as though they were servers. We would have groups of 3 pizza racks stacked with 12 of the VCR dells per shelve. The heat from all the machines was terrible, we even had plastic melting on some of the machines. To cool the system we had 2 used industrial ACs, that were always breaking, in addition we had 3 of the large stand up fans that really did no cooling at all. What is really ironic about this suit is that the company at the time advertised nightly backups on all accounts, however only about 1% of the customers, the ones on our netapp, was actually backed up. For the rest the company would not buy the hardware to actually backup customers.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Dell hid computer flaws. Oh, the outrage !
Correctly directed outrage.
Don't you alleged iPad jockeys have better news to post than this OLD news?
This is NEW news (or at least new information) relevant to the old news. I have no idea what connection you are trying to make to Apple here.
Perhaps, you might cover the intrusiveness of TSA "security".
Because that is never covered here, and the following articles from the last couple of weeks are figments of my deranged imagination:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1723233/US-Marshals-Saved-35000-Full-Body-Scans
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/13/2229222/National-Opt-Out-Day-Against-Virtual-Strip-Searches
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/158250/EPIC-Files-Lawsuit-To-Suspend-Airport-Body-Scanner-Use
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/11/03/1215256/Prepare-To-Be-Watched-While-You-Watch-a-Movie
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/31/0234232/TSA-To-Make-Pat-Downs-More-Embarrassing-To-Encourage-Scanner-Use
Having had comcast for the past 4 years or so, I can honestly say that they are better than THAT. At least in North NJ
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So that means I should not have married the very first girl that didn't care that I was a total nerd?
The world is how you make it
Thanks for the tips. My father-in-law is a Windows man, it's too late to get him on the Mac or Linux wagon. I checked out Acer for the first time upon your suggestion, and they linked to a couple decent boxes sold at Amazon. I'll give them another look over, but the prices were nice. Cheers.
.. and has threatened Dell with legal action concerning misuse of his intellectual property, 'emphasize uncertainty', from beyond the grave.
"Dude, your Dell is getting attacked by the ghost of a dead German Physicist!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The worst comcast ever did was start billing me for a modem rental, then demand I return the modem I owned to stop. Sicced the PUC on them and it stopped real fast. Aside from that, the actual phone monkeys are decent, and I pay by check.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
If you were a true (math) nerd you would know that, statistically, that is quite likely the case.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
So I won't, because they really suck.
But the real problem with Dell is their entire business model. They manufacture nothing. They buy components (motherboards, etc) from the lowest bidding Chinese OEM, who manufactured those components using parts from the lowest bidding Chinese OEMs. The bad capacitors aren't Dells, fault. They aren't even the motherboard manufacturers fault. The bad capacitors are the fault of the company that made them. And unfortunately, you can't tell they are bad until they fuck up.
So Dell is fucked. Dell can spend a ton of money fixing everyone's computer and then try to go back to the motherboard manufacturer and say "you sold me shitty motherboards". Lots of luck getting a Chinese sweatshop to give a shit about quality or customer service..
You married your mom?
Learn to love Alaska
The captain of a ship is responsible for the performance and behavior of his crew.
In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
In still other words, the more shit you take, the more shit you get.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
As love is more complicated than statistical analysis, that depends very heavily on your first girl.
Dell is very segmented by market--consumer, small business, enterprise, healthcare, education and government. Although very similar products are sold in each market, the component quality, crapware, support and service varies. In the enterprise and up you can order custom images with your software preloaded, the support will be all domestic and a very high quality. The components used are better and machines seem better built. We've pretty much standardized on the bottom of the Precision workstation line (T1500) for our standard desktop and have been statisfied with build quality and support. For i7's not the cheapest machine made, but the convenience of quality and support outweighs the slightly higher initial cost.
The nearly same machine is sold for small businesses and consumers with slightly cheaper parts, foreign support and a "boatload" of crapware.
Like many purchases, you sometime get what you pay for. For Joe or Jane consumer, I'm not sure I'd recommend this strategy, but if you value your time there is a real value to a higher initial cost and a lower lifetime expense. (Known as lower TCO, which is marketing speak for expensive.)
They were simply trying to use up their spare parts inventory and string the customers along until they were out of warranty service contract. That's dishonest.
