Repair costs.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

For a machine with a minimum life expectancy of 5 years, and maybe as much as 7-10 years, repair costs are a significant consideration. Well made computers are like cars – it makes much more economic sense to fix them when they fail after a few years than it does to replace. So many car owners will sell a car after, say, the alternator fails at 100,000 miles. They get the part replaced and the new owner has his depreciation paid for and a new alternator into the bargain. Major component failures can then be expected to occur every few years with the average repair/replacement cost being perhaps $500/year. Far, far cheaper than a new car whose value drops 20% the moment you drive it off the lot. That’s a lot of alternators.

Thus it is with computers. While few would argue that it makes any sense to fix a piece of junk like a Dell or HP – indeed, it makes even less sense to buy one in the first place unless your car of choice is the Yugo – things are significantly different with the MacPro and even with the G5 PPC PowerMac which preceded it, in a case of very similar design. These machines are made to last and their high degree of modularity makes replacement of worn parts exceptionally easy and low risk.

Once again, buy the Service Manual referenced in yesterday’s column. It’s $5 for heaven’s sake.

So what parts, absent accidental damage (you drop the Mac Pro on your foot and you spend 6 months in traction; repair of your computer is the last thing on your mind) are most likely to fail and what do new replacements cost?

First up is the power supply. This 980 watt behemoth is not going to blow out on you unless you do heavy-duty video rendering day in and day out in a poorly ventilated space.

The Mac Pro’s power supply.

This runs $290 – just Google the part number. Don’t buy used or refurbished – that’s a false economy.

The other moving, wear parts are the five fans, two of which are in the CPU heat sinks:

The three other fans in the Mac Pro.

Compared to $10 Hackintosh fans, these are not cheap but, then again, they rarely fail.

The front processor cage fan runs $45, the rear processor cage fan runs $38 and the PCIe (case) fan can be had for $59.

The CPU fans are buried in the heat sinks – CPU A costs $148 for fan and heat sink and CPU B is $258.

That’s all for the moving parts.

What’s the worst that can happen? You somehow manage to fry the backplane board (motherboard) or processor board. Those will set you back $344 and another $400.

Unless you are very unlucky, I would doubt that five year repair costs for parts unique to the Mac Pro will be significant. All other parts like hard drives and so on are no different from those found elsewhere and easily found and replaced.