15 ms·
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
- nsmog767 2y agonot the Flux Capacitor?!?!
- shiroiushi 2y agoApple should be required to do a recall for these motherboards.
- wetpaws 2y agoFor 1993 hardware?
- toast0 2y agoIf they do a recall, it will say they should be discarded. Sony has a recall on all its trinitron tvs made before the end of 1990 like this: https://www.sony.jp/products/overseas/contents/support/information/notice_100610_en.html https://www.sony.jp/products/overseas/contents/support/infor...
- shiroiushi 2y agoThis shouldn't be allowed at all: if the product was bad all along, they should be required to fix it, and shouldn't be able to say "well, it's old, so you should just trash it", which means they don't suffer any penalty whatsoever.
- duskwuff 2y agoI don't think that's a reasonable expectation in general, and certainly not in this case. The affected TVs were all at least 20 years old - that's well beyond the expected useful lifespan of even a modern TV, let alone an older model like these. Nor is it clear what Sony could reasonably have done to repair them; even by 2010, a lot of the parts used in CRT TVs were out of production and unavailable.
- shiroiushi 2y agoMaybe you're too young to remember, but people used to keep TVs for much longer periods before HDTV and flat panels came out. Also, these TVs are apparently fire hazards. It doesn't matter that they're 20 years old (at the point of the "recall" in 2010). I doubt the parts necessary to fix them were out of production; you can get parts for truly ancient electronics still. Things like capacitors don't become obsolete. The recall doesn't specify exactly which component is problematic, but says it's age-related, which usually points to capacitors.
- tobr 2y agoThis. I’ve known a TV that was in more or less daily use for over 30 years. Not sure why we stopped expecting that from electronics.
- eru 2y agoBecause electronics got so much better so much faster, that the vast majority of customers did not want to use old hardware. Especially if customers allowing shorter lifetimes allowed companies to lower the prices.
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThere are many use cases for which a decade-old computer is still perfectly serviceable and even where they aren't, those computers can be repurposed for the ones that are. Moreover, we're talking about televisions and old Macs. TVs with higher resolutions might come out, but lower resolution ones continue to be sold new (implying demand exists at some price), and then why should anybody want to replace a functioning old TV with a newer one of the same resolution? Much older computers continue to be used because they run software that newer computers can't without emulation (which often introduces bugs) or have older physical interfaces compatible with other and often extremely expensive older hardware. If people actually wanted to replace their hardware instead of fixing it then they'd not be complaining about the inability to fix it.
- tengbretson 2y agoMy radial arm saw ended up getting a product recall for simply being too difficult for the average consumer to use safely. The "recall" amounted to them sending you instructions to cut off a critical power cord and mail it in to them, and they send you a $50 check.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoThat is completely unreasonable. Companies can't be expected to take in and repair devices that old.
- Throw8394045 2y agoThey don't do recalls even on modern hardware. But soldering hacks are no longer possible, all parts are serialized. Louis Rossmann made many videos on this.
- shiroiushi 2y agoWhat are you talking about? Capacitor technology hasn't changed substantially in decades, and it's just as possible to change caps with a soldering iron now as it was 20 years ago. I have no idea what you mean by "serialized".
- fragmede 2y agonot capacitors, but more advanced components, like the camera, have serial numbers embedded in them, and the serial number needs to match, otherwise it won't accept the component. Components off a stolen device are put on a list and won't work in admirer another phone, so stolen phones aren't even worth anything for parts, driving down the market for stolen phones. It also makes the job of repair shops harder, which is collateral damage in Apple's eyes, but is very much material for anyone running a repair shop.
- pkolaczk 2y agoDoesn’t Apple offer a way to re-pair components if they are genuine and not stolen (unregistered from the previous AppleId)?
