Mac Resource Inspector - Apple Store

I went to the Apple store the other day with Valerie to get her MacBook battery looked at. In years past, the technician at the Genius Bar usually would just run some diagnostics or maybe even use a couple tools from a bootable CD.They have quite a cool setup nowadays though. They now take your computer, and plug in an ethernet cable and netboot the machine. I am unsure at this point if the netboot server is local to each Apple Store or perhaps it is calling to the mother ship. I am going to research this further and see what I can find out.

Once booting, it asks “Do you have the customer’s permission to run this?” and you hit yes, a few OS 9 looking progress bars go by, and it automatically runs through a complete systems diagnostics and gives you a summary read out of all the system’s components.

Here is a quick photo I took of the laptop after it finished running the diagnostic

You can see that the summary is saying the battery is indeed bad. It also has a warning on the hard drive, this is due to the hard drive not being the stock hard drive but an upgrade.

I would love to have this tool at work running on a server for troubleshooting systems. Hell, I would love to have this at home for troubleshooting!

Going to do more research on this for sure. If you know anything about this setup, please comment below!