Thiền và Nghệ thuật Không Bao Giờ Từ Bỏ

Repair is a process of guessing, testing, tinkering, and hoping. And sometimes you come across a job so vexing that by the end of it, you realize your skills—and, more importantly, your confidence—have totally leveled-up.

Like iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens, my first major electronics repair was on a iBook G3. While he had the weird colorful one with the handle, I had the cool white “IceBook” version, which (with some kludges that would have made MacGyver wince) I kept going for years beyond its natural life.

The iBook Challenge

Everyone who has been repairing stuff for a while has a few favorite fixes, and this is mine. It also turned out to be something of an epic story, involving kitchen foil, audio cables hacked to be power cables, beermats, and a borrowed paint-stripping heat gun. And like any good saga, it ends with a real kicker.

My iBook, bought in 2001, ran fine until around 2006/2007, when the screen would glitch out and then die. A reboot would sometimes fix it, sometimes not. In the end, after a lot of internet research, I found that this model often had a problem with its graphics chip. Its plastic body flexed quite a bit, and the stress on the soldered joint would eventually cause the graphics chip to detach from the main board.

My first fix involved opening up the machine and shimming the chip with a piece of a card beermat, and that worked for a few months. Eventually, though, after sticking ever-thicker shims over the chip, and dealing with an ever-bigger bump in the bottom case, I decided it was time to reflow the solder.

iFixit existed at this time, recently renamed from PB Fixit. I’m not sure if it sold any tools that I could use to reflow solder like it does now, but in the end I borrowed a heat gun, the kind you use for stripping paint. The idea was that if I could heat the offending chip enough, its solder would melt and reflow back into the dry joints. The problem was, that heat wasn’t particularly controllable, and as this was my first time doing such a thing, I was kind of terrified I would end up killing the computer.

In the end I had to make four or five attempts, each a little bolder than the last, with the rest of the computer and circuit boards shielded with tinfoil, and wooden chopping boards. In a perhaps unscientific fit of inspiration, I snipped off a length of solder and timed how long it took to melt under my heat gun, and used that as a rough guide. In the end, it worked, and the computer never had a graphics glitch ever again.

The Power Kludge

But that was not the end of major repairs on this now-beloved machine. A few years later, it stopped charging reliably, and as the battery was also on its last legs, that was a problem. I narrowed it down to a broken power socket. This was pre-MagSafe, and Apple’s laptops then used a cylindrical power plug and socket.

Spares were available, but I was a poor gadget blogger and I wasn’t going to waste money on that when I could surely come up with a DIY fix. After all, I’d already beat this computer once.

iFixit Smart Soldering Iron

Great for fixing up iBooks—and anything else.

The fix was ugly, but it worked. I desoldered and removed the old power plug from inside the iBook, then I snipped a phone cable—the kind you use to connect record and CD players to hi-fi amplifiers—in half. I soldered the wires of one half of the cable to the power terminals in the iBook and used the other half to replace the plug on the charger. I wired it so that the live wire ran to the central pin of the female plug, because I’m not a monster.

This hack lost the colored orange/green status light on the original plug, but otherwise worked just fine. If having a computer with a 10cm cable permanently hanging out of a hole in its side can be considered “fine.”

Twist Ending

In the end I replaced the iBook with a MacBook or PowerBook of some kind and handed this one off to a friend’s partner, who was training as a teacher and was using an even older PC laptop. She used it for some time before she snagged the dangling cable tail one day and killed my power hack.

But this time she’d moved to another country, so I couldn’t fix it. She did what anyone would have done. She took it to the Apple Store Genius Bar, where the Genius took one look at my little Frankenbook, shook their head, and sent her on her way.

I’d like to think the genius was impressed by this thing still hobbling along after so many years, but if not, then that’s on them. That iBook was my first ever laptop, my first ever Mac, and my first ever computer that didn’t connect to a TV set with an RF cable. It’s still a special machine for me, whichever shredder or landfill it ended up in, and it taught me that while a computer is quite different to, say, a bicycle or a car engine when it comes to fixing stuff, it is still totally doable even for a relative novice.

It also introduced me to iFixit, and eventually to writing about it, and to meeting Kyle at Wired.com’s CES party in Las Vegas. But that’s another story.