The last Mac we are buying for now.

The base spec Mini (1 year warranty) with an HP L1750 17″ monitor (3 year warranty) ran $800 delivered, including a Firewire 400 to 800 cable to allow restoration of all data and applications from the Firewire backup drive always connected to the machine. The latest Mini only has an FW 800 port, in addition to 5 USB sockets.

The Mac Fry

We have named this machine the Mac Fry as the previous one fried, I own McDonald’s stock (they make great fries) and we fully expect this one to fry in due course.

The Mini removes one significant heat source from the box – the LCD display – but then appears to compound heat management issues by cramming what’s left into an impossibly small cuboid. Still, you get the choice of a reasonably priced matte LCD of your choice, something unavailable from Apple whose LCDs are either overpriced (both 24″ and 30″ models) or come in glossy only (24″).

Because our FW back-up is fully bootable, you simply connect it to the Mini with the FW cable and it thinks it’s seeing another Mac, meaning you can use Migration Assistant to move data, applications and settings over fairly seamlessly. MA will promptly tell you that there is just one minute remaining for your migration to finish, which it will continue to do for the next hour. This error has been there as long as I can remember. I mean, how difficult is it to program the fifth grade arithmetic that has it that you divide bytes/minute by bytes of data to get time remaining and reflect the result in the progress bar? Bottom line is that this computer is barely out of its box and I’m already wondering what other basic errors have been made in its engineering. Well, there are plenty, if you read on. 

The base spec of the Mini is positively cheap. Only 1mB of RAM and a small 120gB HDD. I have a 160 gB notebook 2.5″ SATA HDD lying around (yes, from a dumpster MacBook we recycled a while back) and will swap for that as, at 90+ gB, the Mini is a little too full for comfort. First I have to order another 1 gB of RAM (all of $10 though Apple will charge you many times that) and the Mini will hold up to 4 gB (2 x 2). A total of 2 gB is fine for just about anything, including Lightroom. The other specs are fine – the machine has Firewire and a Core2Duo 2 gHz CPU and the allegedly better nVidia 9400M GPU.

The Mini sports that awful mini-DVI video port with a non captive plug, and comes with a Mini-DVI to DVI adapter, which is just what the HP display requires. Just don’t move the Mini about too much because this adapter is just waiting to fall off. There’s Mr. Jobs’s ‘form over function’ obsession again – in a rear panel connector, for heaven’s sake. Did someone beat this guy for untidiness when he was a kid or something?

So let’s get to the big issue – heat.

Heat killed the 20″ late-2006 iMac and took my late-2006 24″ iMac to death’s door, whence I just saved it.

Bottom line is that the GPUs in these, once cooked, start to deteriorate slowly thereafter, with growth of screen artifacts and more frequent beachballs, until the whole thing gives up the ghost.

Well, at least the Mini is separate from the screen but everything is crammed into the tightest imaginable space and, as the saying goes, “Trust, once lost, is seldom regained”. And Apple hardware, simply stated, has lost my trust.

So after Migration Assistant had done its thing, and after I refused to upgrade Leopard to 10.5.8 (better the devil you know – 10.5.6), I immediately checked iStat, Temperature Monitor and Fan Control to see what the heat story was.

Well, as Pete Townshend once put it, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”.

It runs too hot.

Here are the readings after the Migration Assistant process – one which is mostly CPU- and HDD-intensive. Meaning no GPU labor was involved.

Now while this Mini has yet to fry, these readings are higher than those at which the 20″ iMac would show artifacts – although it had probably fried by then. As you can see, Apple continues to insist on running the (single) cooling fan in the box at ~1,000rpm, despite these elevated temperatures. Now I’m beginning to think like a conspiracy theorist ….

A second with Fan Control and the minimum fan speed was increased to 2,200 rpm (it remains inaudible) and a few minutes later here were the readings:

By running the fan up before frying I’m hoping to nip the issue in the bud this time. Most devotees of Fan Control, like me, come to it after the patient has already passed the point of no return. Anyway, for an additional 15-20F cooling, I would rather buy a new fan in a year at $50 than a new Mac for $600 and, I can assure you, the latter is not an option.

