As a lot of you guys know, I’ve had a lot of issues with Apple over my macs. Imagine how good I felt when I saw this
Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
I’ve been sent numerous test results of people trying the new firmware (as reported earlier) on their UJ-835 or similar model drives. Here is a quick summary of media vs detected speeds.
- Verbatim 16X DVD+R = 2x detected
- Ritek 8x DVD-R = 8x detected (previously 2x)
- Imation 8x DVD-R = 8x detected (previously 2x)
- Sony 1x-8x DVD+R = 2x detected
- Princo 4x DVD-R = 2x detected
While it looks like some media compatability has improved, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
If you can add your media tests to the comments, that would help.
Multiple people have contacted me regarding Apple releasing a firmware update for superdrives on the affected machines. Here are the links to the Mac Daily News article and the official Apple page for the firmware update. If people are able to test this and get back to me with their experiances, I’ll update this page accordingly.
Update: It seems there are mixed results – which seems to indicate a partial improvement, however I personally haven’t noticed any improvements. Princo 4x DVD-R discs still come up as 2x discs, and another unknown brand still came up as 2x. Please keep your experiances coming. If you can include media type, that would be great!
Yesterday I got a call from Janine Beach (Executive Relations, Apple Asia/Pac) to state that Apple regards that the problem with the SuperDrives (as reported here, here, and here) is a correctly functioning SuperDrive. Apple’s official line is that there is no problem burning on 8x Apple media so the drive is fine – even if it fails to recognise any other brand or speed of media. This means you can ONLY use Apple media in the drive – as even 16x TDK discs do not work correctly. There was no notification of the fact that Apple SuperDrives would only burn as advertised on Apple media – and when I stressed this point, I was told by Janine that the drive works as it should, and Apple would not be doing anything about it. After telling Janine that this was unacceptable, I was basically stonewalled.
For this reason, I am asking anyone who has experiance in lodging official complaints with the ACCC or starting class action law suits to contact me to discuss the best approach in making Apple accountable for thier faulty equipment.
Updated 10/4: I understand that Apple Australia employee email accounts are the first letter of their first name, then their last name @asia.apple.com – so Joe Smith would be jsmith@asia.apple.com if people want to contact someone within Apple about their SuperDrive issues as well…..
If you haven’t been following the SuperDrive Petition then you might have missed that Apple have taken in my 12″ Powerbook for testing. Apple Sydney sent 2 DVD discs down to my AppleStore that I’ve been dealing with on this to test if the drive is indeed faulty. I thought I’d expand this test and also provided 4 blank DVDs to test. The results are very interesting:
- Ritek 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 26 mins to burn 4Gb.
- Princo 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
- Yoshi 8x DVD+R. Available Speeds: 2x. 25 mins to burn 4Gb
- Datacell 4x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
- Apple 8x DVD-R. Available Speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x. 12 mins to burn 4Gb
- TDK 16x DVD-R. Available SPeeds: 1x, 2x. 29 mins to burn 4Gb
In summary, only ONE of the discs worked as expected (Apple supplied the last two). These results have been sent to Apple, and I’m awaiting their reply with great interest.