- fragmede 2y agoand Apple will very happily charge you for that privilege
- jajko 2y agoTBH for such a critical piece of our modern lives, I would be more than fine to pay extra to be 100% sure I am getting original parts, put in professionally and in secure manner re my personal data. I wish ie Samsung had such service where I live. We anyway talk about expensive premium phones to start with, so relatively expensive after-warranty service is not shocking. This may actually eventually sway me into apple camp. This and what seems like much better theft discouragement.
- codewiz 2y agoCommodore had 3 capacitors mounted backwards on the A3640, the CPU board of the Amiga 4000 with 68040 processors: https://youtu.be/zhUpcBpJUzg?si=j6UFmIJzoC-UDS6u&t=945 https://youtu.be/zhUpcBpJUzg?si=j6UFmIJzoC-UDS6u&t=945 Also mentioned here: https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a3640 https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a3640
- bogantech 2y agoClassic Commodore Quality :P They also had backwards caps on the CD32 and A4000
- krige 2y agoCommodore just kept doing this. Just listing shoddy craftsmanship would take forever, and then we get to intentional bad decisions, like giving the A1200 a power supply that's both defective (capacitors ofc) and barely enough to support the basic configuration with no expansions, which is extra funny because PSUs used with weaker models (A500) had greater output...
- b112 2y agoThe number of used a500 power supplies I sold to customers when I upgraded their a1200 with a GVP 030 board + RAM...
- kstrauser 2y agoThis was the hardware patch I had to install to use a CyberstormPPC: https://powerup.amigaworld.de/index.php?lang=en&page=29 https://powerup.amigaworld.de/index.php?lang=en&page=29
- rwmj 2y agoZX Spectrum +2 shipped with transistors backwards: https://www.bitwrangler.uk/2022/07/23/zx-spectrum-2-video-fix-recap/ https://www.bitwrangler.uk/2022/07/23/zx-spectrum-2-video-fi... This even caused visible artifacts on the display, which was apparently not enough for the problem to be noticed at the factory.
- ethbr1 2y agoWell, today I learned to install one capacitor in reverse orientation on the PCB on a 34 year old computer... Definitely starting Wednesday off productively.
- xeyownt 2y agoAt least you made my Wednesday ;-)
- phire 2y agoI actually have an LC III in storage, so I might actually be able to make use of this article. I think this will allow me to classify today as productive.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoYeah, I have a Performa 450, which I believe is the exact same computer sold under a different name. So this is definitely important to know. I can go back to bed now, my job for today is done.
- grujicd 2y agoWell, until today I didn't even know capacitor can have orientation! So more productive Wednesday than yours. In entry level electronics class I had decades ago it was always treated as a component that works the same way no matter in which direction the current flows.
- fredoralive 2y agoThere are polarised and unpolarised capacitors. Stuff like basic decoupling capacitors tend to be unpolarised.
- Filligree 2y agoCeramic capacitors don't have polarity. Electrolytic ones do. Thing is, electrolytic capacitors have far higher capacitance for their size -- though also higher resistance. It's something to check, but the polar ones should be clearly marked as such.
- rasz 2y agoCommodore struggled with same mistakes on negative rail in Audio section, but also somehow on highend expensive CPU board. https://wiki.console5.com/wiki/Amiga_CD32 https://wiki.console5.com/wiki/Amiga_CD32 C408 C811 "original may be installed backwards! Verify orientation against cap map" A4000 https://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=1438 https://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=1438 C443 C433 "notice that the 2 capacitors that originally on A4000 have the wrong polarity" Much worse is Commodore A3640 68040 CPU board aimed at top of the line A3000 and A4000 http://amiga.serveftp.net/A3640_capacitor.html http://amiga.serveftp.net/A3640_capacitor.html https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=73570.0 https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=73570.0 C105 C106 C107 silkscreen wrong, early revisions build according to bad silkscreen.
- fredoralive 2y agoTypical Amiga fanboyism and Apple envy, if a Mac does something they have to prove the Amiga outdid it. “Only one model with a reverse polarity capacitor? With Commodore it was a systematic issue!”
