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My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809. Supervisor refused the waive the fee. The screen cracked for no apparent reason and then completely stopped w

My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809. Supervisor refused the waive the fee. The screen cracked for no apparent reason and then completely stopped working. Some firm already filed a class action complaint, and I submitted my details: https://classlawdc.com/2021/08/04/m1-macbook-screen-crack-investigation/ https://classlawdc.com/2021/08/04/m1-macbook-screen-crack-in...

rowanG077 4y ago
While I believe $800 is way too much I do actually believe the screen is an extremely expensive component. It's a 120hz microled screen with a very good webcam. I wouldn't be surprised it's the most expensive part on a mbp.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Correction: MiniLED not microLED
- newaccount74 4y ago
  I agree that the screen is fantastic, but you are wrong about the webcam. The webcam on the new 14"/16" Macbook Pros is complete crap.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Then why does the notch exist? And compared to what is it crap, webcams have always been utter shit if you compare it to smartphones or dedicated video cameras. If I look at a review comparing the Intel based Mac webcam and the 14 inch Macbook pro webcam you see how insanely better it is: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-2021-14-inch https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-2021-14-inch
    - newaccount74 4y ago
      I made some side by side photos and videos (that I don't want to share because of privacy) of Macbook Pro 2015, M1 Macbook Air 2020, 16" M1 Macbook Pro 2021, and the front facing camera of a cheap android phone. My conclusion: - the only good camera is the front facing camera of the cheap android phone - the 2015 MBP camera has low resolution and lots of noise, but the image at least looks natural - the images from the M1 Macs look very similar. They added extreme smoothing to hide the noise. The result is that there is no details at all in the images. Skin looks unnaturally smooth and facial hair is a blurry mess. When you move your head, there are weird artefacts near the eyes. - comparing M1 Macbook Air 2020 and M1 Macbook Pro 2021 looks similar, except the smoothing seems even stronger on the 2021 Macbook Pro - even in perfect lighting the resolution of the camera is very low. There is no way this is actually a 1080p camera. The 720p image of the 2015 Macbook Pro has more detail than the cameras in the new Macs. - the only good thing about the cameras in the M1 Macs is the low light performance. The algorithm is pretty good at producing a usable image even in very low light. It's really not a good camera. It really sucks. Everything else about this laptop is perfect: The display, the speakers, the keyboard -- everything is wonderful, apart from the fact that whenever I facetime with someone I look like a blurry mess.
umvi 4y ago
> My 14" M1 MacBook Pro repair cost was $809 My custom Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC built from parts cost less than this, so a repair of this magnitude just boggles my mind. At that point just buy yourself a new computer.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  May I ask how long the battery lasts on your your Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC?
  - jxy 4y ago
    You can last a "full day" on AAA batteries. A manageable configuration is likely double-suitcase with copper link, each contains 10000 Alkaline AAA batteries.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    A CMOS battery lasts probably something around 5 years.
    - qbasic_forever 4y ago
      Does it scale down your graphics and sound to look like Tiger handheld LCD games when you're gaming on the CMOS battery?
      - Krasnol 4y ago
        I plug it in just the same way I'd do with a gaming laptop.
- wtallis 4y ago
  Is a desktop whose price doesn't include any display really the best comparison you could come up with for a discussion of laptop display repairs?
  - brewdad 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
So after all the hype that I have heard about the Apple Silicon computers, it seems like it takes a screen crack to make it useless and issue a repair cost of almost the price of a new one. Especially when as soon as the computer fails to boot or stops working, you have lost all data on the computer as the data cannot be recovered. Sounds like a total scam. Glad I never bought one on launch day.
- heartbreak 4y ago
  How did we get from a broken screen to unrecoverable data? MacBooks can book with an external display connected.
- z9znz 4y ago
  Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype. This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. It rarely even gets warm, even with Docker, several containers, JetBrains IDEs, Spotify, Firefox with a million tabs, etc. all going. > the data cannot be recovered For most HN readers, not having an adequate active backup/cloud sync system is difficult to imagine. When you can transfer about 1GB/s to a modern fast solid state external drive, plus we mostly have fast internet, it's easy to have live and periodic physical and remote backups. If there's a scam to be found, it's that Apple has a real problem affecting more than a few users, but they are denying it. The scam is not in the computer but in the warranty/repair practices.
