[mac book pro gen 1 engineering] Striking While the Area to the Left of the Keyboard/Trackpad is Hot.
I’ve owned a number of first-generation Apple products in 21 years, and plan to own many more in years to come. that’s how i roll. in other words, i am extremely reckless and stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.
Assuming the MacBook Pro 17″ currently en route to my home office doesn’t burst, spray battery acid or otherwise cause third degree burns and a charred nub where my credit card-swiping hand was. For certainly the negative experience would likely not drive me away from Apple, but rather drive me towards learning to live a life devoid of thumbs.
A short list of charges:
Mac IIsi c1991 This Mac sort of just sucked. It was underpowered for its time, the internal audio was constantly failing, and was a pain to take apart, which fortunately I rarely had to do since there were few upgrade options other than RAM. It never failed completely, just failed to impress. But notably it did not throw off enough heat to blind / scorch / cook / vaporize anything. Then again, it was not on my lap while in use.
Why this Mac a “gen 1″, you ask? It was the first Mac in a sort of quasi-pizza box chassis that was neither the fx,cx/ci full-height monitorless workstation, nor the true pizzabox style of the Centrix 610 / PowerMac 6100. I think the LC (which was even crappier) was the only other model to share the form factor. I am a huge nerd.
Titanium Powerbook 15″ - c 2001 till future (on hiatus) You could hold it firmly like you’d hold a cafeteria tray, one hand on each horizontal side, and sort of twist[1] just a bit. And that was an uncomfortable feeling, followed by the other heavier, hurt-ier feeling of the battery pack dropping out the bottom of the unit like the Marine drop ship in Aliens. 24 missions, simulated. 2 combat drops, including this one. And landing on your foot. No spraying battery acid, though… at least not for me.
One night I was drunk at my friend’s house, and I opened up the TiBook shell way too quickly, instantly decapitating the monitor from its way too-weak latches back to the main body. I screamed for about a half hour straight the same way b.spears might had she just performed the same action on her child, and then I stayed medicated for a week as said friend, who was not in a state of constant panic, packaged the pieces up and sent them to some Mac experts in Cali to perform emergency surgery. I think I paid each party (friend Mike, and MacExperts) $500 for this activity.
She (Stella was, and is, her name; she was a diver but she was never down) came back from that journey (thank you brother Mike), but she just wasn’t the same. I had to treat her really gently, which meant I could no longer use the open laptop as a foot rest when sitting on a couch. When I configured the screen at certain angles, video would drop out, then I’d tweak the screen back and things were fine, but my mind’s eye was quite clear on the fact that some video signal/power cable was slowly being sawed off inside the connecting hinge. I could see the shoddy job the “experts” out west did with regards to tucking in and covering Stella’s wiry, braided lady business between the main CPU and the screen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be blind soon, so I didn’t. I just tool her into my bedroom, hooked her VGA port up to a relic (but perfectly-working) Apple Sony 21″ Flat Screen Tube. A new lease on visual life. She had a gig of RAM, she had Airport, she had 100Base-T to file servers, and she had a big brother external color screen and a willingness to fight and live. And she did not feel shame when I relegated her to bedroom media access center. I didn’t have to tell her it was mostly going to be about displaying p0rn, and she never complained. When I switched her off at night, the monitor and the tibook module went dark, and she was beautiful when she dreamed. Eventually the laptop’s screen (post-decapitation/re-union of screen and keyboard) blinked out a second time, and Stella knew she’d be running permanently through external video means from here on in. Maybe she considered it sort of like being on dialysis. Maybe more like having a colostomy bag. She didn’t complain. Then again, she was “it”, and it was a laptop. I hear the new ones are complaining, though.
For the last eight or so months I lived at that place, Stella was carefully packed up and tucked into my sock drawer level of the closet to rest. if the machine was going to participate in a miracle and start regrowing leads and synapses from motherboard to monitor, I could think of no richer, more maternal environment than to be surrounded by my sometimes sorted, always filthy, “white” gym socks that I wore with everything (formal, informal, sandals), for that was my impetuous personal style at the time.
