The Big Sad: your dead Macs ☠️

[Siliconguy]

I have a 2002 Quicksilver, originally 800 MHz, upgraded to 933 Mhz that is dead. I think the power supply dies horribly and took out the logic board as well.

The 2002 dual 1 GHz machine does still run quite well.

 

[TechNutt]

hmm... MacBook Pro - 2009, 15-inch, dead donor
2002? Titanium G4 PowerBook (typical broken hinge, but works)
2012 MBPro 13-inch, SSD, still daily user
2017 MBAir NVME drive, also daily use

desktops
2001 iMac G3, works, could be a donor if needed
2 eMacs, both USB 2.0, one is a donor, other is in daily use, burning a variety of CDs/DVDs, but that gets much less use now.
2 2012 minis, both are useful in different ways
2006 iMac 17-inch, dead LCD
2004 iMac G5, dead logic board
2008 iMac, 20-inch, SSD, works good
2011 iMac, 21.5-inch, works, use for experimenting with OCLP installs
(I have a bedroom that I use for a workshop, need to prune stuff out pretty soon...)

What does one do with dead pc products? I have a functioning PowerBook Pro from over a decade ago (2006) that I have no idea what to do with it. Haven’t powered it on in 5 years.

 

[QuickSilverLining]

I should get this off my chest

1. My mom's 900 MHz 14" iBook with failed GPU solder. It still powers on and sometimes it works, but only for 5 minutes before it freezes and lines start scattering all across the screen. That was the first laptop in the house.
2. Dual 2.7 GHz Power Mac G5 – my dad's friend had this in his garage and the day I got it the power supply blew up. Took it all apart and the liquid cooling system leaked and it only powers on for 2 seconds before it shuts off.
3. iMac G5 – something is wrong with the logic board since it freezes every time you turn it on, most times it doesn't come anywhere close to a desktop
4. 2008 Mac Pro – this was the home computer for a few years starting in 2013 but it slowly died starting in 2015 over 2 years when it stopped recognizing its RAM one-by-one. Now it's just a big turbo fan when it's plugged in

 

[mectojic]

What does one do with dead pc products? I have a functioning PowerBook Pro from over a decade ago (2006) that I have no idea what to do with it. Haven’t powered it on in 5 years.

If you have files you want from it, copy over the hard drive or take it out. Otherwise, just sell it or give it away, and see if anyone wants it. Or, you can discover these forums and learn what you can still use it for

 

[christiann]

I think a few of us around here have some of these in our homes.

Straight-up — list and/or describe the dead Macs you have lying about! They can be donor and also gravely wounded Macs.

I’ll start.

In my dead lot:
A1104 PowerBook G4 (bad RAM bridge, donor)
M6411 iBook G3/466 (graphite, dead logic board, donor)
M6411 iBook G3/366 (indigo, dead dead dead, a life well-lived, now donor)
M5884 PowerBook G4/400 (dead logic board, donor)
A1054 iBook G4 12 (can’t remember speed, donor)
A1133 iBook G4/1.33 12 (donor)
A1342 MacBook (mid-2010, dead board, slated as donor)

In my “gravely wounded” lot:
A1502 MacBook Pro 13 (early 2015, cracked LCD — glass is ok, but Staingated — and bloated battery; now sans SSD)


A recurring pattern in my list is all are laptops. I simply lack the spare room for dead desktops and displays. Dead laptops, fortunately, fit nicely inside blue, oversized Ziploc bags — which can then be filed away neatly in an IKEA KALLAX cube-shelving unit.

My Graphite iMac G3 DV SE just died yesterday. I’m so sad because it was a great computer. Now it won’t boot off any disk. It has the fly back transformer issue too because it makes the crackling sound during boot and sometimes it doesn’t even boot up. R.I.P
iMac 2000-2022. You served me (and the previous owners) well🤣

 

[christiann]

I should get this off my chest

1. My mom's 900 MHz 14" iBook with failed GPU solder. It still powers on and sometimes it works, but only for 5 minutes before it freezes and lines start scattering all across the screen. That was the first laptop in the house.
2. Dual 2.7 GHz Power Mac G5 – my dad's friend had this in his garage and the day I got it the power supply blew up. Took it all apart and the liquid cooling system leaked and it only powers on for 2 seconds before it shuts off.
3. iMac G5 – something is wrong with the logic board since it freezes every time you turn it on, most times it doesn't come anywhere close to a desktop
4. 2008 Mac Pro – this was the home computer for a few years starting in 2013 but it slowly died starting in 2015 over 2 years when it stopped recognizing its RAM one-by-one. Now it's just a big turbo fan when it's plugged in

Aw, I love the 3,1. It’s the odd
man out; It’s the weird one with software and stuff. No flashing besides ROM and NVMe (4,1->5,1 and 1,1->2,1). Nevertheless, they really can be turbo fans 😂

 

[Doq]

The worst I've had with my Macs is the Companion having Dead Bottom Slot Syndrome.

