Advice from an Apple Tech: Your first time under the hood

You have a Mac. And some half-crazed part of your brain really, really wants to take it apart and tinker with it, upgrade it in every way possible, and put it back together again. You’ve been warned not to do it, but warnings be damned.

Congratulations, you now possess the right mentality to become a Macintosh technician. Now you just need some free time, a Mac to tear into, and no one around to complain about it. But before you start taking stuff apart, here’s some advice, from one Apple Certified Technician to a potential one.

Accidents will happen

So you’re ready to do your own repair on your Mac. First things first: Be ready for nothing to go perfectly the first time. Open the case on your Mac and the circuitry that greets you is nothing short of daunting.

MacworldInside an older model iMac.

There will be mistakes, count on it. In the 19 years that I’ve been working on computers (mostly Macs), I’ve accidentally severed my fair share of cables, heard that brain-shattering “snap!” when a connector was irreparably wrenched in the wrong direction, and set two drives on fire. (The first incident was an honest mistake—I connected a SyQuest EZ 135 drive to a PC’s parallel port, and ran Windows 95’s Find New Hardware feature until smoke rose from the connectors).

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