An Apple a day is not necessarily good for your health

Why is insomnia the opposite of sleeping in? I am wrecked because in the last three days I've repaired three different laptops. The thing is, they each took more than a day to fix. Not a lot of sleep was had, is basically what I'm saying here. If you're reading this it means I did by some miracle manage to get up on Wednesday morning. If you're not reading this, come and wake me quick.

Of the three, by far the most tricky was a friend's Mac - an iBook G4, for those of you who care. Apple are rightly famed for design simplicity, but that applies to the outside only. They seem deliberately hard to repair. Probably, so that you'll have to take it to Apple's specialists who will raise their eyebrows and explain to you how much better off you'd be with a new one. Take the hard drive; this is basically a disk that spends most of its time spinning at several thousand revs a minute. It is therefore the part of a computer that's most likely to fail, and on most it's easy to remove. Even a fairly crappy laptop from Acer or HP will only have about six screws to remove. On a Thinkpad you only need to undo one. With a Toughbook you just open a latch. The Mac?

You have to take the entire feckin' thing apart.  

This is no picnic. The insides are just plain fragile. I'm an artist, I have a delicate touch. Inside this iBook I felt like a gorilla doing a Japanese tea ceremony. And this particular model has the lovely innovation of a socket that attaches to the circuit board far more weakly than to the plug that goes into it. It is not probable, it is virtually inevitable that you will break this off in the process of disassembly. And of course it's not some marginal connector that you could maybe live without like say the left speaker. It's the power switch. So this means you have to do a soldering job on components barely big enough to see. In all truth, I ended up spending far longer fixing this than I did repairing what was wrong in the first place.

What was wrong? In another sure sign that Jonathan Ive leaves the insides to his secretary, the little circuit board for Airport (Apple's cute name for WiFi) is mounted in such a way that it can – with time, will – work its way loose.

That doesn't just mean you lose your wireless, it means you have an intermittent short circuit. So at unpredictably intervals, the computer crashes. (Oh wait I'm sorry, Macs never crash. They have a ‘kernel panic’, which sounds more like a reaction to peanuts.) It took me two days just to work out what was going on.

In order to prevent the card working its way loose again I needed something firm but soft to place between it and the bar which is supposed to hold it in. A millimetre-thick rectangle of cardboard was just the thing. But it's a Mac, you can't just put any old bit of card inside it.

So I found a nice gray piece, cut it to round the corners off, got a pen and wrote "iPadding". I'm applying for a patent.