A closer look
Apple III computers shipped with a catastrophic design flaw in 1980 because Steve Jobs insisted on not including a cooling fan to keep the machine quiet, which caused the motherboard chips to physically expand and pop out of their sockets when they overheated. The official troubleshooting advice from Apple customer support was to literally lift the computer two inches off the desk and violently drop it, forcing the chips to snap back into their proper places. It is a staggering reminder that the world's most valuable and supposedly sophisticated hardware company once told consumers that blunt-force trauma was an acceptable corporate strategy for fixing a three-thousand-dollar piece of defective machinery
