Has your TiBook had its Firewire port go dead? Mine has – twice – and it hashappened to a friend of mine as well. Both are 400MHz models. Mine waspurchased recently as a refurbished product from the Apple Store and theother was purchased brand new, through the education channel and was fixedjust days before the warranty expired. There are hundreds of postings onApple’s support message boards about this problem. If your machine is out ofwarranty and you have not purchased Applecare this can be quite costly tofix. Will these machines continue to require inconvenient returns forrepairs?
If the Firewire port is seen by Apple’s System Profiler but the device doesnot mount on the desktop, these are likely to be symptoms of a hardwarefailure. Certainly a PRAM reset and power manager reset should be attemptedfirst and this appears to work if the Firewire port is not seen by SystemProfiler, but if it’s a hardware failure, it probably means that the logicboard must be replaced.
I use the Firewire port several times a day for buspowered devices on my PowerBook G4 and my PowerMac G4 Quicksilver. I havenot had a problem with the Quicksilver but it appears that this issueplagues TiBooks.
The problem is reported with video cameras, external HDDs,and CD burners as well as iPods. The common thread appears to be theFirewire circuitry of the TiBook. When I asked if this was a frequentproblem, the Apple service tech that helped me said that he did not believeit was. On both occasions, I received a hard sell to purchase Applecare withthe impending repair used as an example of why I needed it.
This appears tobe the response given to many of the people posting to Apple’s support pagesand the tone there is not upbeat, especially from those with multiplefailures. Some people have taken to using Firewire PC cards rather than payfor costly repairs and are not happy about it. It does not appear from myexperience that the replacement logic boards are any better and the growingpopularity of the iPod and other Firewire devices has probably exacerbatedthe problem. With no official acknowledgement, it is not clear that theproblem has been solved in currently shipping models.
Visiting the PowerPage several years ago helped me to inform a colleaguethat she could get her PowerBook 5300 repaired at no cost by Apple eventhough it was long out of warranty. The Twentieth Anniversary Mac userWeb site became a clearinghouse for information regarding the “Speaker Buzz”problem which plagued that machine, including my own. Apple eventuallyoffered some TAM owners new G3 computers in exchange for those machines on acase by case basis.