Chimes of Death

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The Chimes of Death, also known as "Hawaiian Death Chimes", are the Macintosh equivalent of an IBM PC POST error beep.

Often, the Chimes of Death are accompanied by a Sad Mac icon in the middle of the screen.

Different Macintosh series used different death chimes. The Macintosh II was the first to use death chimes (an upward major arpeggio, with different chimes on many models). The Macintosh Quadra, Centris, Performa, LC and the Mac Classic played the upward major arpeggio with the first four notes from the theme of The Twilight Zone added to the end, again with slight variations depending on the series. The Macintosh Quadra AV used a bongo drum sound, while the Performa series used a car crash sound. The Power Macintosh and Performa 6200 and 6300 series, along with the Power Macintosh upgrade card, used a 3-note brass fanfare. The pre-G3 PCI PowerMacs, the beige G3 PowerMacs and the G3 All-In-One used a sound of glass breaking.

Since the introduction of Mac OS X in early 2001, the Chimes of Death are no longer used. In place of them and the Sad Mac logo, there is a new symbol called the prohibitory sign [1].

One can hear the death chimes of any Mac by downloading Mactracker, a program with information about older Macs, including a sample of any Mac's start-up and death chimes.