Here’s a heat trend graph for the three hottest sensors (there are several others) – the immediate drop at the start reflecting the increase in fan speed from 1,000 to 2,200 rpm:

The blip after the early drop reflects the use of iPhoto to download and process holiday snaps, so you can see that GPU use immediately raises CPU (Northbridge) and Airport card (Wireless) temperatures; the Airport card must be close to the CPU in the box as, obviously, no wireless effort was required to process pictures downloaded using a wired card reader. Another piece of down right execrable engineering by Apple. Having a fragile wireless card act as a de facto heat sink will not put the designer in the pantheon of great engineers.

I am reminded of the multiple Airport card failures my ante-pre-penultimate (for you lawyer schmucks reading this who despise clear English – ‘third from last’ for those of you with a spine and morals) MacBook suffered. Now I’m beginning to understand why, thanks to Temperature Monitor.

Temperature Monitor does not report a separate GPU heat sensor so, if that is right, I assume that the GPU and CPU are integrated (much in the same way as the older Intel GMA950/3100 was integrated with the Core2Duo in earlier MacBooks). So GPU heat is a proxy for CPU heat and vice versa. To cut to the chase, you can treat the ‘Northbridge’ temperature as being identical to the GPU temperature.

Any comments that I am running components at sub-optimal temperatures will be treated with the respect accorded all trash. Save your time and forget it. Cooler is always better.

Now I have the exciting prospect of cracking the Mini’s case to look forward to, so that I can install the additional RAM and bigger HDD. Oh! joy. You can read all about that here where, in addition to adding RAM and installing a larger hard drive, I also present the results of real world import and export timings and temperatures using RAW files from my Panasonic G1 and Lightroom 2.

And I have a jumble of cables to hide while I’m at it.

A nerdy note on video RAM:

The nVidia 9400M GPU used in the Mini does not have video RAM of its own. Rather, it ‘borrows’ RAM from the CPU’s RAM, probably explaining the occasional slowness I have noted with just 1 gB of CPU RAM installed. By the time OS X and the 9400m have taken their chunks, not a lot is left for applications.

The default ‘borrow’ is limited to 128mB. I have read that the 9400m can ‘borrow’ up to to 256mB of video RAM which it can do if the Mini is maxed out to 4gB of CPU RAM. Wikipedia says that once you have 2gB or more of system RAM, the GPU RAM increases from the base 128mB to 256mB. Nice! The relevance of this is that more video RAM generally means faster image rendering in applications like Lightroom. Either way, increasing minimum system RAM from the stock 1gB makes sense. The 1gB in our Mini is reported as occupying one of the two RAM slots by System Profiler, so adding another 1gB ($12) or 2gB ($45!) is sensible. You need a putty knife to crack the case and thereafter adding the RAM is trivial. The whole thing can be done in 20 minutes.

Adding a bigger HDD is harder. I address that and provide some performance and temperature measurements here.

There are fine videos on the web illustrating both tasks.

Theories abound.

One thing I learned early on in my years in America is that the country has a marked taste for conspiracy theories.

While the average Briton, Frenchman or German will write off government bungling as so much incompetence by the least able in society who could not get a real job, the American will, likely as not, take you aside and whisper in your ear “It’s a conspiracy, you know”. I have learned that the best course of action in these cases is to nod wisely, claim other commitments and exit stage left.

As it is, I have yet to meet one conspiracy theorist who is remotely successful. Many of these fellows, and they are almost always men for some reason, seem to be suffering from PTSD and probably spend their spare time making crank calls to right wing radio talk shows. They are, after all, the only ones who can get past the censor who screens the calls.

You know the types. “Castro killed JFK”, “We never landed on the Moon”, “Exxon controls the world”, etc., etc. Nuts. In a world where everyone lusts for their moment of fame, loves to talk and craves publicity, not one of these conspiracy loons has managed to explain how the secret of each conspiracy has been kept by so many for so long, undiscovered. It does not solve.

My point is that my email box filled with conspiracy theories based on my recent awful experience of having not one but two 30 month old iMacs die. “Designed to fail”, “Forced replacement policy”, “Jobs needs coin for a new liver/heart/spleen” – you get the idea. And Elvis lives. Right.

The realities are, I’m afraid, far less likely to sell newspapers. Lee Harvey Oswald was a sharpshooter with awesome scores, Neil Armstrong brought back some moon rocks and there’s a reflecting mirror on the moon from which we bounce laser beams testifying to his arrival, and Exxon controls under 2% of the world’s crude. As for Jobs, he owns 7% of Disney so I doubt he will have to wait too long for that new organ or have any difficulty scraping up the cash.

Elvis, however, is almost certainly alive.

