In the x86 world I reside in, there are people who do not buy prebuilt machines. They go to places like Newegg and read the Computer Shopper and hit up the local strip mall with a techie store and build their desktop – tower, monitor, peripherals and all – piece by piece out of commodity parts. (The parts can come from name manufacturers, but they don’t have to. There’s always a generic option in the x86 world.) They end up with a computer that carries no brand whatsoever, beyond the minimal branding done by the partsmakers themselves.
There are also computer makers that sell white boxes, which is essentially a manufacturer buying a lot of the same commodity parts and putting them together into a computer for you, the cash-conscious consumer.
What is the closest Macintosh owners can come to this level of hardware commoditization? Apple’s big selling point for their little video toasters has always been that they ‘Just Work’: That is, they are so well-designed there’s never any issues with hardware compatibility or (presumably) parts failure. It seemed like the polar opposite of the self-assembling x86 world.
But I’ve been hearing, off and on, that you no longer need special Torx wrenches to crack the case, and that you don’t need to buy Apple-branded RAM anymore, either. How far has Apple come in making the Mac’s internals accessable to – and replaceable by – J. Random Hardware-Hacker? Will there ever be white box Macs?
Case Crackers? God, there’s a term I haven’t heard in…a decade.
My Mac G4 tower, purchased in early 2000, was designed from the outset to have easily accessed inner components. A single latch will open the case, without a single screw. I, myself, have replaced the CPU, the Video Card, and added more RAM and a second hard drive.
Well, building one from scratch isn’t in the cards, but Apple long ago moved to industry standards for hard drives and CD ROMS. (I’ve replaced both the hard drive and CD ROM/RW and added memory in my Pismo laptop.) I could, if I though it was cost-effective, get a processor upgrade through a third party.
I commonly refer to opening the case as `cracking’ it. It just seems an apposite term for some reason.
Interesting. On a Google search, it seems that there are quite a few suppliers of Mac parts and refurbished Macs. I’m wondering mainly about how well a part designed for an x86 desktop would work in a Mac. Obviously, you couldn’t stick a Pentium 4 in a slot designed for a PPC CPU, but RAM should work. (On second thought, on the bizarre off chance that some x86 CPU is pin-compatible with some PPC CPU, it might be neat to create a frankenmachine … ;))
Anyway, nobody is selling white box Macs yet. (Or are they, and am I just not finding them? Horribly unlikely, anyway.) And I don’t even know if New World Macs have ROMs that could be copied, like Compaq copied the ROM BIOS of the IBM-PC to make the first clone. So, given that Apple isn’t going to lose the Mac like IBM lost the PC, how far can you go with building your own minimally-branded Mac?
That’s interesting, especially about the processor. I didn’t know there was enough of a market for non-x86 desktop CPUs to support third-party sellers.
CPU Upgrades are a niche market, but a steady one because high-end Macs were a lot more expensive relatively, than they are now. So instead of selling a $3,000, 2 year old Mac on eBay for a loss, it makes more sense to spend $200-$300 on a new processor. Since the rest of the guts, (drives, Ram, expansion slots) are now standard. You can pretty much modernize your mac close to a current or even better than for a fraction of the cost.
There are two, maybe three companies that make “upgrades” for the Mac. They are expensive, but less expensive than buying a new machine. cpu upgrades. The problem is of course, you could build a complete and better Win/Linux box for the same money.
I was always under the impression that the reason the x86 computers took off in the market, compared to Apple, is because there was that hodgepodge for IBM compatible stuff. Heck, I remember when the software I bought would say IBM PC/Compatible, unlike today when it calls for Windows XP or something. The way I always heard the story was that IBM allowed third-party manufacturers to use their designs, while Apple did not, and the rest is history. Am I right?
Long history here, and I am too busy to find a specific link to it. IBM rushed the first PC to market. At that time they violated their standard policy using open architecture. Meaning all the compenents except one were standard items that could be bought off the shelf from many suppliers. The only exception was the BIOS chip. Legally exact duplicates couldn’t be made. However, some clever folks just reverse engineered the BIOS chip to create their own that did the exact same thing the IBM one did.
