As far as I’m aware, the Cork factory is still cranking out Apple products. These days, I imagine some iMacs and even Mac Pros are assembled there. But yah, Cork-made Macs go all the way back to the very beginning, and probably before with some Apple ][-related products.
As far as I’m aware, the Cork factory is still cranking out Apple products. These days, I imagine some iMacs and even Mac Pros are assembled there. But yah, Cork-made Macs go all the way back to the very beginning, and probably before with some Apple ][-related products.
Wow. I had no idea that Apple products are still manufactured in Ireland. I expected that everything would be produced in China. I'll need to check my Mac Pro at some point and see where that was made.
Wow. I had no idea that Apple products are still manufactured in Ireland. I expected that everything would be produced in China. I'll need to check my Mac Pro at some point and see where that was made.
There are still Apple US factories as well, just not too many.
Several years back the G5 at my old job died. Not knowing whether it was the LB or the chip, I just swapped the entire thing. The new (used) LB (and chip) were made in the US factory and were actually OLDER than the parts they were replacing.
Apple also has several distribution warehouses as well. I had my iPhone 11 Pro Max replaced in May. It's a 512GB model so the Apple store did not have it in stock. The replacement shipped from an Apple warehouse in Las Vegas.
Wow. I had no idea that Apple products are still manufactured in Ireland. I expected that everything would be produced in China. I'll need to check my Mac Pro at some point and see where that was made.
I don’t precisely know the rationale for manufacturing Macs in places like Ireland, Czechia, or the U.S. these days.
It seems it relates to when higher mass and dimensions of a product warrant less distance to transport to a customer. To do that means it’s probably less expensive, slightly quicker, and less liable to damage for Apple to assemble larger products like the Mac Pro and iMac in assembly factories in the U.S. (mostly California, but also Texas), Ireland, and Czechia — especially when BTO/CTO configurations are ordered.
I do know several iMacs, for example, post-2010, have turned up online which were assembled in California and Ireland. All were, as I understand it, BTO/CTO variants of the standard configurations which were assembled in China.
That said, I do believe Apple made some assembly plant changes when the Silicon iMacs started shipping. I’ll have to go look into it, but I recall they were being manufactured in Thailand. And I haven’t heard much of anything from products leaving Czechia in a few years, so I don’t know if that facility is still running.
Experimenting with drives & SAS controllers. Second pic made me wonder... (Got drive from work, as untested & it's state may be not too good). First - it is lsi 9211-8i HBA without fcode rom, just to test how mac os will display it. (In linux with lspci shows full correct description).
As i mentioned earlier... i did end up buying a few more of those cheap Netac SSD's. Now the 11,2 hums along nicely with both Tiger and Leopard on their own drives. Well worth the few dollars.
As i mentioned earlier... i did end up buying a few more of those cheap Netac SSD's. Now the 11,2 hums along nicely with both Tiger and Leopard on their own drives. Well worth the few dollars.
I really hope Netac SSDs start to have a direct, in-Canada distributor to help make their products more competitive here. I had a comparative look at what it would cost to order and ship Netac products here, versus our own off-brand Chinese titan distributed in Canada — Dogfish SSDs — and for now, Dogfish mostly still wins out. Hopefully this will change!
Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Netac 128GB SSD 2.5'' SATAIII 6Gb/s Internal Solid State Drive 500MB/s PC/Laptop at the best online prices at eBay! Free delivery for many products.
It’s all about transport costs and customs duties. To get around import taxes, manufacture where you intend to sell. The Ireland plant services the European network.
I am assuming the inexpensive prices for the Netac SSDs are primarily because these are 120GB drives?
I found a vendor (I believe it's the actual company) on Amazon in the US, but I'm not seeing $10 prices or such. That said, I wasn't looking too hard at the time.
Do the prices still stay fairly low at higher GBs? My rule is that I never upgrade a drive unless it's equal or higher capacity than the drive being replaced. My PowerBook has a 128GB Zheino right now so if I were to replace it (no need to do so at this time), a Netac drive would need to be at least 256GB.
I am assuming the inexpensive prices for the Netac SSDs are primarily because these are 120GB drives?
I found a vendor (I believe it's the actual company) on Amazon in the US, but I'm not seeing $10 prices or such. That said, I wasn't looking too hard at the time.
Do the prices still stay fairly low at higher GBs? My rule is that I never upgrade a drive unless it's equal or higher capacity than the drive being replaced. My PowerBook has a 128GB Zheino right now so if I were to replace it (no need to do so at this time), a Netac drive would need to be at least 256GB.