All of the dead machines here in the Lab are PCs.

 

[weckart]

Two dead Performa 6500 towers. Power supply went bang on both. Should be repairable as it sounds like a recapping issue. Just haven't got around to that. Also have a wonky 6400 where the IDE bus doesn't seem to work properly. A Kanga that booted but only very rarely displayed an image. Tried a repair and now it chimes but doesn't boot. Haven't quite given up on that but might be a dodgy logic board. Finally, an iBook 14" 700MHz with the GPU issue. Once the laptop has heated up, the graphics become unstable or freeze. Not sure it's easily repairable as the chip solder connections might be failing internally within the substrate rather than the connections to the logic board. I have tried to shim it for now.

A few vintage PC laptops with similar power supply issues. Everything else broken is either junk or for parts.

 

[micahgartman]

 

[TVreporter]

2011 iMac - graphics card died. Missed out on the repair call.

 

[B S Magnet]

2011 iMac - graphics card died. Missed out on the repair call.

Possibly of some interest, there’s a robust thread over on the Early Intel Macs forum on how to replace video cards inside the 2009–2011 iMacs which, if you’re up for cracking yours open, could give it renewed life with even better performance. (There are also threads on how to upgrade the CPU and upgrading to Bluetooth 4.0 LE/802.11ac, as well.)

 

[BlueMacawBird]

I've accumulated a few dead and impaired ones. I don't count parts machines and I have a number of those for my vintage Macs. To list the dead or injured:

iMac 11,2 21.5" i3, cause of death video card failure. I keep it for parts. I'm not sure why, it might make that fabled one way trip to the Apple Store one of these days.

iMac 12,1 27" i7, cause of death video card failure. Apple fixed it once for free and when it ate another video card they told me I was out of luck. I gave it as parts to a guy I know who had a working machine. It clearly jinxed him because his died shortly afterwards, also from a video card failure.

G4 MDD, two of them, because they're MDD machines and suffer from many problems, notably PSU issues. I got these early in my collecting efforts and thought they were nice. I came to hate them, hot, noisy and unstable. I sent both PSUs to a guy in Canada who claimed to be able to fix them. Both "fixed" units either died outright or became so squirrelly that I consigned the machines to the garage for the mice to play with.

12" Power Mac G4, and a G3 iBook, still run on AC but the batteries are done for. So kinda dead but not yet ready to be buried. It's frustrating for a laptop to not be mobile.

MacBook Air 6,2 (2014) with an intermittent problem where you close the lid to sleep it, and you reopen the lid and it (sometimes) restarts. Awkward if you had anything unsaved when you closed the lid. A real slug, so the problem with the uncommanded restarts was more than enough of an excuse to replace it with a 16" M1Pro MBP. The real gripe with the Air is that I had upgraded the SSD to a 1TB job from OWC, and they tell me it cannot be used in ANYTHING else. Which I find hard to believe but I have not tried to fiddle the thing into an external enclosure of some kind.

And as slightly injured I'll list my trashcan, which needs a new battery. A job that takes something between one and two hours, compared to sixty seconds for my CMP machines. I have the battery but am ignoring the dead one for the time being.

And as a bonus, a shout out to those machines smashed by UPS, FEDEX, the Post Office, or any other shipper who seems to take joy in throwing boxes against walls or other solid objects. It must be noted that the effort by the shippers is compounded by sellers who have no idea about properly packing the computers so they have a fighting chance. Among these unfortunate machines are numbered several G3 iMacs (brittle old plastic cannot survive if you sneeze on it) and Cheesegraters which have had their lovely cabinets dented and bent.

Now I'm going to see about getting that 1TB SSD into an external enclosure of some kind.....

 

[TVreporter]

2011 iMac - graphics card died. Missed out on the repair call.

Possibly of some interest, there’s a robust thread over on the Early Intel Macs forum on how to replace video cards inside the 2009–2011 iMacs which, if you’re up for cracking yours open, could give it renewed life with even better performance. (There are also threads on how to upgrade the CPU and upgrading to Bluetooth 4.0 LE/802.11ac, as well.)

I have scoured that massive thread - too complicated for me and so many different approaches and alternate cards.

That thread is mind boggling to read.

 

[Nermal]

My mom's 900 MHz 14" iBook with failed GPU solder. It still powers on and sometimes it works, but only for 5 minutes before it freezes and lines start scattering all across the screen. That was the first laptop in the house.

Ahh, I had one of those back in the day, although the 800 MHz model. Mine failed, but was still in warranty at the time so I was able to get it fixed for free. It was still functional when I sold it (upgraded to a Power Mac G4).