At this point, anyone could manufacture “PC compatible” systems. Beyond the hardware, all that was an issue was the software. But the software could be bought by itself without having a genuine IBM PC box. This is why Bill Gates is the richest man on Earth. Manufactures just made IBM PC clones, people loaded Windows onto them and voila.
Apple dropped the ball. Not only didn’t they originally allow third party hardware, they also didn’t all their OS to be licensed. As a long time Mac user, I LOVED the fact that EVERYthing just worked, out of the box. All the software as for the most part unified and worked alike. If you knew one program, you knew them all because of Apple HIG and the hardware was for the most part, rock solid. That was BECAUSE Apple made the entire widget and are still the best at this. They had a very small window and it closed.
The early years of Apple, was a great time for computing…but Apple made mistakes. If you look at what the some of the clones were doing, pushing the envelope for speed and expansion; really showed Apple up.
But I don’t think any ONE company could’ve done better. I don’t know if Apple would have retained the Brand loyalty that allowed it to survive these many years, if they didn’t have those early years of being the best and that wouldn’t have happened if Joe’s Computer had been creating “Macs” that just didn’t work.
No. As rfgdxm pointed out, IBM didn’t “allow” anything of the sort, and IBM did not benefit, marketshare-wise, from getting their ass cloned by cheaper companies. They tried to re-take their own market with the IBM PS/2 (I think?), which had many more proprietary parts in its architecture, but it didn’t work out.
Meanwhile, it wasn’t just the two platforms (IBM plus its clones plus weirdo-misfit Apple) back then. Amigas weren’t PC clones, either. And there might well still be three vibrant computer platforms today if Commodore had had anyone competent in the suits departments. Aside from which Sun SPARCstations and Digital Alpha-based workstations and Silicon Graphics Iris workstations and so forth weren’t PC-compatible. There’s no intrinsic reason why not making PC clones would or should necessarily mean failure, although it would be rather optimistic to expect to supplant the PC as the low-end standard. Apple went for and owns the space between the PC and the high-end workstation.
[/hijack]
To return to the original question, the one central thing you can’t buy from a 3rd-party manufacturer or order up from page 297 of COMPUTER SHOPPER is a Macintosh motherboard. Until recently, that was due to the necessary Mac ROM, without which the MacOS would not boot and which had never been successfully reverse-engineered like the IBM PC’s BIOS chip that ** rfgdxm** explained about above. Nowadays a ROM is not necessary (you can, for instance, run MacOS X in emulation, or at least take it for a languid and leisurely stroll, on your PC using the emulator PearPC, which does not require a Macintosh ROM, licit or illicit), so theoretically Shreve Systems or Viking or someone could start making G5-ish motherboards tomorrow. But as of now I’m pretty sure you just can’t buy 'em except as manufactured by Apple.
Cases of a form factor that would elegantly accomodate all the chips and drives and whatnot for a Built Your Own Mac would be a bit difficult to come by, too, but if you’re comfy modding cases and revising attachments and customizing cables and so forth that wouldn’t really stop you. I’ve seen Mac innards stuffed into 1920’s vintage wooden radios, upright Underwood typewriters, 1970s-era Wang word processors, and various PC cases.
I’d think everything else would be a matter of playing mix-n-match and testing it, from power supply to card providing any ports not intrinsic to the motherboard to RAM & memory-bus cards. Basics like displays, keyboards, mice, hard drives, and removable media drives are industry-standard equipment these days.
The current crop of Mac towers, the G5s, could not be built from scratch. The fastest model requires a (relatively simple) powered liquid cooling system, and it, along with the earlier models, have a finely tuned air circulation system to keep down noise. Unlike the older G4 towers, the processors do no reside on a daughter card, and cannot be removed, much less upgraded.
Even for G4 towers, it’s not entirely sensible to shell out the money for a processor upgrade over purchasing a new machine outright. I have a dual 800MHz Quicksilver, and the cheapest upgrade that would provide much of a noticeable boost in speed, a dual 1.3GHz card from Giga Designs or Powerlogix, costs over $600. I’d be better off selling the thing on eBay for a grand and buying a dual 1.8GHz G5 refurb.