It’s all about transport costs and customs duties. To get around import taxes, manufacture where you intend to sell. The Ireland plant services the European network.
What the deciding factor is between whether one’s ordered iMac coming from the PRC or from a a more proximal factory is not as clear.
I hazard a guess it comes down to the structure of the factory assembly in the PRC being equipped optimally for unmodified orders (i.e., that the cost and efficiency of setting up a BTO/CTO line in that PRC factory is more cost-prohibitive and/or time consuming than to have a satellite factory step up).
Recently my G4 upgraded Powermac B&W has been a AFP server for my recently resurrected classic 68K systems
- Quadra 840av
- Performa 575
As well as my 2 older PowerPC systems
- Powermac 8500 (G3 Upgrade)
- Performa 6200CD
Doing some essential backups of systems and files before I do some hardware upgrades to most of the systems above. Biggest thing I hope to do soon is get an XPostFacto install of OS 10.2 on the 8500, after I receive some RAM that I ordered last week.
Really love the 8500, but it still pales to the nostalgia I have for my 840av.
For my Quad Core G5 and Dual Processor G5 I use Intel 320 brand ssd drives. I can use them without any problems in either the top or bottom bay. I bought them used and they are going strong after 7 years. I also plan to get more to use with my Quicksilver that has a Sonnet sata pci card.
Recently my G4 upgraded Powermac B&W has been a AFP server for my recently resurrected classic 68K systems
- Quadra 840av
- Performa 575
As well as my 2 older PowerPC systems
- Powermac 8500 (G3 Upgrade)
- Performa 6200CD
Doing some essential backups of systems and files before I do some hardware upgrades to most of the systems above. Biggest thing I hope to do soon is get an XPostFacto install of OS 10.2 on the 8500, after I receive some RAM that I ordered last week.
Really love the 8500, but it still pales to the nostalgia I have for my 840av.
After wrapping up a way recently (over on the Early Intel Macs forum) to improve the heat dissipation dynamics of an aluminium (2006–2008) MacBook Pro using thermal pads to aid with passive cooling, I decided to crack open one of my two DLSD PowerBook G4s to see whether I could do anything similar for them.
Before sharing anything more, I ought to forewarn how the data for the PowerBook are limited, and results are still indeterminate.
Part of this was 1) my fault; part of it is 2) the inherent quirks of the temperature sensors in the PowerBook (namely, how the GPU readings are useless on, at least, the A1138 and A1139); and part of this is 3) an inherent design limitation of presenting data over time with the older version of iStat Menus — namely, the pre-Intel Snow Leopard versions are not designed to show temperature graphs in “Last Hour”, ”Last 24 Hours”, and “Last 7 Days”.
In reverse order:
3) iStat Menus version 4.00 and on through 4.22 are Intel-only and, as far as I recall, run only on Intel Snow Leopard and up. Version 4.22 is what I used on the linked post above for the C2D MBP from 2008. Version 4.x and higher brought in the active line charts for temperatures and other sensors. Here’s an example of version 4.22 from that MBP:
For PowerPC Macs, the ceiling for iStat Menus is version 3.19 (which works all the way up to 10.5.8 and the PowerPC-bootable 10.6 developer builds). Version 3.x lacks these and only displays current temperatures at any given moment:
2) I don’t know whether this is a quirk limited to just the Mobility Radeon 9700 GPUs installed in all of the 1.67MHz PowerBooks (both DLSD and SLSD) or something more broadly to Radeon 9xxx-series GPUs in Mac laptops, but the GPU sensor temperature on both my A1138 and A1139 G4s are notorious for showing a GPU sensor temperature of 100°C when the system is completely idle and, when a GPU-related load is applied, the GPU temperature actually drops from 100°C (in the above cap, 91°C showed up shortly after the idle 100, because I was actually using the system). Note: this sensor, on either of my PowerBooks, has never shown higher than 100°C, ever. But I can verify that the 100°C reading at idle is woefully incorrect. High heat would be borne out by hot-to-the-touch case temperatures, and this isn’t the case, ever, with the inaccurately high readings. I have no earthly idea why these PowerBooks do this. I chalk it up to ATI’s temperature sensor in the GPU die not communicating compatibly with the system — likely something on ATI/AMD’s part, not Apple’s.
1) I didn’t take any screencap readings of the temps right before doing the following work, so I lack the quality of data of the MBP thermal dissipation mod I did last weekend. So this is worth keeping in mind if you’re thinking about doing something like this the next time you open your aluminium PowerBook 15/17.
OK. Let’s get back to this.
