Filed under: Hardware
Tell us your Mac horror stories
I was surfing the web, doing my job here at TUAW trying to find the news and wacky links that you folks like so much when I came across this story from Ceejbot. She spilled coffee on her Powerbook and now it won't boot.Horrifying.
I had a flashback to a few years ago when my Powerbook (a TiBook) was sitting on my desk mind its own business, counting 1's and 0's. It was a hot summer day and I reached for my large cup full of water. I knocked it over, directly onto my running Powerbook. The screen flickered, I saw some smoke and then I quickly shut it off.
I let it sit for a few days and, luckily, it booted up just like new.
I want to hear your Mac horror stories, the drops, the spills, the lighting-storms; I want it all!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Dylan said 7:28PM on 8-30-2005
i got a mac mini yesterday but then there was a power surge that night and right after i got done watching the intro movie and setting up my account the surge made my wall socket explode and the minis innards were caught on fire and almost caused my house to burn down.
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Sean Flanagan said 6:31PM on 8-23-2005
Horror story:
When moving into college for the first time freshman year, my brand new roommate dropped my 7600 down a flight of stairs, cracking the case and leaving paint marks from the walls on it. After a quick "What the hell is wrong with you?!?!" session, it started right up.
Not quite a horror story:
My father owns a graphic design firm and one of his employees kept managing to get extension conflicts on his beige G3. After backing up all the files and doing a clean install of System 8 (this was a few years ago), it was up and running perfectly. So my father decided to turn it into a joke and installed an extension on the machine that shrunk the usable display by 1 pixel each time the computer started up, which was daily. After months of thinking my father was crazy for laughing out loud at random intervals, and with a screen with roughy an inch and a half of unused black space all the way around, the employee finally spoke up and said he thought there was something wrong with his machine.
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Colin said 6:33PM on 8-23-2005
Um, Dylan, you win.
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Jonathan Crowe said 6:33PM on 8-23-2005
Um. Ceej is female.
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Twist said 11:23PM on 8-23-2005
Way back in the day a friend gave me a Performa 600CD after he got a new 8600/300 and within a week I had messed it up so bad (with ResEdit no less) that it wouldn't boot. Then a few months later I spent $400 on a massive 8.4 gig (massive at that time at least) external SCSI HD for it since the internal 160 gig drive wasn't large enough for much of anything. A few weeks later our house is destroyed in a tornado and then the National Guard won't let us back into the neighborhood for three days and it rains almost every day during that time frame. When we finally got to dig through our stuff I was able to recover all the computer stuff which I then took apart and cleaned out and let sit for about a week so it could dry out. Hooked everything up and it all worked. I still have that Performa and that hard drive around here somewhere.
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Jack said 7:00PM on 8-23-2005
I can't beat Dylan's tale (can anyone?!) but when lightning struck my building a couple of years ago the power supply to my old clamshell iBook shot into the air, was briefly enveloped in a rather spooky blue light and then made a very loud popping noise. This was while I was using the laptop, and, much to my surprise, neither myself nor the iBook suffered any ill effects, other than nearly fainting with fright (me, not the iBook). I don't use computers during thinderstorms any more...
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Jer said 6:44PM on 8-23-2005
At a trade show, cheesy backpack holding my tiBook and way too many product brochures in it. Stop in the bathroom, hung backpack from hook in stall, sitting there contemplating the world and just as the thought of "what if that hook..." crossed my mind someone slammed a stall door and the tiBook did a four foot swan dive into the tile work.
CD drive was toast (great excuse to buy a superdrive) but other than a slight ding on one side the tibook worked, and continues to work, without a hitch.
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rafa said 6:46PM on 8-23-2005
I have a horror story (with a happy ending) envolving a powerbook and a cup of coffee...
