iFix

The iBook was always just a lit­tle bit loose. That’s how I bought it. Every­thing in work­ing order, but cos­met­i­cal­ly you could see some gaps telling the sto­ry of an occa­sion­al brush with grav­i­ty. The pieces just did­n’t fit togeth­er the way they sure­ly did when they came from the factory.

All that changed when it slid off the draw­ing table in my stu­dio and crashed into the floor.It would still turn on, but the screen and its hous­ing would no longer stay up on its own. I had to prop the screen up against some­thing in order to keep an angle that I could read the screen from. Typ­ing on my lap was right out.

I thought about replac­ing the iBook, and I still might. I have my eye on the Mod­Book, but that’s a whole ‘nother sto­ry. Since I don’t always use the iBook dai­ly and I don’t keep impor­tant doc­u­ments on it with­out copy­ing them to my desk­top machine, I fig­ured that repair­ing the darn thing would make a good project.

It turns out that the iBook has a hinge and brace that extends up into the screen hous­ing behind the bezel. Mine was in three pieces and need­ed to be replaced by just one. The hitch was that this piece holds the LCD in place and has wires snaking all around and through it. As it turned out, the oth­er hitch was that the entire case would have to come off of the main sec­tion of the lap­top in order to replace the hinge. The key­board had to be removed, as did the hard dri­ve and just about every­thing else attached to the motherboard.

Spare parts came from eBay and instruc­tions came from http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G4-12-Inch/Hinge-Grill/83/19/Page‑1/Battery. If I knew how com­pli­cat­ed a pro­ce­dure it would turn out to be, I prob­a­bly would­n’t have attempt­ed it. But once the parts were obtained to replace the hinge, I’d crossed the Rubi­con. So I cleared off some space and went to it, one step at a time, fol­low­ing the instruc­tions as method­i­cal­ly as I could. I’ve assem­bled some desk­top PCs from spare parts, but that did not pre­pare me for all the lit­tle tiny screws and del­i­cate parts that inhab­it the innards of a laptop.

One trick I learned that helped more than you might think: I per­formed the repair while watch­ing TV. No, I did­n’t actu­al­ly go from look­ing at the TV to look­ing at the lap­top. In fact, they were in dif­fer­ent rooms. But I sat watch­ing TV until I felt ready to tack­le anoth­er step. Then I’d pause what I was watch­ing, spend ten or twen­ty min­utes work­ing on the iBook and go back to the tele­vi­sion. Not the most effi­cient way, but the TV pro­vid­ed dis­trac­tion when I was frus­trat­ed and more impor­tant­ly took any time pres­sure off of me. As far as I was con­cerned, I was watch­ing TV and tak­ing breaks to work on fix­ing the iBook.

Even­tu­al­ly, it all came togeth­er again. When I say «all» I’m exag­ger­at­ing, as I end­ed up with parts left over. They came out of the iBook but for what­ev­er rea­son did­n’t end up back in. I was dread­ing the idea of start­ing the pro­ce­dure all over again, but once I plugged the iBook in and pushed the pow­er but­ton, what do you know? It turned right on.

I’m hop­ing that this means that the parts that nev­er made their way back into the iBook were non-essen­tial, but I’m hang­ing on to them for the time being. The iBook has been run­ning fine since I per­formed the fix, and in fact I’m writ­ing this post on it. The screen is no longer flop­py. It stands up on its own no mat­ter what posi­tion I put it in. The iBook is still an old G4 and the bat­tery is shot (I get about twen­ty min­utes per charge) but it feels sol­id and is a lot eas­i­er to car­ry than my desk­top machine.

Not bad for fid­dling around while watch­ing TV, eh?