What do people think wears out over time in a Mac?
anything with moving parts, i.e hard drive , fans, optical drive, and on the polycarbonate MacBooks, the top case seems to fall apart after a few years too.
anything with moving parts, i.e hard drive , fans, optical drive, and on the polycarbonate MacBooks, the top case seems to fall apart after a few years too.
Do these really "wear out over time" or do they just have a lower MTBF compared to electronic parts?
For instance the hard drive - I think I had one fail on me in all those years but I had others that I used for more than 10 years and they are still fine.
The hard drive doesn't wear out in the sense that it spins slower and slower over time or the read and write speeds change over time - well not in the timeframes we're talking about which would be 10 years or less.
With a hard drive one gets more of a catastrophic failure with either a bit of warning when it becomes noisy or no warning at all.
Fans I can see more of a wearing out type of component, they tend to get noisier and noisier as the bearings wear.
Optical drive is probably the least reliable item in a Mac. But again, does it wear out if used a lot or just fail. I have never had any of mine fail but then I use them very seldom.
Polycarbonate top on a MacBook - never owned one as far as I can remember but that sounds like a manufacturing defect to me. There are many things made of polycarbonate and they don't "wear out"
Glad I found this discussion.
I'm wondering about the need to out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new soon. I have a MBook, May/2007, 2.16 Intel, 1 GB 667 something-or-other MHz DDR2 SDRAM. I'm at 10.6.8, Snow Leopard. The battery bulged and I replaced it in January from BattDepot. Working just sweetly. I'm told I need way more RAM as it does sound like a lawn mower sometimes when I watch videos, YT, download torrents, etc. Also, Numbers and Pages seem to take forever to load at times.
So, I'm five years in. I keep wondering if I need the new machine or should I just spend some money from colleagues here and get more RAM, get another couple of years out of it. I do use it every day. I wouldn't say it's heavy loading. No fancy programs, watch some videos, word processing, browsing, iMovie from time to time, no real interest in massive photo catalogues.
I've received great advice here already. Just sitting on the fence, still.
/M.
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MacBook, 2.16 Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2007)
iPad2 (2011)
iPodTouch, 2nd Gen. (2008)
AppleTV2 (2010)
A bunch of white adapters and cords, too. On Tumblr
SSD + 3 GB RAM will breathe new life into that mac. It still won't run Mountain Lion, but for some that's okay.
A word of caution - My friend with a similar-era MBP recently purchased an SSD only to run into Major troubles right away. Turns out that SATAII SSDs will downclock to SATA I (which is the interface in your MB as well), but SATAIII SSDs will only downclock to SATA II.
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Steve Jobs re: iTunes on Windows: "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell"
SSD + 3 GB RAM will breathe new life into that mac. It still won't run Mountain Lion, but for some that's okay.
A word of caution - My friend with a similar-era MBP recently purchased an SSD only to run into Major troubles right away. Turns out that SATAII SSDs will downclock to SATA I (which is the interface in your MB as well), but SATAIII SSDs will only downclock to SATA II.
Yes definitely to upping the RAM but forget about using an SSD in that model MB.
I recently installed an OCZ 120GB SSD into my mid-2007 2.2GHz MBPro that has 4GB RAM and there's virtually no real useable speed increase due to the limited bus speed of such models.
As for RAM:
"Apple officially supports 2 GB of RAM, but third-parties have been "unofficially" able to upgrade it to 3 GB or 4 GB of RAM (it can hold 4 GB but cannot fully utilize the memory beyond 3 GB due to the same limitation that impacts the "Late 2006" MacBook Pro line)."
Not to knock that a newer Mac model is often desirable, if one is really needed, and Apple really wants and needs such revenue right?, but is a newer Mac really needed when I read such comments I read as the "old black Macbook is getting quite squirrelly"??
And then is the new Mac going to be used as a new virgin Mac or is any Migration Assistant or even some cloning type stuff going to be used which can lead to some "squirrelly" type stuff and the user with a new Mac ends up right back to some squirrelly OS operations?
Just a thought but I've seen the squirrelly situation with a new Mac and its OS X just too many times for some users thanks with those who figured that a newer Mac would fix ALL their Mac problems.
+1
Sounds like some basic maintenance is in order.
Nuke and pave the hard drive. Clean install latest OS. Cull un-needed apps. Put files back on a file-by-file basis. Don't "migrate" anything.
Could also be a hard drive issue.
Could save yourself $1000+.........
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"not all those who wander are lost….." j.r.r. tolkien
i think the more pertinent question is what does "getting quite squirrelly" actually mean? it's certainly not out of the question that the logic board is showing signs of failure on an older macbook.
to the op, can you describe instances of the macbook "getting quite squirrelly"?? visual glitches? do you still have the original install dvds that came with the macbook? perhaps run the apple hardware test by inserting the install dvd and restart the macbook while holding 'h' (i think it would be 'h' for your generation of macbook, although it could possibly be 'd')
My daughter is reporting that it's not staying in "sleep" mode, unless its plugged in. And then there are random shutdowns. The battery has been replaced, and one of the keys has broken. The case plastics were replaced under the Apple repair program. It has 2GB of RAM, and is running Leopard. We still have the original dvds. I'll see about running the hardware test the next time she comes home for a visit. Thanks for the suggestion.
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Chris
iMac 21.5", OS X Snow Leopard
2G iPod Touch 16 GB
Uh-oh... Seems like the Macbook could be running on it's last legs now based off your comments... Kind of ironic now that your asking about whether you should get a new Macbook for your daughter...
/ 24"Dell UltraSharp
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