For my PowerBook G4s, I use some iteration of G4FanControl — in Leopard, the GUI version, and in SL-PPC, the command-line version. At start-up, I have all three sensors set to 48°C — meaning, the fans kick on when the sensors rise above that threshold. Of course, with the GPU readings never being correct, I’m not altogether sure from where all three of those GPU sensor readings originate. There’s “CPU bottom”, “CPU/Intrepid Bottom”, and the inaccurate “GPU” sensor. That said, when the first two sensors are below 48°C, even if the GPU sensor reports 100°C, both fans stay off, so who even knows.
For the PowerBook G4 on which I did this mod, the A1138, I’m accustomed to seeing the right fan kick on first and, in the past, at a slightly higher overall speed than the left fan. It’s not unusual for the right fan to be just above 2000rpm while the left fan is in the mid-to-high 1000s. The A1138’s fans max out in the low-to-mid 3000rpm range (the A1139s use a different fan design and manufacturer, and those can top out at over 6000rpm).
The approach I followed with the PowerBook differs from the MBP linked above.
The MBP’s heat sink assembly is two pipes which are mounted about 1mm above the bottom case, and in factory configuration, makes the fans do most, if not nearly all of the thermal dissipation work. The A1138, meanwhile, has a different heat sink assembly. For one, it lives about 5.5mm above the bottom case, kept there by bottom case stand-offs. The does allow some air to circulate beneath the heat sink assembly in ways which the 17-inch MBP cannot, so there is some passive cooling to be eked from that design decision alone.
Also, there is a metal plate integrated into the PowerBook’s heat sink assembly’s design. That plate is peppered with holes of about 6–10mm. These holes increase the surface area of the heat sink assembly’s edges through which air can move and make contact with the holes’ edges, also helping with passive cooling (one can also see several of these 5.5mm stand-offs in this view of the assembly, shown upside-down from how it’s configured when reassembled):
A thermal pad mod here, if one is to be tried, requires a different approach.
For the MBP, the objective was to make it less hot to use on a lap (by de-localizing where passive thermal dissipation ended up under the bottom case). For the PowerBook, the objective I’m after is to keep the CPU/GPU/Intrepid as cool as possible; to mitigate the need for fan-based active cooling; and to keep the fans spinning at lower RPM and, thus, quiet(er) (which could be a higher priority for PowerBooks with only one fan and their tendency to make a lot of noise whilst hot, such as on 12-inch and Titanium models).
Expectations for the outcome here are going to be different than with that MBP — namely, does anything actually improve with this thermal pad modification?
What I chose to do was to focus on the solid metal anchors, the areas resembling grey plates, directly under/opposite the three heatsink areas — seen above as those grey areas covering up the copper heat pipe. As the bottom case stands measure about 5.5mm and the grey plates are about 2mm high, I went with a plan to apply 3.5–4.0mm “stacks” of the same silicone thermal pad material I used with the MBP mod.
Unlike the MBP, I wanted these thermal pad “stacks” to assist the grey plate areas directly beneath the heat-generating chips by bridging them directly to the bottom case and shunting some of the passive cooling directly to the bottom case itself (i.e., by making direct contact with the bottom case), whilst leaving be the rest of the grey metal plate (with the holes) as they continue with the same, as-designed, air-based passive cooling:
Were one to flip over the assembly, as one can see on the iFixit guides (below), there are two copper plates — one each for the GPU and the CPU — and a centre area which, in OEM form, includes a foam-based thermal pad for the Agere Intrepid IC (which, if I understand correctly, is a combination northbridge/memory controller):
Unlike the CPU and GPU, the Agere Intrepid IC in the middle is basically a big square of black plastic.
[On my PowerBook, the big, off-white square foam thermal pad you see above did not cover up another copper square but, rather, the same exposed heat pipe and metal plate with those holes. In my PowerBooks, that OEM pad disintegrated a long time ago, and I removed its oily, degraded self in 2020.]
During my last clean-out two years ago, I applied a line of thermal paste along the Agere Intrepid plastic cover to run parallel with the copper beneath. For this mod, I cut a 1mm-thick strip of silicone-based thermal pad to replace the paste from 2020, but only as a strip aligned with and as wide as the copper, not as a square (as I didn’t note a change in temperature from the “CPU/Intrepid” sensor after making that prior change with paste — i.e., it never gets as hot as the CPU, even when under high load).
As with before, direct contact between copper plates and both GPU/CPU was handled with Noctua NT-H2 thermal paste. The stuff just works.
Before reassembling, this is how the “stack” modification appeared prior to flipping over the heat sink assembly:
(I also took the time to clean the not-very-dirty fan blades and to add fresh lubrication to the spindles, much as I did about a year ago.)
