My mother’s Mac mini died on Thursday. The hard disk went. It was about fifteen months old and had seen very light usage indeed. So I took it into the Apple centre i Cambridge, where they sucked their teeth and asked what size it had been. 40GB, I said. Ah, to repair that will be £211.18 + VAT You might as well buy a new one.
This is a Forty Gigabyte hard disk — something that costs around forty pounds at Dabs, and which, on a PC, I could put in myself in about ten minutes. But I have no idea if it is even possible to take apart a Mac without special tools. So they can happily charge six times the retail price just to change this thing.
At this point, my mother was keen just to buy another one and get it over with. So I said yes, and then discovered that you don’t with the new, improved Macs, get Appleworks at all. Oh no. It’s another £60 for a word processor. They told us inthe shop that we could reinstall Appleworks from the old disks. But this turned out not to be actually, how you say, true.
How the hell did this company get the reputation of being on the side of its users?
Meh. That’s about what PC World or any other shop would charge for parts and labour to replace a hard drive. I’ve seen far bigger rip-offs.
If you want to replace the HDD yourself:
http://www.gearlive.com/index.php/news/article/how_back_up_upgrade_the_mac_mini_hard_drive_05101143/
http://www.sterpin.net/uk/ddMacMiniuk.htm
(Google: mac mini hard drive replacement – took 0.41 seconds)
As for a word-processor? I’m a big LyX fan, but there’s always Nisus Writer (http://www.nisus.com/) and OpenOffice. You should be able to get AppleWorks off the old install disk, although it will probably hasn’t been ported to Universal, so it’ll have to run under Rosetta emulation mode.
Well, I couldn’t get it off the old Apple install disks. I tried, and was told that the applications could not be installed onto this machine. Nor could I find them when poking around the disk (“This is Unix. I know Unix. Let’s just run out and let the raptors kill us now, because that will be less painful.”)
I am awestruck by the detail in that Frenchman’s account of how to open up his mac. But I don’t think I dare. In any case, though it may have taken him only thirty minutes, it would take me a whole lot more.
Eek… you are not allowed to say anything against Apple. At least not right now. I’m waiting for my new Macbook to be delivered and I can’t wait. I have been using a PC notebook for the past three years and a Mac for the 12 years before that. I am sooo glad to be going back to Mac! But I really don’t want to think of expensive repairs right now. As a student, it will kill me if I have to fork out that much money on a repair. But I got the AppleCare Protection Plan just for situations like this.
“How the hell did this company get the reputation of being on the side of its users?”
The rapacity with which the mainstream media in the United States fastens its collective jaws around the horny honker of the American business class. Oh, and that “reality distortion field” that Steve Jobs supposedly gives off.
You could always bite the bullet and install Ubuntu Linux. Masses of free software and a truly humungous collection of knowledgable, enthusiastic users, including some big names formerly in the Mac camp – take a look at the Guardian’s IT blog for details.
Does everything I need to do bar video editing, and so far (touch wood) it’s been completely bombproof, and just as easy to use as a Mac.
As I said, except when I need to edit video or do something equally media-intensive, I’m not going back.
But the hard disk was broken, so there was nowhere to install it on.
Besides, the last thing I want to have to do is to teach my mother another operating system. As Unix shells go, I’ll take OS X over anything you can get on linux.
MS Office student/teacher edition is $128 from Amazon. Three installations, no upgrades, Rosetta. Sure, it’s Microsoft, but AppleWorks is pretty bad.
iWork lists for $79, and Pages is a pretty darned nice word processor. Keynote is great, and it sounds like next year we’ll get a spreadsheet.