Critical iBook Design Flaw: The Power Connecter
My iBook served me well during the fall semester. It handled being tossed into and retrieved from a backpack several times each day. Unfortunately, it has recently been rendered inoperable because of a minor fall. This iBook is the fourth laptop that I have used regularly. My previous laptop, a 17 inch Sony Vaio, withstood a five foot drop with only a bent port cover. Yesterday, the iBook fell off of a mid-tower PC. It landed on the power plug. Now the battery will not charge. I suspect that the jack broke off of the system board. The power jack was one of the stronger ports on my former laptops. How talented of a designer does it take to make what should be a two-lead jack into the most fragile part of a computer? I don’t need a little glowing ring around the power connecter to tell me when the battery is charged. I’ll probably take the thing apart this afternoon to see if I can replace the connecter with a
semi standard one. I wanted a simple and reliable computer. That’s why I bought the iBook. Now I’m looking at a soldering iron to fix a problem of function following form.