SO HOW DID IT GO?
The short answer: the modification didn’t hurt the PowerBook at all. Did it help with cooling? Hard to say just yet.
The two differences I’m able to suss from before/after, given how I’m unable to access temp and fan data points over time:
1) The three areas (well, more like the two areas of the CPU and Intrepid) on the bottom case, directly underneath the stacks, are a bit warmer than I remember them being before. This suggests that the stacks are working as intended.
2) The fans still run at or above 48°C, whilst idling, due to my G4FanControl settings. I am noting their velocities now run in the 1200–1300rpm range, whereas before it was common before to see at least one of them flirt with 2000rpm from time to time and stick comfortably in the 1500–1800rpm range. This could also be due to a fresh round of lubrication on the spindles.
CONCLUSION
What I should have done for this before/after test: set G4FanControl to a high threshold (but not so high as to damage the chips; anything up to 70°C should be fine for this setting). Then, push the PowerBook (i.e., run a video for 5 minutes, followed by halting the video) and find where the CPU and Intrepid find their equilibrium temperatures with passive-cooling only. As I only did the “after”, playing back a 360p YT clip and opening the iSight FW camera, I could push the PowerBook to 68°C CPU and 57°C Intrepid without fans; the localized underside locations were hot to the touch.
After the mod, I’ve noted how after following these steps and letting passive cooling, including with my “stack” mod, handle all the heat management, the CPU returns to an idle temp at around 49–50°C, and the Intrepid hovers around 47–48°C. This is whilst Interweb-PPC, Terminal, and Finder are also running on SL-PPC, but with nothing else drawing from processing resources.
This is, frankly, marginally warmer than with my usual G4FanControl settings of 48°C, but not far from what my C2D MBP runs when it’s idling (i.e., 50–54°C, though its fans always run by design). With G4FanControl set to 48°C, CPU and Intrepid hum along at around 45°C as the fans run between 1190 and 1260rpm. [UPDATE after about 30 minutes of idling at the G4FanControl 48°C setting: CPU is at 45°C, Intrepid is at 44°C and both fans have shut off entirely. The ambient room temperature is just a smidge over 23°C.]
I hesitate to make a definitive declaration, but provisionally, this modification seems to aid slightly with passive cooling. By how much? I don’t yet know.
Is it worth it to you to try? I also don’t know, but it isn’t liable to impede on the as-designed passive cooling at all and, if anything, might aid things somewhat. If you already have sheets of silicone thermal pad handy, then it can’t hurt to give it a try. The thermal pad sheets (the ones I ordered were 10x10cm) are pretty cheap, and they’re offered in different thicknesses.
tl;dr: I’ll be making this same modification with my A1139 on a forthcoming weekend, and I’ll do better diligence with chronicling and recording before-and-after temperatures. But hopefully this should give y’all a starting sense of whether having heat move directly to the bottom case, via a trio of solid, thermal pad stacks/columns located directly beneath each heat generator, helps with overall cooling efficiency.
Over this weekend, I wrapped up doing the same passive cooling modification work on my A1139 PowerBook G4, much as I did previously with my 15-inch A1138 PowerBook G4 (above) and on my 17-inch A1261 MacBook Pro.
A full write-up will be posted when I get to it. What I can share is the heat sink assembly design is closer to the A1261 than the A1138. Unlike the A1261, I also threw down some thermal pads in the dual fan cooling areas and, unlike either of the previous two, also applied a bit of thermal paste at the point where the heat sink, by OEM design, makes contact with the bottom case. In other words, I pushed the passive cooling as far as I could.
Provisional results: whilst running Macports 10.5.8 compiles ( port upgrade outdated, over a month since last port selfupdate ), in a 23–24°C room (with G4FanControl set to 48:48:48, identical to the A1138), I haven’t been able to push the CPU beyond 52°C or the Intrepid beyond 46°C, despite the CPU holding at a steady 100% as Macports runs. The highest I can manage to get a fan to move is about 5250rpm (left fan) — well short of its 6204rpm max design capacity (the right fan is loping along at a leisurely 2500rpm).
More soon.
EDIT: Screen cap added
EDIT to add: Heck, I think I’m so impressed by what I’m seeing here that I’m seriously flirting with the idea of opening the A1261 once more and doing to it what I did on the A1139 — namely, adding thermal pads to the pair of fan fins and also adding thermal paste to the contact points between heatsink assembly and bottom case. The nice thing about doing this with the A1261 is I can access temperature histories and compare them more readily.
