Mac OS X updates disable or damage PowerBooks?

Apple, seriously try and stay out of some product settlements for a few, ok? Not but yesterday the 1/2/3G iPod settlement got wrapped and finalized, and today we come to find out that another suit could be inbound with an open registration of complaints over what apparently occurs to some users when -- of all things -- they update to 10.3.9, 10.4.0, and 10.4.1: their PowerBooks' lower RAM slots go bad. The current operating assumption is that the update actually makes the firmware controller or possibly the chipset get all wonky, which, in turn, may disable the lower memory slot (permanently). Has anyone out there in Engadget-land experienced this issue? Besides airing those grievances in our comments, you can also feel free to air them to the complaints registration site, which may or may not at some point turn into a real life suit. How ya like dem Apples?

[Via TUAW]

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[matt @ Dec 28th 2005 8:54PM]

This just happened to me. Laptop was fine for two years, then suddenly started crashing as if it had bad RAM. Removed the stick in the lower slot, and it worked fine. Powerbook 17"

[dmax @ Dec 28th 2005 8:54PM]

Interesting. I just installed a gig of RAM in my 700mHz eMac and now the thing is crashing on me routinely - 3-4 times a day. I reinstalled the system and did a lot of other things.



After all that, I'm coming to the conclusion that it's the new RAM. I wonder if this is part of the deal or if it's the RAM itself? (Disk Doctor thinks its OK...)

[Dom.net @ Dec 28th 2005 9:00PM]

I think this is what happened to my 500 mHz Titanium. No problems on the newer PowerBooks, tho.

[animoller @ Dec 28th 2005 9:02PM]

There are already almost 1,000 signatures on the PowerBook Lower Memory Slot petition at http://lowermemoryslot.editkid.com/. This has started a class action lawsuit with Apple already - the lawyers are waiting for more information to confirm that this is not as uncommon as Apple are apparently claiming. Contact the lawyers so this can get sorted!

[DC @ Dec 28th 2005 9:02PM]

Powerbook 15" 1.5ghz 1gb RAM

lower memory slot failed 8 months after purchase,

after updgrading to 10.4.2. Strange thing is that

it stopped working, but then worked for a short period (3 days) then stopped permanently and had to be repaired. Have not had the same problem happen again since then (fixed november 2005)

[animoller @ Dec 28th 2005 9:07PM]

Please also see the law firm's site directly at: https://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/case/apple_powerbook_classaction

[Peter Dekkers @ Dec 28th 2005 9:13PM]

My 1.67GHz 15" PowerBook's lower memory slot died in its second week of me owning it. It hadn't been moved about at all, just upgraded to 10.3.9. After a few months of frustration about Apple's ignorance about the problem, I started this petition: http://lowermemoryslot.editkid.com



It has over 1000 signatures now. Lots of them with user comments about their specific cases. The last I heard about the Apple lawyers was that they thought the problem to be non-pervasive. O RLY?

[Robert Vassar @ Dec 28th 2005 9:13PM]

Upgraded 5 15 inch, 3 17 inch and 6 12 inch Powerbooks along with a boat load of 12 inch iBooks without any problems.

[Dave @ Dec 28th 2005 9:25PM]

yea the same thing happened to me, lucky i had a gig. My lower slot is dead and i tried other ram...

[Robert Gregory @ Dec 28th 2005 9:40PM]

I have the same issue as well with my lower ram slot on my 15" G4 Powerbook. Does anyone know if Apple has offered to repair this problem?

[david medina @ Dec 28th 2005 9:53PM]

I have a 550Mhz Powerbook and the lower memory slot just made kaput few days after a software update. I already changed my logic board a year ago -*without* apple care, i buyed the card with my money- for a strange overheating of ram.. just too strange..



i can't and i don't want to buy another logicboard now.. but i dont want to loose my laptop either.. this is really a bad bad thing. If Apple's software has anything to do with this issues they must do something. Maybe my case is a special one -'cause the age of the laptop- but i can't belive that i just had the same problems with my memory slots *twice* and with diferent boards..



some ideas? any hope? a tap in the back?