Actually, I think from a legal perspective, Dell was colouring between the lines, if the contract was for Dell to replace the system as often as it failed within the warranty period.
You might complain that it's not ethical given the business image that Dell put forward. Obviously they decided that their short term reputation with share holders was worth more than their long term reputation with customers.
Given the size of the problem (across the industry) I'm not sure there were enough good capacitors available to replace all the defective boards with non-defective boards. I think it also took a while to figure out which capacitors were the good capacitors.
Given the shortage and lead time, if you tell everyone about the problem up front, you're encouraging a run on a bank that's essentially insolvent.
Suppose that Dell decides to man-up and announce a broad recall of millions of mainboards, but you're 18 months away from having enough replacement boards to go around. They could offer some kind of rebate to people electing to keep their could-blow-tomorrow systems. Many won't bite. You'll still have to pro-rate replacements. Dell's big dog accounts are going to expect the lion's share and you can't afford to make these people mad. If you say to every customer who purchased fewer than 100 systems "no soup for you" that's not going to play well in the echo chamber, either. Sounds like a PR fiasco at least equal to the sleazy approach they chose.
OTOH, deciding to manage this by marooning thousands of busy technicians on phone lines to call centers in India with people pretending to comprehend English less well than they actually do is something the market should severely punish.
I wish the suits so enamoured about dealing with big and established companies were the same people suffering telephone hell when big company doesn't man-up to their service contracts. Not that it would change how the world works all that much, but it might cut down on some of the intolerable bluster.
...because this post is in response to those who espouse "the man fucked us over again" attitude you see a lot of here.
Just for a minute, step outside your cubicle and put yourself in charge of Dell.
First of all, you have no choice but to manufacture your laptops in China, Viet Nam, Malaysia or some other God-forsaken country because it takes a lot of labor to assemble your products, all your competitors do the same thing and people want a full featured laptop for $599. If you stamp a "Made in USA" sticker on the box and charge $899, a price at which you'd lose money if you built it here, your product sits on the store shelf like an old turd.
Secondly, you have to source subcomponents like capacitors (or in the case of Mattel, paint for Barbies) from a network of vendors within the country you're building in. This sub-supplier network could go 3 or 4 or more companies deep by the time you get down to the raw materials used to make the parts.
Of course you got samples, tested the shit out of them, and insisted that all the components and sub components come only from approved suppliers. You put in incoming QC tests to make sure the parts adhere to spec, but it simply isn't possible to test every single component every single time they come in. You've got ongoing WIP tests at every step of the way to make sure the subassemblies and end product stays in spec.
Then some peasant in Northern China decides to send some bad raw materials used to make the capacitors used in the Dell (and other) machines up the stream to the capacitor factory. The factory making the caps has no idea the material is bad and the caps test out fine. They only fail over time so they pass any and all incoming QC tests your factory has put in place, and the end computer they go in tests out fine before shipment.
Then you get the first return from the field. And then the second. After root cause analysis, you finally recognize that the capacitor is faulty, and basically you then say Holy Fucking Shit. Because the lead time to get the caps was 12 weeks, and by that time you've got 150,000 suspect machines in the field, another 150,000 in work in process, and another 150,000 worth of parts in the parts bins waiting to be assembled.
You now have to figure out how and why machines fail, over what time span, and under what usage patterns. Will this thing burn down a customer's house!? How badly are you fucked in terms of warranty - how many machines will fail before the warranty is out, and what is the company's exposure? What about all the stuff in the supply chain - do you pay to have it reworked or do you deem the risk low enough that you continue to build and ship?
Then, you start the customer triage process. Who are the most strategic customers that will have the most downside due to the failure? Do we do a proactive recall, or wait until machines fail and come back in? if we don't do a recall, do we alert the public or just wait and deal with the failures as they arrive and hope it doesn't get any worse?
Of course, as part of this process, you've found the mother fucker in China who screwed you, had him shot, then put in tests to make sure this never happens again, and tried to get some sort of money out of the sub supplier to cover the millions you have at risk due to this problem. Good luck with that, by the way.
Then some douche bag on Slashdot calls you a greedy pig for not replacing every machine without question.
