Opening an iBookOuvrir un iBook

Opened up iBook

Yesterday I finally had the courage to start a thing I have been meaning to do for weeks: change the hard drive in one of the lab’s laptops. The laptop is an iBook G4, and the hard-drive died this spring, so we ordered a spare one, the only problem was installing it. While changing a hard-drive in a desktop can be done in minutes, or seconds, if you have a nice enclosure, changing the hard drive is quite different in a laptop.

In the case of the iBook G4, this implied removing the following elements:

  1. Battery
  2. Keyboard
  3. Wifi-Card
  4. Memory shield
  5. Front shell (which includes power button, trackpad and loudspeakers)
  6. Back shell
  7. Front shield
  8. Back shield
  9. AC board

All these elements are held by different screws, so I had to work with a check list and one handy box from the 100¥ shop with a lot of little compartements (visible in the right part of the photo). Interestingly, some parts were also held by magnets, which is new to me. I still managed to put back some elements in the right order, to undo part of the re-assembly twice, but lo and behold, the new hard drive works, and the iBook is now happilly installing the operating system.

I must say the level of integration you see in laptops nowadays is amazing. I remember adding an ethernet board to my Mac SE/30, the task was also very delicate, but the components themselves were huge and the internal design was much more messy. One the other hand, in the inside of the shell, you had the signatures of all the people who had designed the machine. Nowadays, I doubt there would be enought space to put all the names…

5 thoughts on “Opening an iBookOuvrir un iBook

  1. Chouette maintenant, je saurais à qui demander s’il faut réparer mon petit ordi :)

  2. Etrange que pour une fois qu’apple fasse plus complexe que la majorite des fabricants de laptop (en moyenne un tournevisse et une trape plus loin tu trouve ton HDD). Peut etre que l’envie de facturer l operation a des utilisateurs non averti et plus forte que la simplicite.

  3. Il y a une raison pour que ce post soit dans la catégorie “Rêve de Dragon” ou c’est juste un test pour voir si on suit? :)

  4. Si j’en crois un article de Macbidouille, les derniers Powermac ont un DD qui s’enlèvent d’un coup avec une languette à tirer. Gros progrès…

    À propos des signatures : il y en a qui sont visibles au microscopes dans les puces ;o)

  5. Err, visiblement j’ai fait une erreur de catégorisations.
    Ça devrait être corrigé.

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