When I moved out of that place last October, I was faced with a decision to make about Stella and her head-problem v. prolongued usefullness in another role, among a few other tech-will-she-stay-or-will-she-go issues. Stella, dead screen still attached, was light, and she didn’t take up much space. And she was strong, at 1GB RAM and 500GHz G4 processor. She could do …stuff… like search for aliens. And I watched The Deer Hunter (bittorrented) for the first time through her (driving the aforementioned 21″ outboard monitor). We weren’t giving up on the old girl — she’d come with us, be backed in a box between some summer clothing and comforters and stuff, kept soft and cozy and in a sort of suspended animation until we can do something about it… in the future, when Apple releases a product called iDoctor which is a robot that first kills all employees at the Genius Bar and then fixes, using nano-technology, your old computer… old Apple computer. So you can keep them with you, like your children. I wish Apple would hurry up. Meantime, Stella is packed in towels, in a box, in an attic. Far away. A sleeping giant.
In summary, some people probably think that drunkenly decapitating a laptop is not an Apple engineering problem per se, but they’d be wrong: it was a design flaw. Those hinges should have been the strongest part of the system, but they were the weakest[5]. Also, the thing was hotter than hell.
My blue and white G3 - 1998-2005 rip , Bucky (named for Buckminster Fuller), did not receive such a honored fate; I gutted the PCI cards (”What am I going to do with a SCSI card? We’ll address it later.”) and RAM, took an ice pick to the hard drives, and eased down the ramp into the dumpster, and had to goad two nagging guilt-driven realizations into getting close enough to each other to cancel out:
a) Bucky was too old / slow to do anything of modern worth. not to mention the jelly blue+white aesthetic was sort of so 1998. I guess it could have been a good target at a firing range (if packed with dynamite), but i don’t have the hardware and memberships/ready access to make that a practical approach.
b) to leave Bucky so gutted, but technically still usable, is like leaving a vampire on a ship at sea with no human crew, only rats to drink.[3] it was a disgrace. I loved the computer, and it got a lot done for me. I paid for it [2], it was paid for, and now this is happening: it’s on the edge of the dumpster/crusher sled, its sliding down, crash. the chassis is down there. i’m looking at the dumpster hole, and i can see the G3 chassis in there. i don’t believe it has any feelings about it’s fate, since the box doesn’t have a loaded OS or… electricity or consciousness of a soul. That doesn’t stop me from, momentarily, wondering how dirty I’d get if I jumped in the hole to retrieve it, or what it would feel like if, during said process, the crushing claw came down like something from that “Layla” montage from Goodfellas and cut me and my former computer in half. No, I just walked away. And told myself that computer served its purpose, I got the data off it i needed, destroyed that which I couldn’t, and we were done, and that next time I should buy a cheaper and less pretty computer, perhaps, so the eventual emotional issues present at system disposal aren’t so gut wrenching. Except I can’t; I’m an Apple user. This process is just going to continue and I need to grow (or find) a pair and move on.
So, to pause, my 17″ MacBook Pro is coming soon, and this is a machine that will mean some new things, good things. It means my wife Kelley will get my 17″ PowerBook (G4), which has a history of not exploding, to replace the G3 chicklet I got her (used; from friend Eric) for Xmas three years ago. This will be an appreciated step up for her, and I will find myself in the cutting-edge world of wielding this first-gen platform that can not only the operating system I need to primary productivity (OS X; duh), but any number of others that could come in handy (Windows, Linux…, VMware stuff?) to take my productivity to the stately pleasure dome of uber-productive.
It should be here this week. Given the goings on with exploding batteries and warp factors, I think I’m going to have to stop taking the Tylenol PM, start taking pictures, crack out the thermometer, and add some fact and opinion to the canon of this story: will my new MacBook Pro heat to hot-hot then orange then white-hot, warp, jump to warp speed, split and spray me with battery acid[4], like the Alien queen in Aliens?
