Apple to replace DODGY hard drives that go BELLY UP in 27-inch iMac Apple has kicked off a replacement program for faulty hard drives in some of its 27-inch iMac computers. Cupertino confirmed on Friday that an unknown number of systems sold between December 2012 and September 2013 were affected by the flaw. It said: "Apple has determined that a very small number of 3TB hard drives used in 27 …
Yes AlReg could have just copy pasted from other sites...
"commenters on the MacRumors forum believe some of the model's HDDs came from a batch of faulty drives Seagate released sometime ago. In fact, Apple has conducted similar programs in the past to replace 1TB Seagate drives."
Apple begrudgingly complying with consumer law.
You sell products with fault components, you have responsibility for the whole. This isn't a generous corporate gesture - this is a basic consumer right.
That this has taken 2 years to be effected shows just how much Apple values its' customers (stupidity/brand following)
Apple begrudgingly complying with consumer law.
You sell products with fault components, you have responsibility for the whole. This isn't a generous corporate gesture - this is a basic consumer right.
I cannot see any signs that this is begrudgingly or that there has been any reporting of Apple claiming this to be a generous offer. Apple has found a statistically significant component failure (which can take some time to emerge, those specific Seagate drives didn't fail immediately, just much earlier than they should have), and has issues a recall to address this as that is more efficient and better for the users than waiting for other users to suffer drive failure.
If anyone should have issued a recall quicker and more publicly it is Seagate - they are the ones who seem to have had a quality issues with one specific batch and these drives have also gone into other products. But that would not have allowed you to grouse about Apple, of course, so that was worth ignoring :)
Hmmm... it seems that whatever issue has spilled over from their enterprise drives to the consumer class as well. We've had to replace (actually the manufactures of the storage arrays we own) over 2,000 of these in total.
Just watch out for the court proceedings.. I'm sure they are coming. Those 450 FC drives are around ~$1,200 a piece. Do the math.
Meant 450.. not 40. Yes, new ones from the oem can still run that much. The size and new technology (SAS) has pushed their cost up as well. Keep in mind buying from Newegg, amazon etc isn't supported under maintenance agreements and while I agree it's ludacris the vendors still had no choice but to fess up LONG before apple did. Granted, a single consumer's drive isn't a multi-petabye array but I beleive we all know with all if the social media madness it won't take long for word to spread.
I just wish companies would be honest and stop treating this like it's any different than a recall on a car. True, a hard drive isn't as important as say brakes but I think you get the point.
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If you knew anything about Apple, you would know that they don't fail, they have conditions or issues. From the Apple Staff Training Manual: Did your computer crash? No, it "stops responding." Never say crash.
What if some Apple software has a bug? Wrong: there's an "issue," "condition," or simply "situation."
You don't "eliminate" a problem—you "reduce" it.
No Apple products are hot—at most they're "warm."
Reminds me of when we saw a lot of HD failures in the old Apple SE/30 from Sony 40MB drives (but they werent new at the time). Apparently the bearings dried out and slowed the disk down so that it couldnt read the MBR. Replaced tens of them in our little Mac support company at the time. If you turned the SE/30 upside down, it put the pressure on the other bearing and you could get it to boot, and copy the data off to an external SCSI before replacing the disk.
It wasn't so much a problem with the bearings, but it was the bearing lubricant that conjealed over time.
The trick we used to use was to remove the drive, put it into an external SCSI housing, power it on and then give it quick slap. It almost always spun up on the first attempt. Once running they were fine and you could recover the data no problem.
At the time we had an SE/30 using one of these drives running as a fileserver. It was made clear to everybody in the firm that powering this machine off would be a sackable offence.
It seems funny that I feel I could achieve more with 40MB back then than I feel I can do with 1TB these days.
Reminds me of the 10MB drive I got with my used "it's really good deal" es-Radio Shack Point of Sale terminal TRS-2000. It was sometimes necessary to hold the drive enclosure and twist it around its drive axis to get the thing to start turning. Apparently, some had caught fire, and Tandy designers had to insert a current limiting resistor in series with the motor to reduce the power-on surge . Since a stopped motor has no back EMF and needs more current to start ...
I gave the Model 2000 to my mother to replace a TRS-80 Model 4, and its proprietary monitor was broken during a move, but she'd been canny enough to insure everything, and as there WERE no replacements available, she got $400 to replace the monitor -- when the whole setup had cost me $50.
Good old days, etc. When I later worked for Tandy R&D I heard a lot of stories, and one was about R&D staff frantically adding jumpers to get the initial 2000's on the shelves in time.
http://www.cchaven.com/T2000.HTML
"Apple begrudgingly complying with consumer law."
In the USA, "consumer rights" means one year manufacturer's warranty. In the EU, "consumer rights" means about two years. And companies, who also occassionally buy computers, are not consumers and not protectect by consumer law. <br><br>
Fact is that most likely not very many of the affected customers are protected by consumer law. They are covered by the fact that lots of computers breaking down after two years means lots of unhappy customers, and given the choice between fixing the problem and having lots of unhappy customers, fixing the problem is the better choice for Apple's business.
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