- bogantech 2y ago> Typical Amiga fanboyism and Apple envy, if a Mac does something they have to prove the Amiga outdid it. I think we're envious that Apple did a better job of engineering their systems
- hettygreen 2y agoThey were probably expecting these to fail a few months after the warranty expired.
- omoikane 2y agoI wonder if there were any bootleg boards that copied the silkscreen mistake, but didn't use those 16V capacitors, and ended up catching fire.
- PeterStuer 2y agoIn the mid 80's I was the head of the CS student chapter. We ran the computer rooms for the science faculty. We had a room with about 20 Mac 128k. I do not know where Apple sourced their capacitors from, but these were not A-tier. A Mac going up in a puff of white smoke was a weekly occurrence. We had a few in reserve just to cycle them in while they were out to Apple for repair. P.S. still my favorite Mac of all time was the IIcx. That one coupled with the 'full page display' was a dream.
- fredoralive 2y agoWith things like the Mac 128k, reliability issues may partly be down to Steve Job’s dislike of cooling fans.
- m463 2y agoTo be honest, cooling fans never get the attention they deserve and end up whiney or buzzy. That said, apple did a really good job with mac pro cooling fans where the shroud spun with the blades. I think it did better than the the best PC cooling fans like noctua.
- Melatonic 2y agoI always built PCs with the largest diameter fans possible - not sure why so many things come with tiny fans. Loads more airflow with less noise and even if they do spin up fast the noise they make is much more pleasant.
- MBCook 2y agoI was just thinking of the Apple III the other day. If I remember, jobs had them not include a cooling fan. As it would heat up and cool down the chips in the motherboard would work their way out of the socket. So one of the official solutions to try if you were having issues would be to drop it a couple of inches to try and get the chips to re-seat inside. Crazy.
- yetihehe 2y agoOn the other side, we had intern at our (very small) company and he used his own mac. One time he had to debug a mains-powered device. He decided that he will try connecting it to both mains AND programming dongle without separating transformer. He fried the dongle (it literally exploded, plastic lid banging on desk in sudddenly silent office is the most memorable thing), the company provided monitor and device, but somehow his private mac mini survived all this while being in the middle.
- Animats 2y agoDoes the -5V rail do anything other than power old RS-232 ports?
- zargon 2y agoMacs have RS-422 ports, not RS-232. But, no.
- ethernot 2y agoThere are so many cases of this sort of stuff it's unreal. But it gets even stupider. I found one a few years back when I repaired a linear power supply. This required me to reverse engineer it first because there was no service manual. I buzzed the whole thing out and found out that one of the electrolytic capacitors had both legs connected to ground. They must have shipped thousands of power supplies with that error in it and no one even noticed.
- iknowstuff 2y agoName and shame!
- ethernot 2y agoVoltcraft. Can't remember the model number.
- chrisdhoover 2y agoWay back when a co worker was powering up a fire alarm control panel. Poof, capacitor popped and damaged his eye
- jcims 2y agoI have a 3D printer where presumably a smoothing cap just fell off the X axis controller section of the mainboard. Didn't make a lick of difference in anything operationally. Still works great.
- robomartin 2y agoIt could be there to control emissions. You’d need to analyze the circuit to determine its purpose.
- jcims 2y agoVery possible! I actually have a 100MHz scope and sdrs that tune from 9khz to 2ghz, could be an interesting distraction on the weekend to see if that axis is any noisier than the others.
- andrew-jack 2y ago[flagged]
- likeabatterycar 2y agoThe author seems to misunderstand PCB design flow. This is neither a "factory component placement issue" nor a silkscreen error. The error is in the schematic. The layout CAD is often done by a different team that follows the schematic provided by design engineering. Automated workflows are common. The silk screen is predefined in a QA'd library. It is not their job to double check engineering's schematic. The components are placed per the layout data. Both those teams did their jobs correctly, to incorrect specifications. In fact, the factory performing assembly often is denied access to the schematic as it is sensitive IP. If you're going to cast blame on a 30 year old computer, at least direct it at the correct group. It wasn't soldered incorrectly at the factory. They soldered it exactly how they were told to - backwards.