Uh, I hope not, because I actually have work to do, and I like my eyes. Stay tuned. We’ll take this one step at a time. I’ll be posting other stories of first-gen Apple woe along the way. tbc.
[1] I’m not saying i’m doing this…
[2] I had probably just finished paying the Apple loan a week or two earlier. HOOT!
[3] It would also be like when Ripley ran into the cyborg in Alien III in the junk yard, and he’s “alive” but all messed up, so he begs her to shut him down, as that would be preferable to just sort of sitting there forever, rusting. That is an android with honor. Bishop, was he?
[4] Note: To my knowledge so far, I don’t think any Apple laptops in the new lines have actually sprayed acid or exploded. They all seem to have gotten the memo leaving that to Dell. For now. But we also know, from experience, that when the machines choose to rise up, they tend to all do so at once.
[5] This assertion is completely non-qualified, but sounds good.
The motivation behind the potential-but-snubbed question about needing the agent (rhetorical) was said agent’s (actual; horrible) behavior in our home, which called in question his legitimacy, and the method by which we knew him (via our wedding planner, P–, a conduit I know in hindsight to be highly alarming). But more pressing was the conversation at hand, which was in preparation of our cruise and not going well. I’ll paraphrase:
Forgetting about society’s good, instead focusing on my own (and my own awareness that I was not sure of the precise borderline between “annoyance” and “assault”) and that of my wife and holding onto hope of any participation in cruising the Alaskian wildes, I instead followed the nearest child around, twisting my upper body and head down towards the ground but then back up at the floor in a very Vincent d’Onofrio-in-Law-and-Order-Criminal-Intent sort of move that said, “You know, I’m trying to make eye contact with you, and I’m willing to sort of look like a jerk doing it. But then again, you father never gave you much attention, did he? Hm? And his attention was really all you ever wanted, right? The basketball team, the football team, scholarships, you did it all for him, and he wouldn’t even look at you. Am I right?” After five minutes of such badgering one orphan, particularly small and noisome, with a goggly eye, got the message, but she was unfortunately on the other side of the giant luggage carousel room watching me do this to one of her cohorts who was not getting it. Finally googleye finished up with whoever she was doing, came over, relieved her clearly-in-training colleague, and told us to grab our bags and exit via Door 0 aaaaaaallllllllllllllll the way down at the other end of the building. There would be signs for Eurasian Cruises and busses and more instructions and it would all be completely obvious. [
On the death march to Door 0 we passed car rental stands and exits into the misty Seattle morning air and also a man sitting at what appeared to be some sort of legitimate airport pamphlet/materials kiosk that he had erected a large !!!IMPEACH CHENEY!!! sign atop. The woman and I passed and we were asked, “Excuse me, but are you interested,” and I was only slightly upset with myself that I allowed him to get that far before muttering “f**k off” his way. Kelley knew where we were going, because Door 0 was the exact same door she had taken a week or two earlier to engage a charter bus she’d arranged for a work trip out here. Her confidence bolstered mine, as otherwise I would be convinced that Door 0 was some real-world manifestation of a portal from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, a one-dimensional gateway that had one side here in SEATAC airport, the other on a beach covered with lobstrosities, or a wood filled with warewolves, or the hard granite at the middle of some Mid-World mountain (had the door been already wound down). We found Door 0 and went through it, and what awaited us was only 20-30% copied from the diary of a madman. [
First, we were now outside, walking along a curb that ran for perhaps the length of a football field, with a sporadic bus or two to the left, and many airline check-in-ish counters to the right. There must have been some relationship between the busses and the counters, but it was not apparent at a glance, and it wasn’t exactly clear what we should do, anyway, leading to: Second, there were more Les Miserables “working” for the cruise industry, squalid and having received few dental checkups recently, except now numbered in what seemed like dozens, in waves, holding up signs indicating what outside. I had to assume they had been kidnapped from all over the world and impressed into indentured servitude doing… whatever they were supposed to be doing. I’m reluctant to be too hard on these child-slaves, since they were, I’m sure, in fact slaves, which means their wages were draconian, the levels of training they received were undoubtedly sub-standard, and were malnourished to boot. It could be the only explanation why here, as inside, many of them seemed to be propping themselves up by the signs they should have been holding high for all to see, acting as rallying points and offering guidance to weary and confused travelers. The whole system would have worked better if the kids had been outfitted with sandwich boards, so that way they could just sort of set down and take a nap whenever and wherever they wanted, and some sort of internal sandwich board-to-slave kid cantilevered harness would support their weight, but at least the go***mn board would still be propped upright, supporting itself, and nominally functioning. Best of all, perhaps make robots to do this job, and grind up the kids for robot fuel.