So why do Macs, at least the ones I have owned, fail early and often? It’s not like I’m a careless teenager burning them up with moronic computer games. The common thread has been heat. After the cool running G4 iMac and our equally cool running G4 iBook, both 7 years old, and both still in daily service with nary a problem between them, everything since has failed. My first MacBook had graphics issues. The second one got so warm that toasted nuts (like the guys making those crank calls) were the order of the day, then after two Airport cards made no difference to the intermittent wifi, was finally replaced at no charge by Apple (after I had wasted countless hours on getting it fixed). The G5 iMac was sold after nascent heat issues showed up and the story of the 20″ and 24″ late-2006 iMacs is documented all too well here. The second Airport Extreme router I owned doubled as a frying pan for which honor it competed with the AppleTV. All gone.

The reality, I suspect, is as mundane as the simple fact that the modern Mac is poorly designed to manage heat. The emphasis is all about looks and so long as it works in the warranty period, who cares? Like modern cars.

Take a peek inside an Apple store – beautiful design, rows of glossy screens screaming ‘buy me’, chic iPhones waiting to convince you that you are not just another overfed American who hasn’t seen his privates in years – if there is a conspiracy here it’s an obvious one. It’s called short term profit.

The slim and trim Apple Geniuses waiting to favor you with reverse condescension while they make $10 an hour. The soft sell of implied superiority. It’s the very best of American marketing. When did you ever read one of those sycophantic, advertiser supported ‘independent Mac magazines’ survey users of 2-3 year old machines for their experiences? In their advertiser supported hell of ‘free hardware and write nice about us or we will can you’ nothing ever breaks. Be nice or El Jobso will fix you good.

An even worse problem for a growth company with public stock like Apple is what I call the ‘hamster treadmill’ problem. Keep running faster or you fall off. Every quarter’s results have to beat understated expectations and promise yet greater numbers a quarter hence. Once day the whole thing will come crashing down like a pile of cards but, until then, we make hay.

No? Well there were 20 companies in the Dow in 1896 when the index was started. Only one survives today – GE. And it was kicked out not once but twice early in the twentieth century when it soiled the sheets. Nothing is forever.

And if you don’t believe that, I’m from GM and I have just the car for you. Why, it does 230 mpg!

So I’m not all that mad at Apple for making crappy hardware. But I would like to get even! As that bumper sticker I saw on a Fiat in NYC years ago reminds me “You breaka ma car, I smasha ya face”.

The first iMac we bought, and the last reliable one*

* Hint: It’s the one in the middle.

At least let’s be grateful for OS X. This photographer most certainly is. Apple got the Unix code free from Ma Bell and stole the graphics interface and mouse from Xerox who were too dumb to know what they had. How’s that for a conspiracy theory? And it remains the one part of the Mac ecosystem which just works to this day.

One way of determining reliability.

How many times have you read words like this?

“Oh! gee, they just replaced everything, no questions asked, in my dead Mac. AppleCare rocks – everyone should have it”.

How about “Why the hell did it blow after 15 months and why should I have to pay another 20-30% on top of the price of an already premium priced product? And what about my time and data and productivity lost during the repair period? Shouldn’t Apple be paying me?”

Welcome to AppleCare.

I addressed the extended warranty business back in 2008 explaining why, for most reliable devices like cameras and TVs, the cost of an extended warranty would accomplish but two things. Rob the buyer and enrich the seller.

A warranty is nothing other than an insurance contract, so its pricing reflects three things:

• The likelihood of failure of the warranted item
• The cost of parts, labor and shipping to repair
• The required profit margin

Now it’s hard to put a price on the parts and labor component but if, as a first approximation, we assume that the ratio of that cost to the selling price of the item is constant over a large population (some Macs need a costly new screen, some a screw or two – it averages out) then what is left is the profit margin – assumed constant – and the likelihood of failure, which is an unknown variable.

So if you buy those assumptions, simply looking at the ratio of warranty cost to selling price gives you a metric which indicates the likelihood of failure – the unknown variable.

How do these data stack up for AppleCare which extends the new item’s 12 month warranty by an additional 24 months?

