Apple iBook G4 Design Flaw Proven

empaler writes "Apple has long denied service on iBook G4s whose screens went black after just over one year of use, denying that there was any error. But now, the Danish National Consumer Agency has released a report proving that the error is due to a design flaw. So far, the only news site picking this up is The Register (unless you understand Danish). The Danish Consumer Complaints Board says that Apple needs to get a grip and acknowledge this error in the rest of the world. The NCA also has some photos from the report (explanations in Danish, but easily comprehensible from context)."

It's not a bug...

It is a feature. Next thing you know people will say the Ipod Batteries dying after a year is a design flaw too.

Re:It's not a bug...

Would you be saying the same thing if this was made by Sony or MS? If Apple does something wrong then they should be called out for it. Just because it is currently trendy doesn't mean it can't have faults.

Re:It's not a bug...

Hey, did you know that when you buy a laptop in Norway, you're by law guaranteed for 5 years?

It won't cover parts that are normally considered to have a somewhat short lifespan, like batteries. But in other regards it is held to the same standard as other household items that are meant to last, like fridges, etc.

Re:It's not a bug...

Damn socialist countries with their regulations that cause market inefficiencies and lead to poorer-quality and overpriced goods and a lack of innovation...

Oh. Oh wait. This would be good for me.

Hooray Socialist Countries with thier consumer protections!

Re:It's not a bug...

It's a mixed bad, really.

Why should I be forced to pay extra for a hard drive that will last 5 years if I just need something that will last 18 months?

There is an opportunity (hidden) cost to everything; and spending the money to overbuild something for the job has almost as much or more opportunity cost.

Example: you can build a bridge that lasts 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, or even 100 years. Yes, 100 years. It is feasible. So why not build every bridge to last 100 years?

The answer is because if you build the bridge for 100 years but traffic patterns change after 10 years you've wasted the money. And in 50 years when flying cars are in use (har) you'll be really sorry you wasted all that money on the bridge to nowhere.

So -- moral of the story is that strong consumer protection laws have a specific use, but it isn't always the best possible outcome to employ them heavily.

Fix

Push that button in the upper right corner of the keyboard, the one with the circle and a vertical line -- then the screen lights up again, and you get the happy Mac face.

Da button....

Push that button in the upper right corner of the keyboard, the one with the circle and a vertical line -- then the screen lights up again, and you get the happy Mac face.

If you stare at that button for a while you will realize that the circle-and-vertical-line symbol looks a bit like a hand that is flipping you a bird. This realization becomes especially irritating right after you have just lost a significant amount of work or to a kernel panic or a crashed window manager.

It's a dry joint.

Reflow the solder. Simple.

Incidentally, with the introduction of RoHS-compliant lead-free solder, you will see this more and more. Consumer-grade lead-free is so crappy that it's almost impossible to make a single working board without at least some reflow work. Oddly enough, military- and medical-grade equipment are exempt from needing lead-free solder. Wonder why?

Re:It's a dry joint.

You don't even need to solder. Just disassemble the iBook (challenging enough!) and put some sort of filler on top of the graphics chip. I used a 3M rubber foot. Close everything up and the bottom of the case will keep the chip in place. I haven't had a problem in the 6 months I did this repair, and have continued to tote my iBook all over on my scooter.

That said, it's clearly a design defect, and should have been fixed by Apple just like the G3 iBook.

Re:It's a dry joint.

Clever solution:
http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/726/diy-obsole te-ibook-logic-board-repair [geektechnique.org]

A dry joint on thousands of units is a design flaw

Perhaps people here are not acquainted with the product engineering process.

Engineers take *every* component of a product into account during design, including the types of solder to be used and the methods of soldering to be employed.

Indeed, they may select higher quality solder in order to reduce the requirements and hence the cost of other parts, or they may specify lower quality solder in the knowledge that the rest of the components on their bill of materials can still be assembled to spec and will still work together reliably for the normal lifetime of the product.

In this particular case, either Apple engineers did not consider the effect of their design on the solder joint in question (it should probably have been a far more substantial joint), or they did not specify the right type of solder given the requirements of their design, or else the subcontractors who made the unit used a type of solder different to that specified by Apple. (In the latter case this would be an Apple testing/QA problem, since you *ALWAYS* check what your subcontractors are doing, no exception. If you value your brand name, that is.)

So whichever way you look at it, this is entirely Apple's fault. Design and/or testing engineers get paid for doing a good design and/or testing job, and in this case they haven't. Get the message to them, and they'll fix it --- engineers are always happy to fix problems, on principle.

