Comment by genewitch
2 years ago
during the PPC 603 era of Macintosh Performa series, we had a bad motherboard, and apple sent an engineer to our house to replace it. This is around the time that the story of apple sending engineers to houses to remove motherboards, raise them 2 feet above a flat surface, and drop them was being passed around. Something about reseating chips that one of their pick and place machines was misaligned on or something.
When I worked my first job in retail in the mid eighties - we were selling Atari ST and there was an official Atari bulletin to do exactly that. It would reseat the socketed chips.
interesting; i doubt my memory is that faulty, so it's possible the story went through some iterations, making it an apocryphal story about apple, instead. Or, possibly, the major pick and place manufacturer had a slew of alignment issues in the 80s!
I thought the apple "lift and drop the computer" story was about the Apple 3. It had no vents, so it was always overheating and "unseating chips" like the Xbox 360 heat issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws
And so it doesn't become apocryphal but stays a real story, there 100% were people who "Fixed" their RRoD Xbox 360s by wrapping them in towels for an hour so they cooked themselves even more, or they put the mobo in the oven on a low temperature. That fix was also 100% used for fixing certain graphics cards unseating in the mid 2000s as well.
7 replies →
Those might be field engineers, but I have heard of the WiFi teams at computer companies going out to people's houses to test especially weird situations.