Mac Specs

[richmond62]

Just came across this and thought it might be useful:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs
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Apple-Documentation-Website.jpg (73 KiB) Viewed 2132 times

[overclockedmind]

Before I went here, I made a bet with myself that the Service Manuals wouldn't be accessible.

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I was not wrong.

[richmond62]

Looking up my 2015 Retina iMac I was seriously disappointed as the only info seemed to be stuff that was already widely available elsewhere.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Might be better off looking for info from community sources if you need to crack open a Mac. A good YouTube how-to might warn you about insane cabling setup inside before you attempt it. Apple is not interested in helping DIY-repair people these days, and they no longer design 'pro-sumer' things that are upgradable in meaningful ways.

[tperry2x]

You sound a bit like me as far as Macs go, Paul

[overclockedmind]

This is why they lost me, essentially... present-day(ish) I bought a few second-hand Apple-things to see what "more modern Apple" was like.

They had me in the mid-90s, as my favorite teacher had kept every MacUser and MacWorld mag he had ever gotten via subscription, and I got lost in the (obviously one-sided) lore, and every Andy Ihnatko (sp? I haven't typed his name in literal decades) article I could find.

They started losing me the second that, as an ACMT, I was on my "quick pass" through the service manual only to find after several iterations of iMac, they had designed one that, upon lifting the display panel, would kill a ribbon cable attachment (the cable, the display, mainboard or whatever) due to a huge warning not to do as I had been doing with the several previous, identical-looking iMacs I'd worked on (it was at least three hardware iterations without this, but I seem to remember it was more.)

In Appleville, always RTFM.

If it had been for some purpose, or there had been reasoning behind it that boiled down to "we had to do it that way" purely from a logistical perspective, I would have been all right with it.

... I was not all right with it.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

This is why they lost me, essentially... present-day(ish) I bought a few second-hand Apple-things to see what "more modern Apple" was like.

They had me in the mid-90s, as my favorite teacher had kept every MacUser and MacWorld mag he had ever gotten via subscription, and I got lost in the (obviously one-sided) lore, and every Andy Ihnatko (sp? I haven't typed his name in literal decades) article I could find.

They started losing me the second that, as an ACMT, I was on my "quick pass" through the service manual only to find after several iterations of iMac, they had designed one that, upon lifting the display panel, would kill a ribbon cable attachment (the cable, the display, mainboard or whatever) due to a huge warning not to do as I had been doing with the several previous, identical-looking iMacs I'd worked on (it was at least three hardware iterations without this, but I seem to remember it was more.)

In Appleville, always RTFM.

If it had been for some purpose, or there had been reasoning behind it that boiled down to "we had to do it that way" purely from a logistical perspective, I would have been all right with it.

... I was not all right with it.

Exactly, there's no need for that sort of nonsense in a utilitarian desktop device. It was completely subjective bending to what Steve Jobs found appealing, which was a 70s-SciF-esque, minimalistic, thin , curvy, few lines, no wires sort of thing (the way the the home interior in the classic SciFi movie Rollerball)... cool design style imo, but not if it comes at the expensive of being able to keep the thing running or upgrade it easily.
Give me the Mac with 12 ram freakin' ram slots, 6PCI slots, 5.25" bays, in a heavy-ass steel frame, of my trusty PowerMac 9600, lol!

Now for mobile devices it is a bit more understandable from the design constants, but that doesn't make tissue paper thin ribbon cable excusable. I have a whole pile of Nintendo DS 2DS 3DS parts from failed attempts at repairing those things, the second you get the outer shell off, those damn ribbons rip, like if you even breath on them, lol.

[overclockedmind]

Exactly.

I'm done.

I have a Debian Bookworm install with XFCE and like, 2000 packages.

It'd be less, but I wanted to get SeaMonkey and I couldn't find it. Maybe it's a case of "hunt down the .deb"

I can cross-migrate to Xubuntu any time I want. But with 64-bit Debian 12, do I want?

Answer? No.

So here we are.