As for Steve Jobs and Apple Customer Services .. the less said the better.

There's a problem. Get it fixed.

Re:A dry joint on thousands of units is a design f

What do you know about electronics manufacturing? 1. "Higher Quality Solder" There is no such thing as "higher quality Solder". There are two industry recognized solder alloys out there. SnPb 60/40 and SAC305. SAC305 is used on RoHS compliant assemblies, and is mandated by the EU. From the photos, it is obvious to me that this solder was SAC305. (Yes, I can tell. From the side-cuts, you can see that the solder is very grainy and dull. This is the hallmark of lead-free solders.) Again, due to the idiotic RoHS legislation, manufacturers are REQUIRED to use a lead-free alternative, among which the SAC305 is the best. (The proverbial winner of the special-Olympics.) 2. "A far more substantial joint". The solder joint in the photos EXCEEDED IPC610-D Standards for even Class 3 medical devices. This is a SURFACE MOUNT DEVICE, and as such, there is no other way that you can get a more "substantial" joint, unless you went to a TH DIP package, if it was even available, and if you could even fit it into the design. 3. "Right type of solder" See number 1. 4. So no, it is NOT entirely Apple's fault. I'd bet $100 that if this chip were removed, and a new one were installed with SnPb solder, then it would not fail. Period. But since Apple isn't allowed to use the right solder, this happened. Have you ever designed something? Can you say that you tested EVERY POSSIBLE point of failure? No, didn't think so. It's because it's impossible to do. There is a problem, and it's the knee-jerk reaction of the EU to blindly ban the one substance that has been fully responsible for allowing the computer revolution to occur. Way to go!

Re:A dry joint on thousands of units is a design f

But since Apple isn't allowed to use the right solder, this happened. Have you ever designed something? Can you say that you tested EVERY POSSIBLE point of failure?

So... an engineer is told to design a ship. He's told that the material to be used is wood, but designs it as if it were to be made of steel (because that's the right material!). The ship fails. How is it not the engineer's fault for not designing the system to the intended specifications? If the specs said that a non-lead solder was to be used, then the board should have been designed so that it would not fail with a non-lead solder.

Maybe they swapped out the solder after the design was finalized and it's not the designing engineer's fault. But you can't blame the failure on the solder (unless it was not the correct composition). It's not as if this lead-free solder is some mysterious substance. Someone, somewhere along the line, failed in the design of this system.

Re:It's a dry joint.

It's an engineering defect. Whether you look at it as a design problem or a manufacturing problem depends on the constraints (and perhaps also on your point of view). If they are constrained to use particular materials, then the design needs to be such that the system, when made of those materials, doesn't fail prematurely.

Understanding the constraints and setting specific definitions around terms like "prematurely" contribute inputs to the engineering process. In the end, if you release a product that breaks too soon, you messed something up and have a defect.

All of which is fine, if you then respond by revising either the design or the manufacturing process and fixing people's broken computers, which is not what Apple has tried to do.

Re:It's a dry joint.

In the end, if you release a product that breaks too soon, you messed something up and have a defect.

And all Macs come with a one-year warranty against manufacturing defects. Any other measure of "too soon" is just personal opinion. I expect that Apple repaired all iBooks that failed within the warranty period. Apple makes no statements on the useful life of their products beyond their warranty statement, AFAIK.

All of which is fine, if you then respond by revising either the design or the manufacturing process and fixing people's broken computers, which is not what Apple has tried to do.

Got any proof of that wild accusation? Remember, Apple contracts board manufacturing to third parties. I doubt that Apple has sit idly by and done nothing, but that doesn't mean that Apple would have been successful in anything they tried either. Sometimes technique changes (like lead-free solder) give some manufacturers headaches.

Besides, have you heard about this issue on the new MacBook or MacBook Pro systems, which have been in the market over a year now? Seems like Apple had some improvements made, then, if bad solder joints were the root cause of the iBook issues.

bah

My G3 ibook did the exact same thing, and it was also a logic board failure. Apple has had lousy QA for several years now, and as someone who actually LIKES Apple products it's extremely frustrating.

Re:bah

Yep. Same here. Late 2001 G3 iBook developed this problem after about 2 months. Over the next year it went back to Apple 3 times. It was only on the final time that the problem was actually fixed. Had they not taken care of it then, I would have been eligible for a full refund under California's lemon laws. Oh, and the second time it came back to me it had obviously been reassembled by a chimp--one screw was so loose it fell right out, the plastic clips on the case hadn't been snapped back together, and there was a nice scratch on the screen. I love using Macs, but it will be a long time before I buy another one...