After a brief respite back by Door 0, where there were chairs to sit on instead of curbs and the edges of planters, we moved back out around launch-time to find “bus 4″. It’s hopefully not too late to point out that the mean age of the non-identured labor portion of the crowd (our fellow guests) is somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand years old. This is not a surprise to people who have cruised, I’m sure; nor should be a surprise to anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of “cruise”. The problem was that it was a group of people that had no idea what the hell was going on around them, and seemed (perhaps due to their advanced age, and a certain sort of jadedness that descends later on in life) largely unconcerned, at that moment, with the location of bus 4. Maybe they figured that whenever a bus pulled up, they would swarm on it like fireants screaming BUS 4! BUS 4? MAAAAT-LOOOCCK!, until they seized their bloody satisfaction. Many of their ranks would be crushed in the process, but they were legion. Ultimately, I realized, everything must be put in its proper perspective: most of these passengers had probably survived cancer(s), or the loss of their spouse or everyone else around them, or lost all their retirement savings in the DotCom crash or Enron, or were beaten by their children/nurses/postmen, so practically speaking not knowing precisely where bus 4 was, or would be when it got here, was not a high priority issue. It would more than likely take care of itself. 
When the next bus pulled up, the apple-mummy was not there to intercept and engage it; she was still busy with bus 1-2-3. The kindly busdriver man, even he was seventy-ish, waddled down the steps, and I tried my luck. “Are you, uh, bus 4? To pier 66?” “I don’t know. I’m whatever bus the line tells me.” Several others right next to me by the bus door tried the exact same set of passwords (bus. 4. 66.) and were similarly denied access. Looking at apple-woman, doing a little jump like a kid who needs to pee. Eventually she senses it and comes over, declaring the bus “4″. One little victory. Kelley and I are the first on, pushing aside several oldies to secure access. We could finally sit, and relax, escape velocity from airport at last achieved. It’s a shame I wasn’t there to free indentured children-guide slaves that day, because I suspect (and I know this is crazy) that I am in some ways the savior they imagine in their stories told around the fires in the airport parking lot at night when they settle in. They will be set free… on the great day that a page is added to our cruise tour book describing, in few words, to get one’s baggage at the carousel, go to Door 0, walk down the line until you see your cruise desk, check in, give them your bags, and get a ticket to wait for the bus. Damn straight. [
Emotional detachment from the subject matter would have served Singer well in this case, for we are left with a bloaty, sentimental Superman-as-the Baby Jebus passion play begging the obvious question but failing to answer it: “Why wasn’t Christopher Reeves brought back in to play the man of steel?”
Glaciers are frozen rivers, apparently. I didn’t know that until I was rowing a canoe up to one named “Davidson” last week, and our tour guide, a peppy thirty-something semi-leatherwoman who can do something about it now-if-she-hurries, named S-, told us. When I got home, where Internet access does not cost $1.25 a minute, I went to Wikipedia to confirm this. [
This topic, seminal alternative rock band [the] 
And one last thing: according to something I read in Spin, guitarist Joey Santiago agreed to name the band Pixies without knowing what the word meant, but just because the word had an “x” in it and looked cool. When he found out later it was ‘a supernatural being in folklore and children’s stories, typically portrayed as a small homunculus, with pointed ears and a pointed had and featuring a mischievous demeanor’, he was allegedly disappointed, but I don’t see why. [