 

[B S Magnet]

I have scoured that massive thread - too complicated for me and so many different approaches and alternate cards.

That thread is mind boggling to read.

Unfortunately, it really is.

I proposed to them the idea of re-structuring the abundance of info in that wikipost and the 800-page (!!!) thread to be more user-oriented (which would have the by-product of reducing the number of redundant questions being asked by folks who are just getting their feet wet), but the principals maintaining the WikiPost were icy to this idea. It seems they’re deeply invested in making that information as opaque and as conserved to its few principals as they can.

It’s a shame, really. It could be so much more open and welcoming.

 

[MisterSavage]

Two of my old iMacs are living their best lives with relatives.

 

[Nermal]

Two of my old iMacs are living their best lives with relatives.

I'm glad they're living well. I hate it when dad asks for help with his computer; I don't want to touch the thing because it looks like he's poured coffee into the keyboard every day for a year.

 

[weckart]

Possibly of some interest, there’s a robust thread over on the Early Intel Macs forum on how to replace video cards inside the 2009–2011 iMacs which, if you’re up for cracking yours open, could give it renewed life with even better performance. (There are also threads on how to upgrade the CPU and upgrading to Bluetooth 4.0 LE/802.11ac, as well.)

I'm in that position right now. Although the card on my 27" 2011 iMac is still up and running and absolutely fine, the iMac is stuck on High Sierra and I haven't used it in years. Having dithered over the nVidia cards, previously recommended (now no good for Ventura etc), it has now become an uneconomic repair given the cost of the AMD cards outside of the US. The prices of later and more capable iMacs have plummeted since the M1 came out and so have 4k screens so even as a TB monitor, it's not really financially worth modding. Bummer, really but this was coming sooner or later.

 

[MisterSavage]

I'm glad they're living well. I hate it when dad asks for help with his computer; I don't want to touch the thing because it looks like he's poured coffee into the keyboard every day for a year.

Laughed so hard at that. I feel your pain.

 

[B S Magnet]

I'm glad they're living well. I hate it when dad asks for help with his computer; I don't want to touch the thing because it looks like he's poured coffee into the keyboard every day for a year.

“Dad, listen, if your Mac wants coffee, why not just give it some Caffeine instead?”

 

[originaldotexe]

2007 mac mini - bad cd drive? never got a power supply for it so i havent been able to test yet
ibook g4 12" - killed by power surge when lightning hit the power lines (surge protector didnt save me sadly)
emac g4 1.42ghz - major lag & screen flickering, most likely can be fixed with recap?
imac g3 dv 400mhz - used to have a slightly pink tint to the screen and no longer powers on, recap??
early 2008 macbook pro 15" - gpu died 2 weeks after getting it. need to either get a green dot board or have the gpu replaced. i have been looking for green dot boards but havent found any yet

 

[QuickSilverLining]

Ahh, I had one of those back in the day, although the 800 MHz model. Mine failed, but was still in warranty at the time so I was able to get it fixed for free. It was still functional when I sold it (upgraded to a Power Mac G4).

They were really nice machines but it sucks that most of the white G3 iBooks were such pieces of junk reliability-wise 😥

Aw, I love the 3,1. It’s the odd
man out; It’s the weird one with software and stuff. No flashing besides ROM and NVMe (4,1->5,1 and 1,1->2,1). Nevertheless, they really can be turbo fans 😂

Yeah it had a pretty wide range of officially supported operating systems, we actually had Snow Leopard on it for most of its life (yes, in 2013 😂) until we finally updated it to El Cap, and from there it went downhill. I remember it was much less stable on that OS and crashed more often.

 

[christiann]

They were really nice machines but it sucks that most of the white G3 iBooks were such pieces of junk reliability-wise 😥

Yeah it had a pretty wide range of officially supported operating systems, we actually had Snow Leopard on it for most of its life (yes, in 2013 😂) until we finally updated it to El Cap, and from there it went downhill. I remember it was much less stable on that OS and crashed more often.

My 2008 Mac Pro has had every OS from Tiger (unofficially) to Monterey. It’s insane.

 

[Nermal]

My 2008 Mac Pro has had every OS from Tiger (unofficially) to Monterey. It’s insane.

I remember seeing claims 10+ years ago that the Mac Plus had the longest "life" of any Mac. A couple of searches tell me that it was released in January 1986 and officially supported up to Mac OS 7.5.5, released September 1996.

I wonder whether any other Mac has beat that record.

 

[christiann]

I remember seeing claims 10+ years ago that the Mac Plus had the longest "life" of any Mac. A couple of searches tell me that it was released in January 1986 and officially supported up to Mac OS 7.5.5, released September 1996.

I wonder whether any other Mac has beat that record.

The 2007 Aluminum iMac runs Tiger to Monterey (Life=16 years, but everything after El Cap is dubbed “unofficial”)