That's not a design fault...

although it may be a manufacturing fault. It's a solder joint which has broken. Were these computers built with RoHS mandated lead-free solder? There is a lot of concern across the entire electronics industry that the changes required by RoHS will lead to reduced reliability.

This is ONE computer. Is this failure present on others with similar symptoms, or are their other faults modes which can cause the same problem?

Re:That's not a design fault...

It's a design flaw in that the board was allowed to flex every time the power button was pushed, leading to a broken solder joint.

The article doesn't show...

where this component is located. Comments here talk about using a C-Clamp (which is also shown in the Danish photos) as a workaround to the problem. A quick bit of searching produces this site, [coreyarnold.org] which shows that the chip is nowhere near the power button, as you claim. In fact, it appears that the power button mounted to a small, completely separate PC board, in accordance with good design practice.

Powerbooks?

About the same thing happened to my Powerbook, and it still hasn't been fixed. Apple refuses to fix it, because it was dropped about a year ago, and if there is any physical damage at all (so much as a dent), the warranty is void. Since they will only do complete and total repairs, it would cost $1200 to fix.

So, my question: Does this also happen with Powerbooks? And if so, is it something I could easily fix by cracking it open and soldering something? Any step by step instructions on how to do so?

Macs Have Problems, Too

I don't know why this seems so hard to accept. On one hand, there are some die-hard Mac people that seem to refuse to accept that Macs have problems, and refuse to accept that PC's are sometimes actually worth money.

And on the other hand, there are anti-mac people that are excited about this sort of news. That's stupid, too.

But really, the anti-MS and anti-PC and anti-Mac stuff gets really old after a while. Macs have problems, PCs have problems, MS software has problems; I have to say that with this particular instance, Apple supporters seem much more worried about admitting that there is a problem than PC supporters or MS users.

Modding something flamebait for pointing out an inconsistency in how problems with company X are accepted is... hmmm. Silly.

Translation

explanations in Danish, but easily comprehensible from context

Das machine is nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der Springengwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit Spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken by das Dummkopfen. Das rubbernecken Sightseeren keepen Hands in das Pockets, relaxen und watchen das Blinkenlights...

Thank the European Union for this. Seriously.

Disclaimer: Both myself and one of my coworkers are IPC-610D certified inspectors of electronics. For those of you who aren't in the know, IPC-610 is the industry standard that dictates how all electronics assemblies are supposed to be put together. I spend considerable time inspecting fine pitch surface mount devices. I am also the manager of the assembly department at my company, where we make class-2 commercial grade electronics.

To say that I spend a lot of time looking at soldered joints is an understatement.

So, what's the problem here?

The Danish government is just as culpable as Apple is on this one.

The solder used in this joint is obviously (to me at least) a lead-free solder. (Lead free solders are exceptionally grainy and dull in appearance compared to leaded solder that is smooth and shiny.) The switch to lead-free solders was mandated to occur last year on July 1st by the European Union. Any electronics shipping into EU member nations must comply with this new standard, which is called RoHS, or "Reduction of Hazardous Substances". (Look it up in Wikipedia.)

Due to complexities in maintaining parallel manufacturing lines, most companies simply switched to the Lead-free solder for their entire product line. (As did my company). This means that most all new electronics you by are going to have lead-free solder holding them together.

So, why is this a problem? Plasticity.
Leaded solder alloys (SnPb 60/30) are extremely ductile. This means that they will flex a considerable amount before fracture occurs. With electronics that experience heat cycles, or any kind of motion at all, this is an extremely beneficial trait to have. Lead-Free solders on the other hand (like the most common SAC305 SnAu3%Cu0.5%) are incredibly brittle. What is obviously happening here is that the heat cycling from the laptop turning on and off is stressing this solder joint, and causing the joint to fail. Had this been leaded solder, I can almost guarantee that this problem wouldn't exist.

So what does this mean? Exactly what the electronics industry has feared. The EU made a dip$#!t move. Industry experts believe that the average lifespan of an electronic device has been significantly diminished. Down to an average consumer product lifespan of 5 years. There have been early reports of serious quality problems, including SWATCH having over 10,000 watches fail within a month of shipping. You can expect to see a drastic shortening of the lifespan of your electronic goodies. This is just the beginning people. If you see a device that is labeled as RoHS compliant, do not buy it if you expect to use it for more than a few years.

Re:photos?

I got to the photos before the site got borked.borked.borked - it shows solder traces cracking after repeated flexing - huge surprise.