Month: October 2012

Apple recently announced that certain iMacs with 1TB Seagate hard drives are eligible for replacement. If you have one iMac it’s easy to check it on their website here.

However if you have a lot of iMacs at your company you might prefer to do this a bit more quickly! The following command can be sent via ARD:

curl  "https://supportform.apple.com/201107/SerialNumberEligibilityAction.do?cb=iMacHDCheck.response&sn=$(ioreg -c "IOPlatformExpertDevice" | awk -F '"' '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ {print $4}')" 2>/dev/null

To explain: It’s using curl to send a request to the Apple URL, the sn= field is populated with the results of the ioreg command, which is cleaned up with awk (thanks OS X Hints), stderr of curl is sent to /dev/null so you don’t get the download/progress output that curl usually displays.

Another variation is if you already have a list of serial numbers, separated with some sort of whitespace. You can put them in a bash variable and loop though them locally:

serialNumbers="QP0231XXXPK
QP0240XXYRU
D25FP1TXXXJT
QP6481XXXUW"

for number in $serialNumbers; do echo $number $(curl "https://supportform.apple.com/201107/SerialNumberEligibilityAction.do?cb=iMacHDCheck.response&sn=$number" 2>/dev/null); done

This outputs the serial number queried and the response from the Apple server on each line. E03 the response you’ll be looking for. I’ll leave it to you the reader if you want to do any additional cleanup of the output, here’s a sample:

QP0231XXXPK iMacHDCheck.response({"ERROR_CODE":"E08","ERROR_DESC":"Valid iMac SN but WoM is outside of program range"})
QP0240XXXRU iMacHDCheck.response({"ERROR_CODE":"E03","ERROR_DESC":"Valid iMac SN has Seagate HDD - covered by program"})
D25FP1TXXXJT iMacHDCheck.response({"ERROR_CODE":"E07","ERROR_DESC":"Valid iMac SN with NO Seagate HDD"})
QP6481XXXUW iMacHDCheck.response({"ERROR_CODE":"E02","ERROR_DESC":"Serial ID is not iMac."})