I am a fan of the Mac, but sometimes really stupid engineering is really stupid engineering. So I have a Mac Mini (PowerPC G4) and I just got an intel Mac Mini to test dual booting and virtual machines. All was fine for the first 2 days until I had to unplug both of the mini’s to move them around on my desk. Little did I know I mixed up the power adapters. If I noticed at the time I would say who cares. Identical power adapters in identical computers. No problem, right? Not really. Turns out the power bricks for the intel & powerPC mini’s are physically identical, but the voltage is totally different. To add insult to injury the plug is identical so you can plug in the wrong plug to the wrong mini. What does that yield? A mini or two that won’t power on.
According to apples support website they put up a KB article about the difference in power supplies. They show the nice difference in the power supplies. It is a light grey wording on the side of a white device that physically look the same. Yeah everyone will notice that difference! They say it is hard to confuse the two. BS!!! COME ON APPLE. DEC back in the mid 90’s had this issue with laptops we had at my old company. You plug the wrong one in and it fries the computer. Why make 2 devices physically identical when it can cause harm to your equipment if you use the wrong one? According to the same KB article, they say: “While using the incorrect power adapter won’t hurt your Mac mini, it could cause unexpected behavior, most notably an inability to turn the computer on!” Can someone tell me how that is NOT hurting the computer? I cannot believe a computer company that tries to be so consumer oriented like Apple can screw something up like this?
Screwing the adapters up was a stupid mistake, but one that should been made impossible by good design. I haven’t done more troubleshooting, but I am told that you can get the machine to recover from this. I just haven’t worked on it long enough. I really don’t want to have to call the unit in.
I am still like Apple hardware, but in my book they just dropped down a peg or three.