Welcome to the world of the manufacturer.
And by the way, the above if GROSSLY simplified to enhance comprehension.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
I'm not surprised one bit by this. I worked for Sprint/Nextel and we were told the same thing about phones with known issues. We were told "if they don't ask, don't tell" then pressure us into selling those exact same phones to customers (they put the higher bonuses on those phones for agents). It was very shady.
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Every computer I got (mostly second hand) has the warning in plain sight - DELL
at least that is what it will be considered now.
I've been using Comcast for about 6 months. I was horrified to find out when I moved here, I either had Comcast, Cox, AT&T, or Verizon...
Comcast seemed to be the lesser of the evils... but to be honest, I've had zero problems on the billing/customer service side, only occasional service interruptions (that were actually caused by someone backho'ing the metro fiber ring... this I know because I got to see the fallout as our engineers deal with it at work). Speeds are excellent.
It really makes you realize - you only ever hear the negatives. Why should someone go to a forum to talk about how good some service is? Nobody does that. Only the people who want to bitch.
See if you know anyone in the area that has Comcast, perhaps my luck is a local thing (but it -may- not be)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The hate comes from CSRs that don't do their job.
In my case, two sites full of billing errors, gone to collections, state utility regulatory agency intervention, two guarantees that they'd fix it, until I found out that they lied, turned both over to collection agencies again, back to the state agency who drills them, then six months later, the final settlement and refund.
Comcast is a money making machine disguised as a cable company. It's like the metaphor about AT&T being Southwest Bell with lipstick.
All of them are trying to squeeze profits where ever they can, by cutting down on customer serivce, and billing for anything they can get away with first, and answering questions second. There is nothing to love-- they're corporations that have no alternatives, and so their semi- or totally monopolistic behavior takes over. They care about one thing: what their share price is doing to day.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
many thanks to the mods who got the joke !
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
(troll)
How terrible for you to have four, yes four, whole providers to choose from. What a rough experience it must have been to deal with a company operating under reasonable amounts of competition.
(untroll)
We must have been one of the lucky 'important' accounts, because Dell let our onsite certified tech (our employee) sign off on bad caps, get an RMA number by email sight unseen, and get replacement motherboards shipped before the bad ones even made it back to Dell. They can be okay to work with for large accounts, but I wouldn't buy a computer from them even if it came with free oral sex.
As for ISP's, the more the merrier. If there are two or more in your area, you always have the option of threatening to switch and taking all of your friends with you (not to mention talking anyone else whose computer you get talked into fixing into switching). The very same companies that perform so well with competitors become right bastards when they are the only game in town. Verizon can go to hell for what they did to Alltel though, and thanks to Viaero for picking up the slack.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
I am not necessarily pro-Dell, but I am for making money, so I learned 'contracts' -(IANAL) When you call a 'Hardware' company for tech support regarding 3rd party SOFTWARE that the hardware company did not install on the hardware you bought, and so therefore could not have had the opportunity to configure their hardware for that software, how would it be profitable for that company to support you? It could not be. MOSTLY because if they did that for you, they'd also have to do it for everyone else, but mainly because [you contracted with them to provide tech support based upon the hardware and software configuration that you purchased] YOU made the contract for their services. If they were expected to provide unlimited services to you, no matter what you did, then they would have been justified to charge you for that. It's common knowledge that Dell is a hardware company, not a software company. If they tried to charge you for support of software they did not 'build', you'd really get heated. -They would not be able to alter the software to your configurations, so what would you be paying for ? Also, 'increased service' above your warranty -just because its relatively soon after you made your purchase, is not kosher, either. There is no 'Service' without 'contract', and 'Contract' is two-way, never only one-way. On another note - I can say from experience that had you purchased your upgrade from Dell based upon the system as it was sold (you had that choice), they would have slip-streamed all necessary drivers into your installation CD and the entire upgrade process would have been pretty quick. Also, Dell does not abandon their hardware because you change the software. They would continue to provide hardware support as best they could based upon the contract. -Its just that when you change the operating system, sometimes the hardware then needs new drivers and setting configurations TO WORK. So if you expect them to work (provide service) on what you did not pay for, who would it be getting the short end of the interaction? any company's shareholders would have lots to say about that business model.
cjacobs001
In this case, premium motherboards with solid caps.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
True, it could have been worse. But I did not expect anything from any of them... Comcast not being horrid was a pleasant surprise.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I agree with you that shit happens in manufacturing. I buy electronics products with my fingers crossed, always hoping they are in the "good batch".