Using the lowest selling price of each item (except for the iPhone where the much more popular 3GS model has been used), the ratio of AppleCare cost:selling price is as follows in rising order:

• Mac Pro – 10%
• iMac – 14%
• Apple TV – 21%
• MacMini – 25%
• MacBook – 25%
• MacBookPro – 29%
• iPhone 3GS – a whopping 35%

These are troubling statistics from which I glean the following:

• The Mac Pro is dead reliable (can you say ‘proper cooling’?)
• Only a fool buys an iPhone with or without warranty
• Now I’m really worried about having bought that MacMini to replace the FriedMac
• The MacBookPro is a real dog
• By Apple’s reliability standards, the iMac is one of the most reliable products they make. This is no consolation.

Another great reason for building your own Hackintosh – check the build list. No single part costs more than $100 with the exception of the exotic $250 Core 2 Quad CPU – how many properly cooled CPUs have you known to fail? All the parts come with a one year warranty and all cost less than one AppleCare insurance policy …. so when they fail in month 13, you throw them out and buy a newer, better replacement. For $100. And you don’t have to ship the whole 50lb megillah back to Mr. Jobs for repair. What’s not to like?

But you have to give it to the merchant huckster in charge. He gets to look the good guy (“AppleCare looks after you, no questions asked” – no need to ask at those margins), charges you up the kazoo and makes huge profits on the insurance business in the process.

The 20″ iMac is no more.

I have long known that one of the key dictates of being a smart investor is knowing when to cut your losses. I now know that the same applies to iMacs. It also makes sense, like with investing, to have alternatives. Read on.

The garbage awaiting collection

The repair place said they couldn’t fix the logic board from the 20″ iMac so I removed the remaining components and trashed the case, beautifully drilled as it was. A $2,000 machine dead after 30 months. Please, no cracks about buying AppleCare. When you pay a 100% premium for a machine, you should not be required to pay another 10% for insurance.

The 24″ iMac with its new graphics card is up and running so stay tuned for developments and some measurements of temperatures.

Meanwhile, I have bought a Mac Mini and an HP display. We will reuse the Apple keyboard and mouse. The display at least comes with a 3 year warranty and at $580 the Mini with a 12 month warranty is a whole lot less than a new motherboard for the dead iMac with a 3 month warranty. After selling off the bits my Mac ‘investment’ will come down maybe $200.

As we all know, the white iMacs were replaced by the aluminum-bodied ones with the ghastly glossy screens and purportedly improved graphics. So you thought the cooling problems would have been fixed by now, huh? Oh! I forget – what problems? At least, that’s Apple’s line.

Well, here’s an ad from yesterday’s Craigslist which I chanced upon when listing the components removed from the dead iMac:

It just works fries.

Not all is bad, however. One day my 24″ iMac will die and be uneconomical to repair. In my techie phase I learned some interesting things. Macs use industry standard components. They come in lovely cases. They are poorly heat engineered. They are overpriced. They are cheaper to build yourself.

Clearly, buying another iMac is out of the question. With its core audience of photographers and movie makers abandoned, and with quality control having fallen off a cliff, all that remains is the pretty looks and the high price tag. My primary reason for switching to Macs a decade ago was the software. Constantly rebooting the fraud that is Windows was getting old and OS X delivered – and continues to deliver – in spades. Rare reboots, no spam, maybe three kernel panics in ten years. That’s why I use Macs.

And, by the way, our first iMac, the lovely ‘screen on a stick’ design, remains perfectly operational to this day. Not a statistically meaningful sample, but, for this user, a meaningful fact. Too slow for heavy Lightroom work, but great for surfing and email use.

So my next desktop Mac will have the following specifications:

• 3.8 gHz Intel Quad Core CPU (Yes, 3.8)
• nVidia 9800 GT GPU with on board cooling fan and 512mB of video memory ($100 compared to $260 to replace the nVidia 7600 in my 24″ iMac)
• 700 watt power supply with dedicated fan
• ‘Superdrive’ DVD burner/reader
• 8gB of DDR3 system RAM
• Sound insulated heavy steel case with three 120mm fans
• 8 USB, 3 FW400, 2 FW800 and Dual DVI connections
• 1 terabyte HDD

Cost? $1,012 including $62 for delivery. Assembly time – 2 to 3 hours.

Number of cooling fans? 5.

Maximum temperature of any key component? 90F.

All parts easily user upgradeable at low cost as technologies improve.

And no, you cannot get it from Apple whose MacPro starts at $2,500 and which will be left in the dust by this machine. The nearest comparable Mac Pro configuration would run you $3,350, or more than three times as much. So much for all that nonsense about ‘you pay more but you get more’. And as for the ‘server quality hard disk’ in the machine (Jobs’s words, not mine) it’s nothing more than a bottom-of-the-line POS Western Digital, unlike the better quality one shown here.

