Today was my first experience with Apple's support division. I bought an Intel Mac Mini a little over a month ago and have been having a problem with it. The issue is that it would randomly hang at boot before POSTing. The power light would come on solid, but it wouldn't display anything, it wouldn't make the CD-ROM drive chirp quietly, and it wouldn't even make its startup chime. It would do this persistently if powered off by holding down the power button for six seconds and powering it on within a minute. The hang would also affect sleep, where one could put the machine to sleep in OS X and come back to find it in the same sort of hung state with no video and the power light on solid. The problem gets worse with OS X configured to automatically put the machine to sleep. This problem would occur on maybe three out of five boot attempts.
Anyway, I took it in and must have consumed 45 minutes of the poor guy's time just trying to get the machine to fail. When I first tried to reproduce the problem, it booted reliably more than ten times in a row. Argh!! Anyway, the guy was patient and eventually the problem started occurring as frequently as it did at home. Then he suspected that the software I had installed was causing problems. I had installed their firmware update, Boot Camp, and used Boot Camp to repartition the disk and install Linux alongside OS X. Boot Camp is a beta product that they don't support, at least not yet, so we did a clean install of OS X and lo and behold, it's still possible to get the machine to hang.
Apple is going to replace the logic board under warranty. They don't have parts at the retail store I took it to so it will take a week. Case closed for now. I walked out having traded my Mac Mini for a piece of paper.
While I was trying to convince the guy that it really was broken, he managed to fix issues for three other people, including dead iPods, corrupt filesystems, etc.. The guy wouldn't even bring up warranties until after diagnosing a problem as a hardware problem. This guy, and probably Apple's service divison as a whole really seem to take care of their customers and I'm quite impressed.
Aside from all of this, the Mac Mini is quite an impressive piece of hardware. It has cutting edge Pentium-M "Yonah", i945GM, and ICH7 silicon from Intel, two SODIMM sockets, a Marvell gigabit ethernet chip, a CSR BlueCore4 Bluetooth HCI, Atheros wifi, and a 2.5" Serial ATA hard drive. The integrated Intel video is less than impressive though. All of it is generally compatible with Linux using various open-source drivers, although due to how new the hardware is, some drivers are still in their infancy and have bugs.
The major Linux problems I have with it are:
- Suspend-to-RAM doesn't work, it seems to get stuck before successfully powering down. Hopefully this is related to my Mini having been broken.
- The Intel HD Audio driver can't output to the headphone jack, can't sample from the line-in jack, and can't use the built-in speaker. It *can* output to the line-in jack. WTF?
Also, during this whole experience I heard reference to at least one web hosting service provider that deals in rack-mounted Mac Minis. Whoa!!
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