This is a different case. Other manufacturers are reporting the same problem in 2003. However, Dell just kept on churning out 11 million PCs from 2003 to 2005.
Wow, took them 2 years to discover the problem and educate their support to cover the problem? For what? Capacitors that costs a few pennies each? In exchange for their goodwill and brand name? How much is the Dell name worth now?
Nothing to me. The capacitors still costs a few pennies each though.
It may actually cost Dell less to stop production, wait for new capacitors before continuing. Retail consumers may not care, but Dell have no integrity at all to bulk purchasers and will have to push prices further down to attract any new customers. Dell have nothing to gain in this debacle, short or long term.
Yes, I know! I have railed against such "legacy" MBA courses that teach this and a bunch of other horrible stuff for a while now. The sad thing is that even if MBA classes have stopped teaching this stuff, there are still MBAs out there who still believe this stuff.
Have a throughput problem? Comcast's method of determining IP throughput ? Send a tech out to measure the cable's signal strength. If it's ok, then there's no problem!!!
That's the extent of the network diagnostics -- doing the same stuff they'd due to detect cable signal quality problems.
!!!!
I thought AT&T was bad when they tried to diagnose throughput problems using whether or not 'ping' worked.
I didn't know how bad it could get.
Apple posts their "recalls" all the time. This particular link can be found on http://www.apple.com/support/, right now, under a column on the left called "Exchange and Repair Extension Programs":
http://www.apple.com/support/exchange_repair/
But damn they sure do a good job of hiding those problems.
You, sir, are a moron.
Awww, what's next? Your Mama jokes?
That the page you reference may not have existed in the Year 2000 time frame never crossed your mind, did it? The internet archive only has it in existence going back to 2006. The hundreds of folk who wrote to thank me for pointing them to the unpublished knowledge-base article must have been morons too? Along with all the folk at Apple who had initially declined service for broken out-of-warranty base stations? That's quite an army of morons...
But it explains why you posted as an AC. Better luck next time.
I didn't know Apple ever used a i86 in anything until they switched to Core2 about four years ago.
It's what happens when you buy a design instead of developing it yourself. My guess is that Apple lacked the internal expertise to design a WiFi router and card system in the time frame that they wanted to bring it to market. So, they looked around for companies willing to private-label their wares inside an Apple enclosure. IIRC, they had an exclusive on the manufacturing rights (i.e. Lucent couldn't sell or pimp it to others) for a year.
The early Apple PCMCIA Wifi cards for laptops and desktops also appear to have been Lucent based. The first generation of Apple Base Stations was interesting in that it consisted of a small motherboard with a modem daughterboard and a PCMCIA-slot into which the wireless transmitter card was inserted. Thus, some folk recycled these "silver" cards into their laptops after their base station died.
At the time, the Apple base station was by far and away the least expensive wireless base station on the market. Thus, I credit them with bringing Wifi to the masses and forcing other manufacturers to follow suit, price-wise. Subsequent generations of base stations switched to various flavors of RISC processors. See vonwentzel.net for a comprehensive list of Apple base station features, dissections, etc.
Capitalism is based on the idea that Consumers have CHOICES and select the best that is most profitable to them. Consequently the invisible hand of capitalism will guide the best companies to becoming the most profitable, and everyone is happy. In our current system there is not real choice, only the choice of a lesser of two evils amongst a cartel of corporations.
Modern media has created the erroneous belief that corporations want a free market economy. This could not be more false. Corporations want monopoly, and a steady stream of money. The definitely do not want to compete. If do not have any moral / political forces e.g. Teddy Roosevelt breaking up trusts, do not exists, the corporations will naturally grow so powerful that the consumers become virtual serfs.
Red blooded USAians (like me) tend to condemn the Bolshevik revolution and spread of communism. However there WAS big reason, for the revolution and the capitalists over there only have themselves to blame. I am afraid that the next person who is put on hold for three hours won't sneak into the house of the companies head honcho, and kill him, I do not want this to happen, but when people have no recourse to the law, it is inevitable. You can only push people so far.