*snif*

[Audun @ Dec 28th 2005 9:59PM]

This did happen to me a while ago. Just send it in. They fixed mine in 6 days.

[Greg @ Dec 28th 2005 10:06PM]

Bought my 15" Powerbook in July 2004. Lost my lower slot within the last 6 months. Not sure what update took it out, nor did I notice when it happened. Have two good RAM sticks, each shows up when placed in top slot, but neither shows up when placed in bottom slot. Bet I will keep an eye on this one.

[Deluxe @ Dec 28th 2005 10:20PM]

As bad as i feel for those of you who've lost sections of your ram, but it's karma time for you apple fanboys.



And we love a good lawsuit.

[Gary @ Dec 28th 2005 10:53PM]

Mine went out right after the warranty. It's funny how the Apple support guys act like you are the only one with a problem. Right now, if you are out of warranty, you're hosed.

[Greg Mote @ Dec 28th 2005 10:55PM]

My Jan 2005 PowerBook lost it's lower ram slot. After a week of working on half the ram, I carried it to the apple store, they shipped it to Houston, replaced the motherboard and shipped it back to me a few days later. Carbon Copy Cloner took care of my data while the computer was away. It was a bit inconvenient, but Apple took care of it.

[lamont @ Dec 28th 2005 11:32PM]

my powerbook 500 is up to date and i have no problem. still working at 100% "all 1gb"

[Amir Yazdan @ Dec 29th 2005 12:33AM]

Happened to my 15" powerbook. I had apple care so I got a new motherboard and everything was fine after that.



www.kryptonitechoppers.com

[MT @ Dec 29th 2005 12:44AM]

I've had no problems. Running 10.4.3 on a 1.67GHz PBook.

[Patrick @ Dec 29th 2005 12:49AM]

I have a 1.25 15" Al PB with 512 in the lower slot and nothing in the upper slot. Always update right away and never had a single problem (since Sept 03 when I got it).

[SectionZMusic.com @ Dec 29th 2005 1:01AM]

12" 10.4.3 is fine

17" 10.4.3 is fine



I have had an crashing issue with my 12" when i get it to close to a Helium get well soon balloon that I got for my wife though.

[morpheusdiblanco @ Dec 29th 2005 1:05AM]

And I thought it was just me!



I had this happen to my 15 inch PowerBook G4 as well. Fortunately mine was still under warranty. Apple replaced my mortherboard... and installed a new hard disk in the process.

[matt @ Dec 29th 2005 1:12AM]

There is no way this will affect 12in owners - this is an issue that requires TWO RAM slots. The 12in only has one - 256mb onboard and one slot.



This has affected only one 15in PB in my office one Rev C. the newer rev d's are fine.

[Eric @ Dec 29th 2005 1:30AM]

My powerbook's lower ram slot crashed after the updates too. It worked, but the system didn't recognize it. I removed one of the chips, started the computer and at some point the system info said I had 0 ram at all and the computer was running. The Geniusbar sent out my powerbook and had my logic board replaced, no problems since....

[matt @ Dec 29th 2005 1:34AM]

I have a TiBook that i use at school with Mac OS X Tiger with all updates and i havent had problems with the bottom RAM slot.

[Robbie @ Dec 29th 2005 2:58AM]

Wow! I thought Macs were supposed to be perfect and WAY better than Windows based PCs. This really shows how "well made" Apple computers are made when an OS update permanently ruins your computer. All you Apple fanboys now it, along with everyone else, just admit it, Windows hardware > Apple hardware. Its not very impressive when Apple zealots brag about how stable your computers are. I would hope they would be stable, considering how little software and hardware is available for them. I had an eMac 1.25ghz, but I ended up throwing it away. I'm a programmer for a major corparation, and I just hated the lack of good compilers, not to mention that I do a considerable amount of VB and C# database programming. I also am a hardcore gamer, and Macs are terrible for gaming. Honestly, what do they do better than a PC? Talk about overpriced junk.

[Ellen @ Dec 29th 2005 3:35AM]

That's odd, one of the RAM slots on my logic board (15" 1.25ghz powerbook) died too, but I didn't put it together with a software upgrade. I ran the first versions of Tiger just fine, since the slot didn't die until mid or late summer. If it's software related, it'd probably be around 10.4.2.

