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Doq

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 8, 2019
609
872
The Lab DX
Oh boy.

So about a few hours after I made the post about installing Adélie Linux on the Twelve I went to reboot to reconfigure some kernel modules and it never turned on again. Figures something went wrong so I had tried the usual tricks: reset PRAM, remove expansion memory, battery, what-have-you. I even tried the super reset trick and while I got the beep it didn't go further than that.

I used to get a chime but now I don't even get that anymore.

My current suspect is actually the GPU. Before the last reboot the tty looked a little funny, and it actually crashed and I had to cut power. I don't see anything on screen, even with a bright light through the Apple logo (indicative of either 0 brightness or dead backlight). Even weirder is that Target Disk Mode is fully functional; though I don't see the FireWire icon on screen, I can plug it in to another machine and the disk pops up no issue. I hope it's *not* the GPU though because that's basically equivalent to a cooked logic board and the Twelve is perma-dead.

Any ideas on resussitation?

On a bit of a silver lining, after installing Adélie I noticed the battery started charging, which I completely dismissed outright before??
 
If you let it sit a while and completely cool off, does it come back to life? It could be the heatsink:

 
No. This happened a couple days ago; I had tried it again right before making this post though.
 
Even weirder is that Target Disk Mode is fully functional; though I don't see the FireWire icon on screen, I can plug it in to another machine and the disk pops up no issue. I hope it's *not* the GPU though because that's basically equivalent to a cooked logic board and the Twelve is perma-dead.

My suspicion is that the GPU has failed. I have a number of iBooks with dead GPUs that will still boot and happily allow you to access their internal drives via TDM. Have you tried connecting an external monitor yet and seeing whether anything is displayed?
 
Happens with 20+ year old hardware, I loved the 12" PowerBook I had, it was the 1.5Ghz model, but it just had that weak GF5200 graphics.

I really want one of the 17" with the 128MB 9700 Mobility, but I doubt I'll like the keyboard as much as I did the 12".

I sold it on a few years back and it was really still a great machine, I just wasn't using it at all and I wanted it to go to someone to get some use out of it.

Maybe one day I'll snag the 17" I want, I just haven't found a good one at a good price.

Really I was hoping the Linux open hardware PPC laptop project was going to be done a long time ago, but they are still a long way from shipping units, and the hardware they designed the system around is already obsolete.

The whole project is an utter waste of time at this point, but it would still be fun to see if I could hack OS X onto it. Tho I'm pretty sure the thing is vaporware at this point.
 
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Happens with 20+ year old hardware, I loved the 12" PowerBook I had, it was the 1.5Ghz model, but it just had that weak GF5200 graphics.
That's this one as well. For as much power that Apple crammed in the small package, it was inevitable that something was going to fail, huh?

I really want one of the 17" with the 128MB 9700 Mobility, but I doubt I'll like the keyboard as much as I did the 12".
You know I originally thought that all the Aluminium PowerBooks had the same keyboard but it turns out there are differences.

I do know that the keyboards on the 15" and 17" models are Basically The Same so if you have a 15" it'll feel the same on a 17".

FWIW I also have this model and in my opinion it's got one of the nicest keyboards I've typed on-- this coming from someone who also regularly uses ThinkPads, I think Apple laptop keyboards peaked with this '03-'07 design.

Really I was hoping the Linux open hardware PPC laptop project was going to be done a long time ago, but they are still a long way from shipping units, and the hardware they designed the system around is already obsolete.

The whole project is an utter waste of time at this point, but it would still be fun to see if I could hack OS X onto it. Tho I'm pretty sure the thing is vaporware at this point.
Ugh, I've had my eye on that for a very long time but I've all but lost confidence in it and admittedly POWER as an alternative architecture overall, especially with the recent popularity of devices with ARM processors. Also with RISC-V being an open ISA I wouldn't doubt for a second that hobbyists would pick that up instead-- it's already happening, even.
 
That's this one as well. For as much power that Apple crammed in the small package, it was inevitable that something was going to fail, huh?


You know I originally thought that all the Aluminium PowerBooks had the same keyboard but it turns out there are differences.

I do know that the keyboards on the 15" and 17" models are Basically The Same so if you have a 15" it'll feel the same on a 17".

FWIW I also have this model and in my opinion it's got one of the nicest keyboards I've typed on-- this coming from someone who also regularly uses ThinkPads, I think Apple laptop keyboards peaked with this '03-'07 design.


Ugh, I've had my eye on that for a very long time but I've all but lost confidence in it and admittedly POWER as an alternative architecture overall, especially with the recent popularity of devices with ARM processors. Also with RISC-V being an open ISA I wouldn't doubt for a second that hobbyists would pick that up instead-- it's already happening, even.
I've got the 13" M2 MacBook Pro and I'm really impressed, tho the keyboard is not what the 12" was, just a joy to type on.

I like ARM and I've been hacking on it a long time, I think I had an Arm ChromeBook in 2013 or so and it was fun to hack a full install of Linux onto an SD card and dual boot. Even was able to get the GPU drivers to work for OpenGL and HW video acceleration. It was a 64bit Armv7 I think and I was able to port Doom3 to it and get it to run pretty well on the Mali GPU with OpenGL ES.

It was a fun project, I love hacking stuff to work like that.

That's the one thing about my MacBook is everything pretty much just works, but I use it as my main productivity tool for finance, information, correspondence, and it's my main workstation for heavy lifting.

I said in a thread earlier that it was night and day faster at Qemu than the PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0 Ghz. I mean it's 10x or 20x faster, and it's not like you are going to lug the G5 onto and airliner, tho I used to take mine to the beach or mountains with me on holiday.

Funny how fast they became obsolete, I had the late 2004 1.8Hgz cheap model, think I got it the week it came out. By 2009 it could no longer play web video fast enough to be of much use to me anymore and I gave it away.

When buy a workstation I expect to get 10 years out of it, but I made more money in the first month that I owned it than it costed me new.

The MacBook saves me time, and time is money at some point, but I just haven't found the niche use for it like I did the G5.

May step up to the 16" and see if it rains money.😁
 
I said in a thread earlier that it was night and day faster at Qemu than the PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0 Ghz. I mean it's 10x or 20x faster, and it's not like you are going to lug the G5 onto and airliner, tho I used to take mine to the beach or mountains with me on holiday.

One would expect that, since Apple M1 was already faster than mutilcore Intel MacPro workstations.

However, as hilarious as it is, I have seen a couple of cases where 2005 PowerPC was faster than 2020 M1: I don’t mean “subjective feeling”, I was running test suites which measure and record time of execution.
 
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