A developer Friday told AppleInsider the drive on his Mac mini was only used a handful of times before the attempted install of Snow Leopard. After he inserted the installation disc for Mac OS X 10.6, the drive would not mount any other optical discs. Now, he said, the drive will not read or write any CD or DVD.
“Unfortunately, I have not been able to get Apple’s cooperation on resolving this,” the developer said. “For now, I am advising all my Mac clients not to upgrade and I am not guaranteeing that any solution I build will run on Snow Leopard.”
He also cited a colleague who had a similar problem on a two-year-old MacBook Pro. After the user attempted to install Snow Leopard, an error code was displayed. The drive would read CDs, but stopped mounting DVDs. When Apple replaced the SuperDrive in the MacBook Pro, the problem was not resolved.
The SuperDrive is the most mechanical component in any Mac — with even more parts then a hard drive. These things fail.
I was working as a Mac Genius when 10.5 came out, and we saw a bunch of dead optical drives and hard drives the weeks after the launch. It’s not hard to understand why — the two parts have to move a lot of data during an OS install. It’s like having a sprained ankle — you can walk around your house just fine, but if you try to run, it’s going to hurt like hell.
Now at an Apple-Authorized Service Provider, I’ve seen the same thing with 10.6. This isn’t unusual, and having two failures back to back — like in AppleInsider’s anecdote — isn’t unheard of either. The unit may have had a bigger issue, or the customer’s replacement drive was bad out of the box. Sucky? Sure. Unusual? Not especially.