Can you spell ‘Hackintosh‘?

Don’t get mad. Get even.

Here’s the build list, in case you are skeptical:

Hackintosh build list

The Intel CPU is easily and safely overclocked to run at 3.8gHz if that is your thing. Trivial to do. Every component is as good or better than its counterpart in the MacPro at a fraction of the cost. And you don’t get the single electronic part that Apple actually designed in its computers – the mother board. The one that fries. My seven year old, now a recognized Lego expert, could probably assemble the bits in an hour …. and at $5/hr, half the payroll rate of the alleged Apple ‘Genius’.

You can add a screen of your choice, but don’t waste money on the dated Apple 30″ Cinema Display (made by LG, by the way). Get the newer technology from HP, model LP3065 at $1,180 with HDCP support, and save another $720 while you are at it – why, that almost pays for the other hardware. (The Mac Display is $1,800 but you are hosed down an additional $100 for Apple Care to equal the HP’s 3 year warranty). The HP includes on site service. Nice, as you can be sure Steve Jobs ain’t coming by to fix your Apple Display when it blows. And as for the OS, use the goddamned disks that came with that iMac in the garbage. You paid for them.

The 24″ comes to life

Here are the ‘after’ and ‘before’ System Profiler screen shots reflecting the change to the new GPU card:

So while they appear almost identical physically (see yesterday’s piece), there’s no denying the doubled video RAM in the new card.

Diagnostic comments will have to await an extended test period, but the spinning beachballs are gone, for now, and performance in Lightroom 2.4 is exemplary. For example, in full screen mode, holding the right arrow key on the keyboard depressed has 150 images zip by the screen (these are 1:1 previews) in 5 seconds. Faster than the eye can make sense of. A promising start.

And yes, a lot of heat can be felt pouring out of all those holes I drilled. No surprise there.

Further, this is confirmation that owners of 24″ iMacs with the Nvidia 7300 GPU can upgrade to the improved Nvidia 7600 variant without any system issues. The 7600 was available in Apple’s premium machine as a Built To Order model (meaning Apple’s costs went up 50 cents and yours went up $500) which, at least in the US, seems to have included a faster CPU as well, the Intel 2.33gHz Core2Duo. As I have discussed before, for photographers CPU speed is not a major consideration. It’s the graphics, stupid.

What I did not realize when I wrote that earlier piece is just how heat challenged Apple’s poor engineering is. Those of you who like to waste your time and make schmuck class action lawyers rich can start a suit to recover your $4 in damages from Apple two years hence. Me? I’ll be taking pictures and, hopefully, still processing them on my 24″ white iMac. You know, the last one with a matte screen.

True cost of doing this:

“Ah!, Thomas”, I hear you lament,” you are a moron when it comes to economics. You are clearly clueless about opportunity cost – what your time and trouble cost because you could have been doing other things rather than messing with your iMac to make it run”.

Well, let’s look at the alternatives.

1 – Buy a new iMac. Let’s put aside the fact that you can’t get one with a matte screen. Base 24″ iMac with 2.66ghz C2D and (overheating) Nvidia 9400 GPU – $1,500. Scrap value of your old iMac – $400. Net cost – $1100. Time to order, unpack and install, including moving all your data over – 4 hours at, say, $100. Satisfaction quotient – “This is the last Mac I will ever buy; after that it’s back to crappy PCs and the horrors of Windows.” Total cost – $1,500.

2 – Send your old iMac for repair to Apple. Repair $950. Shipping + materials $100. Time to pack and unpack – 1 hour. Satisfaction quotient – Disgusted. Plus what do you do during the month your iMac is out for repair and it still runs too hot when you get it back, if it runs, that is? Total cost – $1,150.

3 – Repair it yourself. New GPU $260. Tools – $50. Time to gut and reassemble – 3 hours. Time to drill holes and install mesh – 3 hours. Time to read manual and prepare – 1 hour. Given that you can hire a laborer to work in your garden at $20/hr rather than doing it yourself while you repair the iMac, you just saved $560 (7 x $(100-20)) in time value. Time to read my blog – sheer joy and free; you are going to do that anyway so it’s not an opportunity cost. Satisfaction quotient – enormous. Total cost – $450.

Hey, seems that I do get it after all. Why, maybe I’ll buy that blown one from you for $400 and fix it up as a back-up? Drop me a line if it’s for sale.