Mac Attack!
Apple Macs are Greeeeeat, as Tony the Tiger might say!
Except they aren’t. Not if you need any work done on their internals.
Case in point, a three year old Power Mac G5 dual processor Tower. Perfectly decent with enough ram etc to whip through even huge Photoshop tasks.
Client phones to say his machine came out of sleep, made a loud cracking noise and died.
Fairly obvious to even PC Worlds Colin that the power supply was goosed. I went round just to confirm with multimeter in hand and that’s where the problems started.
Firstly, just an aside to the usual refrain from Mac evangelists; ‘Macs look brilliant and never crash or get a virus unlike those PC things people always want me to buy’. Well, they may look good they may not it depends on your personal opinion. A Subaru whatever may look good to some people where as others love their Alfa’s. Chicken is nice to eat if you like it… see where I am going.
As for they never crash/go wrong etc or get a virus. It is pretty obvious again that as Apple has a much smaller share in the computer market that it will not be targeted as often. Most offices even if they are creative types have PC’s doing the admin stuff, the stuff mostly targeted by crims and basically PC’s are more prevalent so therefore it makes sense to target them with mass spam bots etc.
But, never go wrong or crash…. HA Fu**ing HA. That is the biggest li.. eh, mistruth that I have ever heard.
I have been using/servicing/installing/integrating Apple products as long as I have PC’s and although Apple have a distinct advantage when they make the OS and hardware, things do often go wrong.
back to the story…
Here is the rub. Basically this G5 is on the verge of being PC-ised in that it has standard SATA hard drives and other bits but many parts are still proprietary. This includes the power supply. Made for Apple by various suppliers to fit in the case, to get it out meant disassembling half the machine including the processors.
As I am not an Apple Authorised Service Provider, I cannot just order these parts from apple. I also can’t get apple hardware diagnostic tools. So to a third party provider. Cost of said part £200…for a Power Supply!!!!!!
Two things to be aware of if you are doing this kind of job.
1) If you upgrade or replace any processor, you must get an AASP to thermally calibrate the Mac.
2) If you replace a faulty motherboard, again it is a trip to an AASP (of which there are only 2 in Scotland)
If I were to try to become AASP I would have to jump through so many financial and time consuming hoops that I just will not do it. I therefore do not want to touch any more Apple hardware problems.
As much as people love their Mac’s, please stop the deluded ‘Mac is so much better than PC arguments’ and look at the hard facts.
Thank you PC is all I can say!