[Jesus @ Dec 29th 2005 4:36AM]

I have lost all faith in Macintosh.



I had a gen1 iMac G5, which broke down from overheating a total of four times in a year (and had its motherboard replaced four times). Finally Apple gave me a new model iMac, which I got two days ago. This in itself is very gracious, but this model's PRAM goes screwy, disabling the USB bus every day, so I have to restart it and reset the PRAM. Incredibly disappointing.

[David Moffitt @ Dec 29th 2005 4:42AM]

happened to a friend of mine, interesting it's software, not hardware, i'd just assumed the logic board crapped itself.

[Rodger Donaldson @ Dec 29th 2005 4:42AM]

The Apple drones showing up to abuse people who dare complain about Apple shipping crappy product might care to amble over to macintouch, who note that some revisions of iBook are seeing failure rates in excess of 70% - bad enough that Apple are extending AppleCare for free to try to placate customers.



I don't know about anyone else, but when I drop thousands on something, I kind of expect the shipping failures to be nearer to 1% than three-quarters of units.

[Macfiend @ Dec 29th 2005 4:51AM]

There seems to be a whole epidemic with SuperDrives and Combo drives which seems like it's also related to Apple updates. Not to mention the whole iTunes-static issue which seems to have conveniently disappeared sans solution.

[SadPandas @ Dec 29th 2005 5:17AM]

Over on both the Macnn and the Think Secret forums people have been posting this problem for a while now. My 1.67 PowerBook has both rams filled with 1gig sticks and i just updated to 3.9 last week. I wish this article had been written before then... and i also hope this doesnt screw me.... I was just thinking of installing Tiger as well, I had been holding out till all the music software and hardware i used were all updated before i did...

[WebCester @ Dec 29th 2005 7:42AM]

Have you ever heard about the 1.8Ghz SP bug? Introduced with Tiger, finally got terminated a month ago. More info here: http://g5freeze.com/



Seems to me they should have done some more testing on Tiger before rushing it out the door.

[MattJ @ Dec 29th 2005 7:53AM]

It's not the software disabling the hardware, the hardware has a fault (for the record we've only seen it on 15" models). It happened to me, I arranged a repair with my local AASP and brought the machine in when the part arrived. 30 minutes later I was one happy customer.

[Brian @ Dec 29th 2005 8:33AM]

I have had no problems with my 15" 1.67

[cindy barfuss @ Dec 29th 2005 9:14AM]

I bought a powerbook G4 3 years ago and recently updated it to Jaguar. I went to update some recent weekly updates for security and the ipod features, and my system crashed! It won't even start up now, it just keeps freezing everytime I try to start it up and I can't get it past that!!

[Alwin @ Dec 29th 2005 9:52AM]

I have a 17" Powerbook and have had no problems.



From the sounds of the complaints, it seems to be fairly isolated to the 15" models.

[Rizo @ Dec 29th 2005 10:30AM]

Yeah my RAM dropped from 1GB to 512MB as well. I wonder if this has anything to do with my ethernet port going bust as well. Luckily my powerbook was still under warranty so I got it fixed.

[sven @ Dec 29th 2005 10:54AM]

Dead lower slot on 15" 1.5 GHz PB. I can't definitively correlate it to an upgrade, but definitely happened after 10.4. Worked again for a few hrs after I tried installing upgrade memory in it, but then PB crashed, and slot has been dead again ever since.

[dmc @ Dec 29th 2005 11:02AM]

I'm an Apple Tech and have seen this numourous times. The only hope is that the customer has applecare. I swap out the logic board and it's fixed.

[Scott Newman @ Dec 29th 2005 11:10AM]

I think it's more likely that heat from the CPU is permanently damaging the lower slot. Upgrading Mac OSX is very heat-intensive. That is especially true if PB users have their energy saver CPU setting at "highest." Finally, the lower RAM slot is directly above the CPU.



This is not saying that Apple is not responsible. It think the sheer number of RAM slot failures points clearly to a design defect. Apple's failure to acknowledge this casts even more blame on them.