- rcxdude 2y ago>The layout CAD is often done by a different team that follows the schematic provided by design engineering. Just as a note, this is a fairly archaic way of working nowadays. At my place schematic design and layout go hand-in-hand, and we rejected a candidate because he didn't do the latter. The main reason is layout is no longer an afterthought, it's a key part of the electrical design of the system, and there's little room for a tedious back and forth between the circuit designer and the person doing the layout about what traces are and aren't important to optimize for various attributes.
- jimnotgym 2y agoAnd yet it is not at all unusual for a production engineer to spot these faults and pass them back to the design engineers for rework.
- rcxdude 2y agoAlso true! Most common when you accidentally screw up a footprint and it doesn't fit the part on the BOM. A backwards part is the kind of thing they're not likely to pick up on (if it's marked on the silkscreen incorrectly, at least), but some do.
- 2y ago
- lmpdev 2y agoI have my childhood LC II in storage I wonder if it has the same defect
- fishgoesblub 2y agoIf anything you should open it up to check for any leaking batteries/capacitors.
- magic_smoke_ee 2y agoFrom around 2011-2015, I sometimes talked to an ex-Navy electrical tech who said he was also an early Apple rework tech in the SF Bay Area. He had no shortage of work fixing manufacturing problems, adding rework improvements, and building custom test equipment until they laid him off, outsourced his job to some random country, and then he was homeless until around 2016.
- johnklos 2y agoIt's a good thing that these machines don't even need -5 volts. With just the positive voltages provided, RS-422 still works, including LocalTalk. I think the -5 volts is only there in case an expansion card needs it.
- upofadown 2y agoI did a bit of research on this because I was confused about why RS-422 needed -5V. Normally the driver is powered off +5 and 0 Volts for RS-422. By increasing the swing down to -5, the Mac port is compatible with RS-232. So a Mac of this era can connect to a modem with a specially wired cable. No level conversion is required and RS-422 receivers are required to work down to -6V so the Mac is producing completely valid RS-422 at the same time. Most RS-232 receivers of that era had a fair amount of gain with a transition point close to 0V. So only a little minus voltage would be required in practice, not the entire -5V. So just as long as the reversed capacitor was not entirely shorting out the rail things would have worked.
- johnklos 2y agoI've wondered how my machines have worked without negative voltages, and this helps. Thanks! These days, a charge pump device costs just a few dollars from Ali-express, so even though things work fine this way for many things, it wouldn't hurt to make them work for most if not all things. When a replacement power supply does provide negative voltage, I try to use it, even if it does mean adapting -12 volts, which is what most ATX power supplies provide, to -5 volts, which is what, it seems, many 68030 Macs want. Funny - I just did an ATX power supply for a Quadra 630, and it seems that most of the 68040 machines were using -12 volts instead of -5 volts (except the Quadra 605, which happened to use the same form factor and power supply as the LC / LC II / LC III).
- Waterluvian 2y agoI spent my mid childhood on an LCIII. One summer my friend brought his Performa over and we tried to play 1v1 Warcraft 2 over the serial port. LocalTalk or something alike? But it just never quite worked right. I remember how frustrated and confused my older brother was. The computers would sometimes see each other but would drop off so easily. Was this that?!
- sgerenser 2y agoIirc Warcraft 2 came out well after the LCIII was obsolete (in fact, I’d be surprised if it was ever released for 68k Macs). Official system requirements list PowerPC and MacOS 7.6 as minimum required[1]. Maybe thinking of a different game? [1] https://www.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/warcraft_ii_tides_of_darkness___system_requirements https://www.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/warcraft_ii_tides_...