I dj at a local club and the first time i took my pb with me, (instead of my girlfriend's toshiba satellite), to dj, I decided i would have some coffee at my booth, instead of at the bar like I usually do week after week... so the girl at the bar brings me my coffee (at this time i was already running traktor, outputing to the main speaker through my pb) and on one of the dumbest moves I ever did, I spilled the hot coffee all over my pb... I didn't panic, I just asked for some paper towels, cleaned it up and kept playing through the rest of the night... it worked like a charm... I thought I was just lucky it didn't ruin anything on the machine... WRONG!!! When I got home the backlit keyboard function wasn't working, nor was my "v" key... I freaked out... My 4 month-old pb was ruinned... forever... not that fast kemosabe!!! I went to my apple retailler (yeah, i'm from Portugal) and somehow I convinced him that the "v" key had stopped working the night before but the coffee problem had happened 2 months ago... I pulled it off... after waiting for about 3 weeks, my new keyboard arrived and now it's as good as new... damn I'm a lucky bastard...
Now I'm always EXTRA carefull with liquids around my pb and I even bought a silicone keyboard protector just in case... It's a damn beautiful machine... it doesn't deserve this kind of abuse...
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rafa said 9:11PM on 8-23-2005
I have a horror story (with a happy ending) envolving a powerbook and a cup of coffee...
I dj at a local club and the first time i took my pb with me, (instead of my girlfriend's toshiba satellite), to dj, I decided i would have some coffee at my booth, instead of at the bar like I usually do week after week... so the girl at the bar brings me my coffee (at this time i was already running traktor, outputing to the main speaker through my pb) and on one of the dumbest moves I ever did, I spilled the hot coffee all over my pb... I didn't panic, I just asked for some paper towels, cleaned it up and kept playing through the rest of the night... it worked like a charm... I thought I was just lucky it didn't ruin anything on the machine... WRONG!!! When I got home the backlit keyboard function wasn't working, nor was my "v" key... I freaked out... My 4 month-old pb was ruinned... forever... not that fast kemosabe!!! I went to my apple retailler (yeah, i'm from Portugal) and somehow I convinced him that the "v" key had stopped working the night before but the coffee problem had happened 2 months ago... I pulled it off... after waiting for about 3 weeks, my new keyboard arrived and now it's as good as new... damn I'm a lucky bastard...
Now I'm always EXTRA carefull with liquids around my pb and I even bought a silicone keyboard protector just in case... It's a damn beautiful machine... it doesn't deserve this kind of abuse...
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skip said 6:47PM on 8-23-2005
I have a G4 Powerbook 1.25 GHz and about 2 months out of the warranty (and about the time of the Tiger upgrade), my lower RAM slot died.
The horror story is that I don't know what I did (if anything) and I'm not convinced that paying out of pocket for the repair will leave me with a 'book that WON'T spontaneously do this again.
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anamnesies said 6:54PM on 8-23-2005
My first mac, a PB G4 15" 1.33, decided it had wings to fly, and so, it fell two floors, through a space in the middle of a staircase. After rushing down the mentioned staircase, pushing people out of the way, I opened the bag, to reveal one messed-up powerbook, with a cracked lcd, but STILL WORKING!! Didn't even come out of sleep! When I arrived home and connected it to an external monitor, everything worked like a charm... Except the LCD, of course.
Epilogue: some time later, after lots of debate when whether it was worth fixing or not, the Apple reseller in which I had bought it, offered a trade-in value for it, should I buy another PB. Which I did, being now the proud owner of a 12" little thing...
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Jas said 6:58PM on 8-23-2005
my dad smashed the hdd on purpose cuz he wanted to protect his data and our old mac wouldnt boot up anymore. its sad yet funny that you see a hammer hole right in the middle of the hdd
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Christopher said 7:02PM on 8-23-2005
I was having a meeting with my boss, with my closed Powerbook on the table. She accidentally knocked her coffee over and we both watched it quickly spill down the table and UP THE VENT on the backside of my PowerBook.
Sizzling Smell. Drip Drip. She's dead Jim. RAM chips were fried, shorts on the MLB. It was an ugly, smelly mess.
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tj said 7:03PM on 8-23-2005
Our office has TERRIBLE systems guys.. They keep "forgetting" to come install more ethernet ports in my office. I have one but there are two other machines and an XRaid and I have to keep swapping.. anyway, I was using my TiBook on one side of the room and the jack was on the other and there was a giant electric blue cable running across the room. The TiBook was sitting, closed, on the desk and one of my coworkers walks in a snags the cable.. the unthinkable happends and the TiBook goes flying and lands on the corner of the screen. I check the damage.. the corner of base next to the combo drive is separated and the left hinge is completley ripped off. I pray to the Steveness Himself and press the power button.. DING! The lovely screen in all its glory turns on, all on, not one crack. I swore to His Steveness right then that I'd never use any other machine than a Mac for as long as I live.
