Tag overheating

Probably Not What Steve Jobs Has To Say

Steve Jobs is making a big public announcement today, and it’s expected that Apple will announce that they’re going to do something to fix the problem with the antenna on the iPhone 4G. Personally, I think it would be AWESOME if Apple promised to send each and every iPhone user a big ol’ roll of duct tape, but that’s probably not what’s going to happen.

Also probably not gonna happen: no official endorsement by Steverino of this awesome faux bacon carrying case for your iPhone (via bookofjoe), but I’m betting that Steve himself probably carries his duct-taped iPhone 4G in one of these beauties and shows it off to all the other bajillionaires at his Bajillionaire Club meetings.

Meanwhile, to much less fanfare…Apple has quietly announced that they are beginning a fix-or-repair program for Time Capsules purchased between February and June 2008. You will recall that there has been a well-documented problem with the hard drives inside Time Capsules overheating and failing after about 18 months of use. I’m guessing this isn’t high on Steve’s deck of Powerpoint slides today, either.

Maybe Apple Meant We Should Bury Them In Our Yards For 50 Years

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with Apple, Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register, drive failure, Mac OS, overheating, Time Capsule November 4th, 2009 @ 11:36 am

For my birthday this year, I convinced Bridget to buy me a Time Capsule network backup server. Apple had just launched the 2TB model and retailers were dumping the older 500GB model, so it was easy to find deals on the smaller ones. Charlotte and I both have Macs, so it seemed like a good way to add a painless backup solution AND the wireless access point built into the Time Capsule let me extend the signal of our home network so that I could sit in the living room and have a nice strong signal. 500 gigs isn’t as much as it used to be in terms of storage, but it’s more than enough for our backup/archival needs.

Now I’m reading that Time Capsules seem to have a disturbingly consistent lifetime limitation of about 18 months. After that length of time, apparently the hard drives wear out from overheating, and, due to Apple’s design of the device, which doesn’t really allow you to open the box and tinker around, the whole thing turns into a lovely white-plastic-and-brushed-aluminum brick. Moreover, because this happens AFTER your warranty has expired, Apple disavows any responsibility for fixing or replacing the thing. Charming.

The writer of the Guardian article has tried to get Apple to own up to the issue; consumer protection laws in the U.K. are a bit stiffer than they are here in the U.S., and there’s a case to be made that Apple does have to replace the drives in units sold there. He also notes that thermal damage is a repeated theme in Apple hardware: similar problems have affected AirPort Express nodes and at least one Mac laptop model. This Gizmodo post about the problem points to a website called The Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register, which hopes to collect enough serial numbers of bricked Time Capsules to demonstrate that Apple is deliberately ignoring the problem.

Since I have a bit to go before my Time Capsule hits that 17 month-17 day wall, I am not quite in disaster recovery mode just yet. I happen to have another 500GB external drive that I was using on my Windows PC, and once I get that cleaned up and reformatted for Mac OS, I can use it to make an archival copy of my Time Capsule drive and set it aside for that fateful day.

On The Side

Only 159 Shopping Days Left!
July 19, 2010 | 11:12 am

The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]

Anti-Social
June 14, 2010 | 11:32 am

On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]

Tag, You’re It!
April 21, 2010 | 11:43 am

In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]

Follow-up: World’s Shortest Man
March 16, 2010 | 1:49 pm

Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]

Top Ten Overdone Stories Of The Week
March 11, 2010 | 11:26 am

boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas

Observe The Snow, It Fornicates
February 23, 2010 | 1:33 pm

Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]

Follow-up: I’ll Take Menhaden
February 10, 2010 | 11:14 am

I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]

iCan’t Take Anymore
February 1, 2010 | 1:41 pm

It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]

New Year, Same Old Nonsense
January 1, 2010 | 4:31 pm

Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
December 3, 2009 | 9:58 am

This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]