This repair was easy.....too easy.....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just got finished with a repair of a customer’s iMac G5 20" (with integrated iSight camera) (which i’m posting this thread on, in fact…)

the system came in because it didn’t see it’s built-in AirPort card…

first off, a little background about the iSight equipped iMacs from a service tech viewpoint…

they are one of the most service-hostile case designs Apple has yet come out with, to start, the top of the case is held in place with spring-clips that need to be released by pushing in with a credit-card style tool (a glorified plastic rectangle, really), in theory, the clips should release

in reality the card usually bends before the clip releases, and the clips hold fast, once the clip eventually does release, you have to pull the top half of the case forward, without the clips re-engaging, problem is, there’s no safe place to pull on the screen, there’s not enough grippable area on the sides of the case, and you don’t want to put any pressure on the LCD display, as it could crack, and screen breakage is not covered under warranty, usually once you release one corner and start working the other one, the first corner locks back up when the other side releases…

so it takes a long time to safely remove the front display bezel from an iMac…unless you use my secret technique…

i took a couple of high-strength Neomydium hard drive magnets out of some scrap drives, wrapped them in electrical tape to prevent scratching the plastics, and held them on the front of the bezel, the magnet attracts the metal clip, usually with a positive click, and that side of the bezel opens easily, the other side is usually a little harder to open, but easier than just with the card…

once the bezel has been removed, most of the replaceable components on the iSight iMac are located BEHIND THE DISPLAY, so in order to replace components like the power supply, hard drive, or optical drive, the screen must be removed, very annoying, and to make matters worse, when the clock battery (CMOS battery) eventually dies, not only will the display need to be removed, but the logic board as well…

so, you get the picture that the iSight iMac G5’s are a royal pain in the arse to work on…

now, to the point of this thread (finally!!)

I put the iMac G5 on the bench and got it ready for the annoying task of bezel removal, I removed the neccecary screws at the bottom of the bezel, and, with a heavy heart, prepared to struggle to unseat the top half of the case

magnet in place…CLICK!, left hand side of the case popped open easily, now to the right, after a short delay CLICK! right hand side popped easily. the front bezel slipped off with no resistance, heck, even the cables to the iSight camera were easily pulled out and the quick-disconnects released (the built in iSight uses a Mini-USB cable, incidentally…)

so, the bezel came off easily, I laid the machine back on it’s foot to prepare to remove the screen to access the AirPort card, as most of the replaceable components hide under the screen, and the screen’s a pain to remove…

then I spied the AirPort card…underneath the right-hand speaker, a location that doesn’t require display removal, a quick removal of the Torx screw holding the speaker in, and the AP card was visible…

long story short, when Apple assembled this machine, they ran the speaker cable underneath the AP card, and the cable put just enough pressure on the card to pop it loose from it’s friction connector, I reseated the AP card and ran the speaker cable across the top of the card, reassembled the machine sans-bezel…

and it saw the AP card, and ran flawlessly…

this repair was far too easy, much easier than it should have been, so obviously, something else must be ready to go wong with it, iMac G5’s are supposed to be a pain in the arse to work on, and this one was easy…

hmm, wonder what else can go wrong with this one

oh well, time to open a 17" iSight that has a bad optical drive, that one should fight me every step of the way, as this model is supposed to do…

Anyone else ever encounter this situation, when an unpleasant task goes smoothly, too smoothly?..

2

Has Apple ever made anything that didn’t need some sort of cobbled-up gimcrack to get into?

More importantly, what’s it going to cost me in about three years when the CMOS battery in my 20" Mactel iMac dies? (And why couldn’t they put it under that hatch on the bottom edge where the RAM is located?)

3

Not in their consumer line, no, the Pro models (PowerMac towers and PowerBooks) are generally easy to work on…

part price will change in 3 years, currently the battery’s around $10-15ish, it’ll be the labor that’ll be the killer, approx. a half hour or so to gut the machine to the logic board, i guess the reason they didn’t put the battery in an accesable area is because it’d make too much sense…

4

Since you have so much spare time now that that repair went so easily, you wanna look at my Mac Mini?

5

What’s the issue with it?

6

Oh well. Guess I’ll just file your magnet trick away for future use. I’m assuming the battery is a bog-standard CR2032 or similar that’s available at Walgreens for three bucks.

Or do they customize those as well, like IBM did on some Thinkpad lines, soldering leads and a plug to it and heat-shrinking the whole affair?