In the past I would argue that the baser instincts of capitalism were periodically checked by 'the moral fiber' of the corporate governors ( and vigilant government) that kept the system from going to hell. This no longer appears to be the case. The notion of providing a 'good service and dealing honorably with customers' has been replace by lets outsource our call center to Indians, and keep the customer on hold for 3 hours.
There are numerous examples showing the our corporate leaders have become no better then common street thugs. My favorite one is Midway airlines collecting $20 million dollars from the taxpayers for NOT running an airline after 9-11. 50 years ago, some CEO / CFO would have said 'no we can not collect money for not doing our job'. Now the corporate culture is 'Hey why not. It's not illegal'
... but please allow me to respectfully disagree with some of your statements.
If my base station experience was so unique, why are there hundreds of e-mail messages in my mail file for Graphite Airport related issues alone? This month alone, over 450 visitors looked over the repair instructions for the graphite base station power supply. It's 2010, my friend and the graphite base station came out 10+ years ago.
I also qualified my statement re: Apple admitting issues with a getting a common manufacturing defect repaired to my experience alone... not the general customer experience. Since I have not owned an eMac/iMac/MacBook, I had no opportunity to experience the out-of-warranty repair programs you mentioned. Please do not generalize my statements out of context.
That Apple may have learned from prior issues is a good thing but I was not impressed with the Apple response at the time that the capacitor issue reared its head in the graphite ABS. IMO, the graphite airport base station was the tip of the spear of the capacitor plague problem. Based on the entries in the internet archive, Apple started publicizing out-of-warranty repair programs sometime around 2005, i.e. years after the graphite base station was released.
That you didn't hear one word about thermal issues is your experience. Perhaps it's because you wrote software and did not provide hardware support in the years after the product was released? Are there former colleagues that you might be able to ask who are in a better position to know what the in-field graphite base station hardware issues were over time?
I ask, because I heard about it hundreds of times. I had 3 out of 6 graphite ABS's I installed for friends and family break in a manner similar to mine. Not all of them in 13 months, like my first one... some took two years... I proactively upgraded / ventilated the remaining units but my guess is that they would have broken also. Why so many units in my part of the world failed and so little of yours will likely remain a mystery.
In a similar manner, I doubt that every iMac/eMac/etc. manufactured by Apple that you mentioned as covered by out of warranty repair programs has failed outright due to the capacitor problem. Likely, it's a question of usage, time, environmental conditions, and simple statistics. So while you may have repaired hundreds, even thousands of units, there may be some users out there today with functional eMacs that have not been affected by the problem.
Please also consider that the thermal issue was exacerbated by environmental conditions. A marginal design might work as long as the external air temperatures remain low. That is why I considered the lack of ventilation holes in the ABS case to be a design defect. If you look at at a Lucent unit from that era (i.e. when they got to wrap their own plastics around the same motherboard that Apple had sourced from them), it features lots of little slots for convective cooling.
Lastly, thanks for your help in bringing this amazing technology to the masses and cheers.
I was advising my clients of this in 2003 (Wikipedia article referencing the current Register article), when I was servicing Dell systems under warranty.
And I was advising them of the futility of changing suppliers. Everyone was hit by this, except perhaps IBM and Gateway, and I'm fairly certain they just escaped the magnitude of many other manufacturers' problems, including ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, even Tyan. Every seller was hit, HP, Compaq (separate companies at the time), Acer, you name it. Some got in front of it quickly, but Dell was one that stood out for shipping repaired motherboards that had bad and good caps on them. The guys in the shop had never really experienced capacitor failure, so they were a little lost when I first diagnosed it, and I was a little lost when I saw how many were failing. It wasn't a bad batch, it was an entirely bad manufacturing process.
I wonder how many other devices back then had this crap in them.
ps - If I had access to the business records that would document our findings back then, I'd offer them gratis to the plaintiffs. These and the many others that must exist would leave Dell with no place to hide. Unfortunately, this will really only benefit the lawyers, but it should at least make Dell change. Fat chance, but we can dream?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.