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eMacs suck to work on.

Posted on June 21, 2005 by Mike

Jay, over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog had is eMac start to die on him this week so he decided to take it apart and replace the hard drive. It sounds much easier than it turned out to be.

Once you get inside, things get worse. With the power button around the side instead of in front, just taking the case off means stretching the delicate wires to the power button to their limit and then unplugging them one-handed while you hold the case in the air with your other hand. And getting to the hard drive, easily the most frequent point of failure, requires discharging the CRT and disassembling almost the entire machine to get at a unit that is locked away sideways under the “digital board.”

That sucks. Discharging the CRT?! F@uck that man…I’m not trying to discharge a CRT. That crap can blow your ass across the room if you mess up. There was a time when I was looking at possibly getting a eMac, but that time has passed (not just because of this story, the time passed along time ago).

A story like this does make me wonder how easy / hard it would be for me to work on my iBook, like to replace a hard drive if something happened. Oh and no, theres not a real “point”, per se, of me relaying this story, I just thought I would show an Apple mistake for once, show both sides.

…you can go back to your lives now.

Links: Maintainability: lessons Apple could stand to relearn

  • danielcole

    yeah, I knew that servicing my MacMini would be a pain in the ass before I bought it. If you compare total computers sold vs. broken parts I figured that harddrives and computer parts don’t break all that often. If something goes bad in my Mini I’ll try to fix it but by that time it will probably be time to go shopping for a more up-to-date machine anyway.

  • danielcole

    yeah, I knew that servicing my MacMini would be a pain in the ass before I bought it. If you compare total computers sold vs. broken parts I figured that harddrives and computer parts don’t break all that often. If something goes bad in my Mini I’ll try to fix it but by that time it will probably be time to go shopping for a more up-to-date machine anyway.

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