[Ian @ Dec 29th 2005 11:13AM]

I just sent mine out for repair. It is as I was told only effecting 15" powerbooks. For those with 12" or 17" powerbooks it doesn't effect you (yes saddly size does matter), but that doesn't mean it is limited at all. It seems like an alarming amount of 15"s are having the problem. The true scope will probably never be know as not everyone uses their lower memory slot, and most people don't check their ram info unless they are having problems running software.

[Dave Taylor @ Dec 29th 2005 12:04PM]

I'm a tech at an Apple Authorized Service/Sales Dealer. We've sold many AL'books and have seen this problem--which is repaired under warranty in all cases--and have not noticed any cases where this symptom occurred after an upgrade. But in at least six it was NOT related to any action, and in most cases simply occurred when the unit was switched on. I'm thinking coincidence, not causality.

[Andy Stewart @ Dec 29th 2005 12:13PM]

I just took mine in on Monday. I did some careful swapping of my two DIMMs and discovered that it was the lower one that stopped working. Using Console I found that it was failing no matter which of my two DIMMs I put in it.



I took it to the Apple Store 10 minutes away and he cheerfully took it in to be fixed. I wonder if he knew of the problem. He did check out the version number, but that is also the way to get the serial number.

[umijin @ Dec 29th 2005 12:22PM]

It makes no sense how a SOFTWARE upgrade could cause a logicboard failure, unless it encodes a way to move/increase electrical current to someplace it shouldn't.



I'll warrant people are having problems, but OS upgrade related? Not likely.

[Tony @ Dec 29th 2005 2:10PM]

This happened to me too about a month ago on my 15" PB 1.25GHz that I got in Sep 2003, but for me, it was NOT related to an OS update, as I was running 10.4.3 for a while. The PB just froze up one day, and noticed things were running a lot slower. I eventually found out that my RAM went from 768MB to 256MB. So I swapped the RAM and restarted. The lower slot was working again, but after a few minutes, it froze up again, and my RAM went to 512MB. I swapped the RAM again, and that was when the lower slot died for good. I have tried everything I could possibly think of - resetting the PMU, reinstalling the OS after wiping the HD, using TechTool and Apple Hardware Test, nothing can get that slot back, other than replacing the logic board.



Luckily I bought AppleCare at the last minute, but for those people who say we shouldn't be complaining, look at the posts which mention that they have had their logic boards replaced several times. This obviously points to a design flaw, not a simple case of getting a bad part.



If we make our voices heard, Apple will listen. Everyone with this problem under warranty should send in their PowerBooks at their earliest convenience, even when the problem comes up again after repair, because replacing logic boards isn't cheap for Apple, and they will have to eventually do something about it. Last time I had my logic board replaced for an unrelated issue, it was a $800 part, well above the $249 (or $349 for non-edu customers) I gave them for AppleCare.

[Jeremy Wright @ Dec 29th 2005 3:08PM]

Mine went kapoot too. The apple support guys said that it was my fault with the brand of memory put in and that if I didn't change it, they wouldn't fix it again.

[John Lockwood @ Dec 29th 2005 3:09PM]

I have (so far) had three PowerBook G4 1.5GHz units fail, and it sounds like all three have this problem. Their symptoms are that after running for a short time (approx 1 hour) they start kernel panicing, often also corrupting the hard disk. This happens even if you don't login (simply leaving it at the login screen).



Reformatting, reinstalling, swapping memory, swapping hard disks, even swapping logic boards did not help. However I have not tried using only the top memory slot (yet).



One so far has been exchanged by Apple after four unsuccessful repair attempts did not fix it, one is with an Apple repair centre right now, and the third was out of warranty when the problem started.



All had recently been upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4 (now 10.4.3).

[James @ Dec 29th 2005 5:45PM]

Same happened to me.

You can go to http://lowermemoryslot.editkid.com/ to sign the petition.. .

[Adem Rudin @ Dec 29th 2005 5:49PM]

Never even heard of this problem... considering the age of most of these computers, and the age of the updates, almost all affected ones should be under warranty still.



Odd though.