I'm waiting for the class action lawsuit against Apple for AppleCare repairing Macs, and not flashing a serial # on the logic board, thus making Facetime inoperable along with other MacOS features. Apple Stores refuse to FIX this problem because many of the machines, like 2009/10 Macs are considered obsolete. Apple stores have repair disks to fix this issue, but they won't touch those affected machines. Trying to do it myself has proved unsuccessful, so I've never been able to use Facetime on my Mac Pro.
Suggestions?
This frankly seems to be a pretty big edge case, and even harder to have happen now. Macs are considered vintage after five years from discountination, and obselete after 7. Apple doesn't do any hardware work on machines past that point, but no one I know wouldn't at least be willing to run diagnostics on that machine for you, and if you have an unserialized board, it makes you serialize it before diagnostics can be run. If for some reason all the physical serial markings were removed giving it a correct serial number would be impossible, and the process is written to firmware and is not undoable/redoable in the store. So if let's say the store lost power during the write to firmware and now you've gone from a machine that worked but didn't have a serial number to a paperweight that couldn't boot, I know which I would choose. And Apple does not have a way of ordering that part with any guarantees of continued function/reliability at this point. All those boards out there would be heavily refurbished by this point. However most apple techs aren't going to even consider that element of it. I'd be willing to bet if you went to the Genius Bar and asked for diags, they'd hook up an Ethernet cable, get a message saying that your board wasn't serialized, and as long as they could find one, they'd serialize that board, but know full well there's nothing that tech can do about it if that firmware alteration corrupts the MLB, and Apple can't fix that if they can't get a replacement MLB.
Another poster asked about recent cases of Apple behaving in such a manner. Check out the cell data issue with iPad 2's after 9.3. The issue was sometimes fixed by a restore, but mostly the only workaround was to toggle cell data off, take the SIM out and reinsert it, and it would work for a while for some people. It was acknowledged by Apple as a software issue, and the support article stated it would be fixed in a following software update. Nothing through 9.3.5 helped, and the last time I looked, sometime before December, the support article still said that a software patch was coming. Cause I'm sure they've had a team working on a 9.3.6 patch for a year now, for a device that otherwise isn't supported. Not super great.
As for Apple creating a bug to do this, given the dates (the certificate expired 7 days after iOS 7 came out I believe it said), it sounds like they just didn't renew the certificate and push it out, and the iOS 7 update didn't need it since it was relying on the newer peer to peer connections only. Since it was a certificate for Akamai, I would think their signing authority would have signed that file, so Apple altering the certificate should have made it fail immediately, it would no longer match the real certificate. Kind of the point of certificates. Not saying that doesn't make it a shady business move. Just that "created a bug" seems misleading in my opinion.