7

Yes, and ususally about that time I realize that I have screwed something up so bad that it is going to take the rest of the day to get back to where I started.

8

It’s a coin cell battery, a 2032, Apple part # ***-1098 (any Apple rep will know the first 3 digits of the part number), Apple pricing at current rates is $25 for the part

Geez, $25 for a 2032 coin cell, i’m in the wrong business here…

9

Well, I don’t wanna do your troubleshooting for you, but I think its main problem is that it has an obviously defective and substandard user.

10

That’s $2.00 for the battery itself, $5.00 for the cardboard tray with ingenious notches and slots, $6.00 for the paper sleeve with “Designed in California” printed on it, and $12.00 just because it’s Apple.

I scare myself that I was able to guess the generic part number of the thing…

11

Actually, I just replaced the hard drive in my original iMac G5 (pre-iSight), and found it to be about the easiest drive replacement I’ve ever done. Even easier than replacing a drive in a generic wintel PC. In fact, the only easier drive replacement I’ve done was a hot-swappable drive in a RAID array on a Compaq server, which required no tools at all; actually, that one barely required opposable thumbs.

Here’s all it took: I put the iMac down on it’s face on a soft towel, and loosened three screws across the bottom to take the entire back off, including the foot. You can’t even lose these screws, because they won’t come all the way out; they just loosen to a certain point, then spin in place. After that, the entire motherboard and all components are laid out flat, and easy to access. No nooks to reach into, and no sharp edges to cut your fingers on. And here’s the best part: there are two colors of screws inside. Those you mess with, and those you don’t. If it’s bronze colored, it’s related to user servicable parts. If it’s silver, it’s for something else. To remove the drive, all I had to do was remove three bronze screws and disconnect the cables. I put the new drive in the bracket, replaced the three screws, put the back in place, tightened the three screws, and the job was done.

My understanding is that Apple discarded this brilliantly designed case to shave about a quarter inch off the depth of the overall case, resulting in the maintenance nightmare that MacTech described in the O.P.

12

Exactly!, the original iMac G5 case, while not as cool as the “iLuxo” case of the iMac G4, was a nice, simple, straightforward case design, a case design that worked, and Apple, of course has the inability to leave a good case design alone, and turned the case into the abomonation it is now

i DID take the Intel based 17" apart, and it’s the same basic headache-inducing design as the G5 iSight series, just slightly less annoying, it doesn’t have the massive “ladder” style heatsink of the G5 iSight model, still less service-freindly than the first-gen G5 iMac case…

13

Oh! The BEZEL, the iSIGHT CAMERA, the CREDIT CARD TOOL!

I learned about these parts when I called Apple care to request repair of my optical drive.
I-Mac with intel…20" screen.
The ‘tech’ that…no, change that to ‘hack’, spent ONE HOUR trying to remove the bezel, finally gave up, and said he would return after he could get a copy of the manual.
( This is where I should have stopped him, but, hey…Apple care sent him.
).
He returned 3 days later, removed the bezel in 5 minutes using the credit card thingy. He then broke the wires leading into the i Sight camera…made a call and ordered a new one…replaced my optical drive (he had brought that part with him) told me he would be back in 3 days to replace the camera, and would put the bezel back on so I could use the computer while he was away.
Guess what, he says…the bezel is ‘warped’ as it would not snap on cleanly. TWO HOURS later, he was still struggling, putting as many of the screws in as would fit, explained that If I wanted to insert or eject a CD, I had to squeeze the side of the screen, so the CD would go in or out. May God help me at this point. This hack was breaking my pride and joy, right before my eyes.
He wasn’t out my door for one minute, and I was on the phone with Apple care
The next AM, I was at the Apple store, I Mac in hand.
Two days later, I pick it up, and hear the following from the REAL Mac fixer.
This clown should NEVER have been sent to my house. They think he was a TV repair guy that dabbled in computer repair, when he should have stuck with TV’s. He had put the camera in BACKWARDS, which caused the bezel to not line up, tried to convince me that the bezel was warped…when I booted up after he left, the bottom half of my screen was noticeably darker than the top. This happened because of the bad alignment.
Suffice to say, my Mac goes back to the Mac store if anything ever goes bad again. Lesson learned.
And, oh…kudos to the Apple care guy…he mailed me an I Pod for my troubles for free.