- Waterluvian 2y agoWe tried both WC1 and 2. Played both to death. WC2 worked mostly well but just kind of slower game speed. In fact I got Diablo running on the LC3. A level took like 10 mins to load and it ran at 1fps though. :)
- kalleboo 2y agoThose requirements have to be from the expansion or something, I played a lot of WarCraft II on my 25 MHz '040 Centris 660AV back in the day (we also had a family Performa 5200 so my house was the only place my friends could play multiplayer networked WC2) You can just about make out "68040" in the requirements on the box art here https://images-worker.bonanzastatic.com/afu/images/7569/5203/SL500_AB280.jpg https://images-worker.bonanzastatic.com/afu/images/7569/5203... Edit: found a photo of the expansion system requirements, also lists 68040 as supported https://cdn.mobygames.com/covers/4056502-warcraft-ii-beyond-the-dark-portal-dos-other.jpg https://cdn.mobygames.com/covers/4056502-warcraft-ii-beyond-...
- etrautmann 2y agoThe first board I ever designed and had manufactured had a reversed tantalum capacitor on the power rails and exploded somewhat dramatically when powered up. Lesson learned!
- baybal2 2y ago[dead]
- robomartin 2y agoBrings back memories… About 30 years ago I designed my first PCB with frequencies in the GHz range. It was full of challenging transmission line paths with frequencies in the hundreds of MHz and above. I am still proud of the fact that all of the high speed signals worked as designed, with excellent signal and power integrity (the large FPGA was challenging). Emissions passed as well. I did, however, screw up one thing: DC I somehow managed to layout the DC input connector backwards! These boards were very expensive ($2K), so an immediate respin was not possible. I had to design a set of contacts to be able to flip the connector upside-down and make the electrons go in the right way. The joke from that point forward was that I was great at multi-GHz designs but should not be trusted with DC circuits.
- mhardcastle 2y agoWhy include that capacitor at all if it doesn't matter whether it works?
- rwmj 2y agoIf you look at the traces you can see the capacitor is right next to the power connector, on the -5V rail (which is not used for much, only for the RS422 serial port). The capacitor will be there to smooth the power supply when the machine is just switched on, or there's a sudden load which causes the voltage to "dip" above -5V. Basically it's like a tiny rechargable battery which sits fully charged most of the time, but can supplement the power on demand. So you can see why it probably didn't matter that this capacitor didn't work: It's only needed for rare occasions. RS-422 is a differential form of RS-232 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-422 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-422) so being differential it's fairly robust against changes in load if they affect both wires. And the worst that can happen is you lose a few characters from your external modem. In addition, electrolytics can probably work when reversed like this, at least a little bit. It's not exactly optimal and they might catch fire(!).
- phire 2y ago> It's only needed for rare occasions. The two RS-422 ports are actually used quite often on these old Macs for printers, modems and apple talk networking. It was the only communication port, as there was no parallel port. They were backwards compatible with RS-232. So it obviously worked well enough. The backwards cap was measured to reduce the voltage to about -2.4v. I suspect that all it did was reduce the maximum range, which started at a massive 1,200 meters for RS-422 (and a good 10m for RS-232)
- _whiteCaps_ 2y agoAlso known as the Madman Muntz theory of Engineering :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
- qingcharles 2y ago
- foft 2y agoIt is not just Apple that did this, for example here is an equivalent from Atari: https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1698 https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=1698
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoAnyone else a veteran of the Great Capacitor Plague? Seen more than one fire in the server room due to bad capacitors. "Burning-in" your server became literal.
- yborg 2y agoI have a Quadra 700 of this vintage that hasn't been powered up in 25+ years. Kind of wanted to fire it up again to experience the glory of A/UX one more time, but sounds like I'd have to replace all the lytics :/
- chefandy 2y agoWhat’s the liquid in the old capacitors? PCBs? (as in polychlorinated biphenyls… that abbreviation collision always annoyed me.) I think I know exactly enough about electronics to ask more annoying questions than someone who doesn’t know anything at all.
