2018 Mac Mini Engineering Sample

[harvester32]

Well,

It seems I have a 2018 Mac Mini that Apple wants back! So, the symptom is the light that goes off on the front of the mini. I thought it was random but I can replicate it and told them what is happening. The person on the phone was very cryptic about why they wanted it back and even said, "there's more to why we want this back, but I'm not allowed to discuss the full reason why." This shocked me as it seems rather odd, but I can imagine it is something that has gone wrong with the T2 chip and therefore they can't discuss. So the symptoms are:

Light goes off when returning from Bootcamp to Mojave. When you restart from Win 10, it will go to the black screen and the monitor (and the light on the front of the MAC Mini) will shut off. It won't come back on until you do a complete shutdown and startup in OSX.

Second symptom is the fan will not come on in Windows while in bootcamp playing a game. The computer gets very hot. I had to coax the fan on by loading Boinc and running Seti with light settings. It was enough to trick the fans on and brought it down so I could touch the case. Without it on, the game would not compel the fan to come on no matter how hot the case got (so hot it was barely touchable).

So anyway, one of their Sr. Engineers is calling me tomorrow and they are going to ship me another BTO mini (i7, 512GB, 16GB) and then I'll return this to them.

As I don't want to mess with the internal stuff too much, any way to "depersonalize" this? I don't want to get rid of any software to mess up the testing and will just send a note that they are required to wipe the Mini when complete. Just don't want them reading my documents or mail.

Thank you,

Ken

 

[F-Train]

This shocked me
...

As I don't want to mess with the internal stuff too much, any way to "depersonalize" this? I don't want to get rid of any software to mess up the testing and will just send a note that they are required to wipe the Mini when complete. Just don't want them reading my documents or mail.

It sure is a good thing that about 99.999% of the population is unlikely to go into shock over an event like this.

Don't know what Apple will do in this case, but its standard procedure is to ensure that the customer's drive is erased before it takes possession of it; and if the customer hasn't erased it him or her self, they will do it in the customer's presence. Believe it or not, Apple doesn't want to be in possession of your data.

It's probably a safe bet that Tim Cook has better things to do than read your personal documents, although I don't doubt that you think that they are riveting.

 

[harvester32]

A new replacement is on the way...will advise when I get it if some of the issues have been corrected. Apple has been very helpful.

 

[mightyjabba]

An engineering sample is kind of like a prototype or beta version. Not sure what that has to do with this. They just want to "capture" your system so they can figure out what is going wrong. This happens relatively frequently, from what I understand -- particularly with new products.

 

[inmnbob]

An engineering sample is kind of like a prototype or beta version. Not sure what that has to do with this. They just want to "capture" your system so they can figure out what is going wrong. This happens relatively frequently, from what I understand -- particularly with new products.

Apple called me too and wanted my first MM to be sent to them because they "saw things in the crash report that engineering wan't to investigate". They were disappointed to find that I had returned mine and were going to try and get the store to send it to them.

 

[harvester32]

Yeah, they discussed me returning this one to the store and then after seeing the report asked me to ship it to them. I am doing the express replacement so I have the new one coming first. MJ, yes, engineering sample is misused in this case, however it is wanted by the engineers and they think something is wrong. Thanks for the clarification.