Much cheaper than a new computer…

Herbert Gramsch
Dogern, Germany

So if you want a long-term reliable Mac you really need to go for a PowerBook, (MacBook Pro). For an iBook ( or MacBook) six years is actually a pretty good run.

I now am using a 14″ iBook G4 from 2004, and last night I got the OTHER problem! I’m going to try to solder the joints tonight, but I solemnly vow that I will NEVER purchase an apple computer again. For this kind of unreliability and poor engineering, I’d rather pay half for a cheap-o PC!

All of the following is just my personal opinion: I admire Apple, and own a bunch of Apple stock. But it is not a perfect company. And they demonstrated that with their remarkably crass and destruction decision to kill the installed base of iBook G4s, with conscious intent. A decision they continue to support. It was and is nothing less than a criminal act, I’m very sorry to say, and they’re rather lucky they haven’t had to pay too badly for it.

iBook G4s die because Apple elected to kill them rather than allow their fans to make noise. They knew all the iBook G4s would succumb quite early in their lives due to very high internal temperatures. And those temperatures were quite literally trivially easy to manage properly. But they faced a problem: The fan is noisy. They didn’t want waves of fan noise complaints, or to be known as a company that made a laptop with a noisy fan. Maybe they wanted a longer battery life specification too, who knows.

So they elected to set the internal temperatures so high that the fan would almost never run, even though they were well aware that all the iBook G4s would die early in their service lives because of that decision. And that’s what they did. It was a conscious decision. It cost many people the price of their iBook G4s. Any in many cases their data too, if they didn’t back up regularly. And they continue to support that decision today – the latest Mac OS still sets the iBook G4 internal temperature so high that the fan will almost never engage, so the laptop literally cooks itself to death.

Sooooo. You can fix your iBook G4. But you must also purchase and install G4FanControl, by Andrea Fabrizi, at http://www.AndreaFabrizi.it. It’s about $8 last I looked. It’s trivial to install, and to use. Set your three internal temperatures to 40, 39, and 42 °C respectively. In my opinion. You can set them anywhere you want. You could even set them rather high to minimize your fan noise, as Apple did, in which case your repaired iBook G4 will die quickly again. I strongly recommend that you set them to 40, 39, and 42 °C respectively. As Apple should have (and still could, and absolutely should, with an absolutely trivial Mac OS 10 correction).

You must also repair whatever internal hardware died due to the blast furnace temperatures Apple set for the iBook G4. Any of a number of things could have failed. But the power converter IC’s solder joints seem to generally succumb first, followed by ball grid array solder joints and the hard drive.

If the hard drive is dead, it’s a goner, so replace it. Here’s a page which illustrates how to disassemble the iBook G4 so you can perform internal repairs. It focuses on hard drive replacement, but access to the hard drive will of course also provide access to circuit board components such as the especially vulnerable power converter IC: http://www.FAQintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/ibook/g4hd/

Even if the solder joints on the power converter IC aren’t dead yet, they are almost certainly compromised. So resolder them.

I use the wonderful 331 type organic flux based solder for the re-soldering job, plus lots of extra organic flux brushed into the work. Then I thoroughly wash the circuit board when all my work is complete. The Kester 331 type organic flux is highly conductive and corrosive, and must be completely washed away. Fortunately, it’s also fully water soluble. And it’s the only flux that makes true precision soldering work possible.

I scrap away all the solder mask from all the copper associated with pins 1, 2, 19, and 20, then add a lot of solder – as much as I can flow onto all the available copper – to create heat escape paths and heat dissipation surfaces. I also dress the overlying flat cable away from the IC, so it no longer thermally insulates it. And I add a strip of heavy copper foil to the top of the IC which overhangs substantially to the side opposite the battery, to provide another heat dissipation path.

It takes surgical skill and devotion to do a thoroughly good job. (And that’s just not possible without organic flux, no matter how skilled and precise you are.) But the reward is a genuinely reliable repair.

In my case, both of my two iBook G4’s needed the power converter resoldering job, the first, which is under my fingers now, because the joints had failed outright, and the second because they were in the process of failing. The first also required a hard drive replacement – it now sports a 160 GB drive from Applied Times (http://Times.Applied-net.jp/), a local consumer electronics store here in Miyazaki, Nihon.

But the second iBook G4 has a more sinister problem, possibly a ball grid array solder joint failure under one of the large ICs. Possibly the G4 processor, or the big IC next to it (maybe the GPU, I don’t recall now). That iBook G4 remains disassembled, awaiting further attention back home in Oregon. Maybe I’ll ship the motherboard to Superior Reball and Rework which Simon described in his 6 March 2009 post above – that looks like a very good way to resolve the problem.

But the first one, under my fingers now, running at 40, 39, and 42 °C respectively, has been rock solid – it runs like a champ, and I have full confidence in its reliability. The fan is noisy. But that doesn’t seem to bother me – I’ve just grown accustomed to it.

When the iBook G4’s fan is run rationally, it’s a terrific system (but unusually difficult to open for service). But when its fan is run as the Mac OS instructs, it’s a very short lived toaster oven. Which is extremely wasteful. And stupid. And sad…

If for whatever reason any of you prefer to sell your iBook G4 rather than repair it, I might be interested. Maybe… If so, please flag me at Bruce at my domain AirplaneHome.com.

Regards, Bruce

I have a second iBook G4 that freezes after 10 mins or so from cold. When I reboot a few times it doesn’t make it past the ‘blue screen’ freeze. Do you think the solution I tried on the other iBook would work on this or is it a differnt chip problem altogether.

Thanks in advance for your response and thanks loads for taking the time to post this info which has helped so many, including me.