- syncsynchalt 2y ago"Wet" capacitors contain any number of liquid electrolytes. Could be something tame like ethylene glycol, boric acid, sulfuric acid, or nastier stuff like organic solvents (DMF or DMA which are poisonous, or GBL which is less lethal). Nothing as bad as PCBs as far as I'm aware.
- chefandy 2y agoCool, thanks. I think I should learn how these components actually work. Individually they seem pretty simple.
- mike50 2y agoPCBs were only used in oil capacitors and some transformers. Generally these were used in motor and grid power applications. The only consumer applications are some motor capacitors and florescent light ballasts.
- chefandy 2y agoYeah I pretty much grew up (unknowingly) playing in an illegal unmarked chemical waste dump so it takes a lot to get my attention, but I opened up an old fluorescent desk lamp from the 60s I had that fried itself to see if it was fixable — and found a small piece of crumbly asbestos shielding about the size of a business card stuck to a big leaky ballast. Pretty solid toxic waste combo. City hazmat got a sweet vintage lamp that day, sadly.
- 65a 2y agoElectrolytics are usually nothing too fancy, but it is proprietary. Water and electrolytes, hence the name. PCBs are in the big transformers and what used to be called bathtub caps which looked like this https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VjwAAOSwfGJjYtHx/s-l400.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VjwAAOSwfGJjYtHx/s-l400.jpg (think 1950s electronics stuff)
- mikewarot 2y agoI've found a ground lug in a Kilowatt Grounded Grid amplifier... that didn't ground the grid. I found a bad solder joint that looked ok, but was intermittent, and had been that way, in a Television built in 1948 and used for decades. Bad design and assembly goes back forever, as near as I can tell.
- alain94040 2y agoSounds like the person who designed the board followed a very simple and wise rule: always connect the negative side to the ground. Can't go wrong with that... until you have to deal with negative voltage (-5V). Another out of bounds bug.
- PcChip 2y agoDidn’t this also happen on some Asus motherboards a couple years ago?
- Karliss 2y agoThat one was Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero ~2years ago.
- namibj 2y agoSorry to hijack the thread, I couldn't directly reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42092845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42092845 . The reason to not (just) use optical flow is that it isn't absolute. If you pattern your surface correctly, you can ensure that every few by few pixel region on a QR code like bitmaps surface is unique, and thus can be decoded into an absolute position. Basically a 2D absolute optical encoder fast enough to be part of a motor control loop.
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhat apple era are those machines? is this before or after Jobs shafted the engineering department on the sale and Woz had to give them bonus to keep them on the factory?
- sroussey 2y agoI have an original Mac that no longer turns on. I bet there is a capacitor to replace. This is giving me the energy to go look for it!
- MBCook 2y agoThere’s a very good chance the battery has leaked and caused quite a mess. Well capacitors are a problem the battery is the biggest one.
- weinzierl 2y ago"The capacitor might not have been doing its job properly if it was installed backwards, but it didn’t seem to really be hurting anything." This is the buried lede! I am of the opinion that half of the capacitors in any modern circuit are useless; the trouble is we don't know which half.
- rasz 2y agoThis guy knew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz > He often carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he thought that one of his employees was "overengineering" a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer "Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in" and walk away.[14] Techmoan recently did a video "The story of the 4-Track Cart" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqoglkbe9sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqoglkbe9sc covering most of Muntz life. On a serious note this is a terrible practice and nowadays wont pass any EMC certification.
- rcxdude 2y agoYou can still do it, you just need to do it in the EMC test chamber :P
- moring 2y agoWhy is the pool of goo under C21 when it is C22 that is flipped?
- Bric3d 2y agoIt leaked when they removed them, it's a common issue with these capacitors and part of why people replace them.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoThe best way to remove any aluminum SMD cap is to grab it with needle nose pliers, press it down into the PCB, and begin twisting them a under moderate pressure while alternating direction until they break away from the PCB. Never pull up!