Category:Apple Documentation

📖 Apple Documentation
Apple Books, Service Guides and More

This category holds the general Apple and third-party Macintosh literature on this wiki: Apple's own non-service publications, the repair books, the LaserWriter service-training manuals and the owner-level guides. Apple's own machine service manuals are in Apple Service Source; the programming and compiler books are in Apple Programming Documentation. The repair-relevant titles here are pulled out with what each one is good for on Macintosh Repair Resources.

The documents here that are genuinely component-level

Apple published almost nothing below module level for its computers. These four third-party books are the exception, and they are the reason several capacitor and fault pages on this wiki have a source at all:

Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets — Larry Pina, Hayden Books, first edition second printing, 1990, 365 pp. Component-level work on the 128K, 512K, Plus and SE.
Macintosh II Repair and Upgrade Secrets — Pina's Macintosh II companion, Brady, 1991, 283 pp. The page title omits the year; the file is named for it.
The Dead Mac Scrolls — Pina, Peachpit Press / Goldstein & Blair, 1992, 489 pp: symptom-to-repair, board level, machine by machine.
Troubleshooting Your Macintosh 1992 — Douglass High, M&T Books, 1992, 471 pp. User-level rather than board-level, but its chapter 11 is the reference here for the physical AppleTalk network: termination, noisy nodes, circular networks and the cable limit.

They are secondary sources. Where one of them disagrees with Apple's own service documentation, the Apple document wins.

Apple's LaserWriter service training

Apple's Service Training participant manuals, all Version 1.1, 1996, and all Apple-authored:

LaserWriter II Service Course — 79 pp, the whole LaserWriter II family
LaserWriter Pro 600/630 Service Course — 54 pp
LaserWriter Select Service Course — 65 pp
Personal LaserWriter SC/NT/LS Service Course — 76 pp

Older and larger: Service Support Tranning Programs Laserwriter Technical Procedures Jan 1985 is a 236-page Apple Service Support Training Programs binder containing six separate documents; its centrepiece is Apple's own LaserWriter Printer Technical Procedures (rev. Jan and Feb 1985), which carries the Laser Power Adjustment (P/N 011-7052) and Image Skew Adjustment (P/N 011-7051) procedures and the fuser assembly part number 699-0306 — none of which is in the later Service Source LaserWriter volumes. Both the file and the page title misspell "Training". For context on why that printer mattered, Macworld August 2010 Four Reasons Why The Laserwriter Mattered 2010 is a two-page 2010 magazine article, not a manual.

Apple's own non-service publications

The Basic Elements Of Design Apple Computer 1991 — Apple Computer, 1991, 80 pp, from the Apple Publishing System series
Macintosh XL Screen Kit — Apple, 1985, part number 030-1240-A, 28 pp; the MacWorks XL screen kit
Programming with AppleTalk 1991 — Michael Peirce, Addison-Wesley Macintosh Inside Out, 1991, 278 pp. Held here as two scans, both linked from that page

Owner-level books and general references

The four editions of The Macintosh Bible — 1st (1986, 435 pp) · 2nd (1988–89, 771 pp) · 3rd (1991, 1,126 pp) · 4th (1987–92, 1,262 pp) — and:

The Apple Macintosh Primer 1984 (Sadler / DATAMOST, Reston, 1984, 113 pp) · Presenting the Macintosh 1984 (Miller and Myers, dilithium Press, 1984, 125 pp)
The Apple Macintosh Book, 2nd ed. (Cary Lu, Microsoft Press, 1985, 422 pp) and 3rd ed. (Lu with Chu, 1988, 395 pp)
Under the Apple 1987 (Bornstein, 1987, 363 pp, on desk accessories) · The Color Mac 1992 (Miller and Zaucha, Hayden, 1992, 333 pp) · The Tao of AppleScript 1993 (Schneider for BMUG, Hayden, 1993, 311 pp)
The PowerPC Macintosh Book 1994 (Somogyi, Addison-Wesley, 1994, 241 pp) · The Power Mac Book 1995 (Pronk, Coriolis, 1995, 411 pp)
The Great Macintosh Easter Egg Hunt 1998 — David Pogue, Berkley Books, 1998, 140 pp. A catalogue of hidden messages and jokes in Apple hardware and software, expressly unauthorised by Apple in its own copyright page. Nothing serviceable in it

None of the books in this last group is a repair source. They carry no schematic, no parts list and no component value, and no figure on this wiki should be cited from any of them. They are useful for establishing what a machine shipped with and how it was meant to behave.

Pages here whose file was never uploaded

Programming The Laserwriter 1991 names a document that is not on this wiki — both the embed and the download link are dead. The page is kept so the gap is visible, and asserts nothing about the document.