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Ryan Groat said 7:16PM on 8-23-2005
My horror story isn't quite as extreme as most of the others, but scared the hell out of me nonetheless. I recieved a 17" Powerbook about a year and a half ago because I was going away to college and needed a computer. High School was still in session at that time and when I went to school the Powerbook sat on the desk in my room idling and running the 'flurry' screen saver.
About I'd had the PB for about a week, I came home to find the computer seemingly asleep. The display was off, but the funny thing was that the sleep light was not on. I decided that my mother probably was trying out the first household Mac and turned it off. Long story short: it wasn't asleep and it wouldn't turn off. I promptly freaked and went to the Apple Discussion forums where I explained my plight. They told me to calm down, which I took five minutes to do. I then tried to turn the computer on one more time, which it did. I haven't had any similar problems ever since (actually that has been my only hardware problem ever with this computer) and I still have no idea what caused that freaky incident.
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Logan said 7:31PM on 8-23-2005
Hmm... nothing really that bad, except for an ibook that fell off of the sofa, and landed screen down, bending the screen, and causing warpage, but other then that, the iBook works fine.
Ryan Groat - Was it out of batteries?
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Kristin Wenzel said 11:39PM on 8-23-2005
My story is a lot like many of the ones I've seen up there. My Powerbook G4 15" 1.5GHz was my new baby, just a week old, when I bumped a CARAFE of wine and spilled most of it into the KEYBOARD and screen. Flicker, smoke, I turned it off, unplugged it, pulled out the battery, and about a half-cup of chardonnay comes POURING out of the battery slot.
NOT good.
Panicked, emptied out the wine, set it upright to dry overnight and the next day *ding!* welcome to macintosh! Good as new, except for some water damage to the LCD on the bottom right corner.
Good lord, these things are impenetrable.
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michael said 7:58PM on 8-23-2005
A gathering of myself and two other friends, seated in a ring around my 12 inch pb on the table, surfing around as we drank beer and considered a venue for our absent friend's bachelor party.
A particularly amusing comment was made at some point, and i burst out laughing - but had a very full mouth of beer. I've never done this before or after, but i then and there sprayed a full mouthful all over the screen and keyboard. My aim was perfect, and my powerbook was drenched, screen and keyboard. I'm very meticulous about my screen, so this was extra funny, uh-huh.
Somehow it survived, and my keys don't even smell like Molson.
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michael said 11:09AM on 9-14-2005
I call B.S. on Dylan's story.
I used to ride my mountain bike to class, and I put my 15" Powerbook in my backpack. One day, as I was riding home, I decided to try a new route. On that new route was a very steep hill that I figured I could roll up. Turns out I'm no Lance Armstrong, and I land on my back (which my powerbook is then underneath) and my bike lands on me. Somehow my Powerbook just kept on sleeping, and didn't even scratch. And here I am typing this comment on that same Mac (now 43 months old).
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Ryan said 10:29PM on 8-23-2005
A few weeks ago I was walking on the beach, listening to my iPod, when it started to rain. I put the ipod into my pocket, and stepped into a nearby hotel. This is a fancy beach hotel with a pool and a spa. It doesn't look like it's going to rain long, so I set my backpack with my stuff in a corner, and have myself a dip in the spa! It's a minute or two before I remember what's in my pocket. I jump out of the pool, rush to take it out of my pocket, and it's drenched. Just. Like. That. It doesn't work of course.
I'm wise enough not to try to turn it on, and, after looking around online for some tips, I decide to wait 10 days before I touch it. It works great! But the battery takes 24 hours to charge and lasts for less than 2. The Apple Store tests the battery, agrees it's toast, and replaces it for me in the store. I decide not to have them send it off for engraving, when they mention offhand that they'll "run a few tests to make sure its under warranty." Phew!
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