You can upgrade the disks, memory, and GPU in the new G5 towers to squeeze some more life out of them, but you’re stuck with the processor. You can’t even overclock Macs without soldering jumpers, which I’ve done, and is a white-knuckle experience, because one screwup and you’ve toasted your machine. In a PC, you just flip some jumper switches, or, more conventionally, adjust frequency and voltages in the BIOS. The customizability of Macs is extremely limited compared to the PC world, and roll-your-own is simply not an option. You see people dismantling old G4s and sticking the parts in new cases, but I really don’t see the point beyond the desire to tinker for tinkering’s sake.
I must have been thinking of the early days, when “cracking the case” on some Macs literally meant cracking the case open, with a special tool. As in having to actually break plastic to get inside the machine. :eek:
Except that mismanagement and outright hubris seem to go part and parcel with making non-PC desktop machines. You mentioned the Amiga and I’d like to bring up the NeXT Cube, Steve Jobs’s (solo) foray into megalomania, and the BeBox, the computer that was supposed to do away with the cruft of decades past and provide a single platform for multimedia computing, that was killed because the people in charge didn’t predict the Internet.
(Of course, there have been a lot of minor players, such as the RISC PC, that basically went nowhere.)
Interesting. I knew there was at least one thing Apple wouldn’t replace with a commoditized part.
So, does Apple ship Macs with very much in the way of technical specs to make parts replacement less hit-and-miss? I notice that, for example, the Power Mac G5 ships with a choice of pretty standard video cards, something that surprises me for some reason, but the website doesn’t mention the specific sound card the computer ships with. Is Apple in the business of making sound cards, or is the website just incomplete?
IBM was the third or fourth in a very, very large market. It wasn’t profitable for IBM, an American company, to keep the business in the US to compete head-to-head with Dell, Gateway, and Compaq, but it makes all kinds of sense for a Chinese company to pick up a business like that.
Cringely provides an interesting analysis of why the deal took place. Essentially, IBM sold the division to Lenovo to gain an ‘in’ in the huge and growing Chinese PC market, and to gain partial control of Lenovo itself. Plus, since this deal kills the relationship with Intel, IBM will be able to make its own PCs around the PowerPC and Power5 chips. While these might not do well in the US or Europe, China, where Windows is mainly used illegally, might really like it as a way to prevent copyright violations within its own borders and make it a more attractive trade partner. And IBM, of course, has a financial interest in tweaking Microsoft as often and as hard as possible.
So, the Apple CPUs are physically attached to the motherboard? Do the people who sell PPCs physically altering the boards to make good on the upgrade they just sold you?
Typically, there is no sound card. You can add one, but normally sound is handled by the CPU.
Pretty much throughout the history of the platform, all Mac CPUs have been soldered in. No sockets (though the exception to this rule was a crop of G3s in the mid-to-late '90s, which had the CPU in a ZIF socket). Up until the G5, Mac towers had a motherboard, and an attached daughter card on which you find the CPU or CPUs (as well as the L3 cache in the G4 models). To replace the CPU, you remove the daughterboard, and add a new one with faster processors. The process is really no more involved than dropping a new CPU into the socket on a PC, but the chunk of hardware that goes around the CPU in a Mac is pretty substantial; and very expensive. In the G5 towers, the CPUs are soldered on the mobo. If you want faster processors, I guess you’d have to rip out the old mobo and get a brand new one. I doubt that would be significantly less expensive than simply buying a new computer. I really don’t know what the CPU upgraders like Powerlogix are going to do once everyone is using G5s.
I certainly remember the long-shanked Torx screwdriver days, as I had one of the original Macs (and a Fat Mac, and a Mac SE, and a Mac II…), but I don’t remember ever seeing one that required you to break anything to open the case.
You didn’t ALWAYS need a case cracker to open them (“them” being the original Macintosh, the 512, the Mac Plus, the SE, and the SE/30, and I guess the Classic as well) — sometimes you could just pull those long torx screws out and lift and the innards would lift away from the faceplate. But sometimes you needed a device that would fit into the skinny slot between the front bezel faceplate and the rest of the body and push against each side until they’d separate, often with a gut-wrenching CRAAAACK, because the plastic parts were factory-pressed together pretty tightly.
I had a case cracker made from alligator clips. It finally twisted up on me and I discarded it. My SE didn’t need one (came apart effortlessly), it had been apart so often by then.