  - Ycombigatorz 4y ago
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype. > This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. According to the comments in the apple forum thread, this bug affects people with older Intel-based MBPs as well. Taking the thread at face value, if this is a super common issue, then your coworkers should also have observed significant numbers of "random failures" on their legacy Intel MBPs because those laptops too are cited in that "50 page thread" as being subject to this supposed failure mode. Do you find that to match your experience? It is, of course, unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just a catch-all for people who damaged their screens (micro-fracture) from various drops/impacts, and then over time the micro-fracture eventually worked and became a macro-fracture. They do that - glass can be damaged without actually being visibly damaged until you put it under a microscope, and then some later much smaller stress (even just thermal stress) causes it to fracture along the weak spot. 50 pages of people sounds like a lot, but Macs are the most popular single-series laptop in production (other laptops have more in total, but it's fractured over many manufacturers and series) and if that translates to 500 posts / 200 unique users who broke their screen, across 10 years of usage... that's not actually all that much, or that surprising. Once it hits the internet it gets blown all out of proportion... remember when RX 480s were "killing motherboards", or NVIDIA GPUs killing themselves due to "bad drivers", or EVGA 1080s were "dying en-masse" due to bad VRMs? Remember POSCAP vs MLCC on Ampere GPUs? Once a social-media pitchfork mob gets started, it becomes basically impossible to measure because all kinds of random failures get attributed to The Current Thing and people trumpet every random failure as being evidence of it. I'd believe there are some amount of "childhood mortality" in a screen - the person in this thread whose screen delaminated right in the middle after a couple weeks isn't the only person to have a bad screen. But it's very difficult to distinguish which users have that, and which users just dropped it and then later had a crack start working at that fracture point. And once it becomes public that there's "an issue" (regardless of if a significant issue actually exists) there is a huge amount of piling-in where everyone whose screen ever micro-fractured from a previous bump will pop up and tell you about their screen that "randomly shattered". Genuine question but how is a manufacturer supposed to handle that? Let's say Framework puts out a glass screen model. Do you just give everyone who says their screen shattered a replacement screen? So you're providing unlimited warranty screens for customers who aren't being careful but know to say "it did that by itself"? Do you limit it to one freebie per customer? What if that one also shatters? Do you just do it for the first 3 months, and what happens when someone says theirs shattered after 4 months? And any customers you let fall through the cracks will post a thread like this one about how you've wronged them... Worst of all Apple is involved here, and that just sets people off like crazy. I know I'm going to get various un-civil responses for all this. There’s no question that the design of the screen is certainly worryingly fragile, but, I really don’t think that all of these are truly manufacturing faults, they’re people bumping an overly fragile design and then later having a micro-fractured screen start working on them.
haunter 4y ago
And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. Even if the screen broke you can probably buy a 3rd party one from Aliexpress for $100. But $800 for a replacement one? I’d rather sell the MBP for parts on eBay and buy a new one if must then pay that much. Like you would get more for that with a broken screen for sure, some people would fix it on their own or use it as a desktop computer. But I don’t have a SV engineer salary so what do I know
- z9znz 4y ago
  > And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. Most people is a sketchy expression, but I would venture a guess that "most people" buy cheap laptops because they don't really care, they don't know how to adequately judge which ones are worth more, and they also just don't want to spend much on a computer. It's hard to imagine, but "most people" actually care little about computers.
  - comprev 4y ago
    For many people outside of HN demographic $500 is a lot of money for "a computer" A macbook would be like buying a top spec Mercedes when all they need is a no frills base model Ford.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      That used to be true, but somehow Apple gets them. Probably still more true of non-mac computers - where high-end sales I imagine are almost exclusively to businesses and gamers.
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Except the Mercedes is actually repairable.
      - asdff 4y ago
        Not anymore
      - 4y ago
threeseed 4y ago
I just had my 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen crack a few days ago and it was replaced for free. Be curious about your circumstances whether it was repaired at an Apple Store and when this happened. Perhaps there is a policy that isn't being disseminated around properly.
- volkl48 4y ago
  The magic term is this: "single hairline crack". If there is one continuous crack with no point of impact or other obvious damage, it will generally be covered under warranty (assuming you are under warranty) and not considered accidental damage. That was policy in the past and I doubt it's changed. If there is more than one, in any way - not covered unless someone's being nice to you.
- bozhark 4y ago
  Sounds like Apple might be aware it’s their fault now. Perhaps they were intending on keeping that a customer responsibility for the comment above yours.
  - millzlane 4y ago
    The warranty has always covered a single hairline crack. If there are multiple cracks, chips, or a POI on the outside of the glass. It's clear as day what happened to the screen. I can't count on my hands or toes how many people will say they don't know what happened to the physically damaged machine. Maybe someone else broke it and they didn't know. But I can tell you that we fix more physically damaged machines than we do single hairline cracks. So I would say this isn't a huge issue that people make it out to be. I think it's more plausible that people are surprise that their really expensive super thin and sleek computer breaks when it's physically damaged.
    - Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
      To me the super thinness out right screams to being part of the cause. Without taking one apart to confirm it for myself, going off past patterns I would guess Apple have thinned the lid and the display past its limits under every day use (not lab conditions). Pair that with People having got used to using a single hand to open/close their screen, heck even Apples marketing pushed one finger lid openning/closing. So people are not closing their screens "carefully" from both sides with two hands any more (and haven't been doing so for many years, as its easier to close a laptop lid than open it). But with thinness comes lack of rigidity, so closing the screen with a single hand unless you do it smack bang in the middle I would guess is putting more strain on one side of the lid leading to a premeture screen failure. Basically "Bendgate" all over again. But its not the first time we seen screen issues on macbooks come to light once the devices where in the hands of real world people. Look at the stage light defect which for the longest time Apple denied as a fault https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-backlight-service https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-... which turned out to be that the flex cable was just a smidge too short and repeated normal use damaged the flex cable. I'm not saying the customers are not at fault. <edit>Heck I've seen plently of dropped devices and the customer swears on their first born they didn't do nothing. Until you point out the impact damage and suddenly it all comes flooding back to them.</edit> I just see a repeating pattern and would like to dig into it more before I dismiss the customer saying they don't know what happened.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809. I was quoted, for the MacBook Air screen repair (it died overnight), 490 EUR VAT included in Belgium. Paid the M1 MacBook Air 1020 EUR or so 10 months ago. In addition to the price being ludicrous, I've got an interest close to zero in owning a laptop which can suddenly stop working for no reason. Serious build quality issues: I think it's simply a piece of shit and has to be called for what it is, regardless of whether replacement parts are highway robbery (which they are) or not.
fezfight 4y ago
I wonder if Tim Cook has a lot invested in rare earth mining companies or something.
phoenixreader 4y ago
But there is a product defect class action lawsuit against Apple literally every two years. Apple must treat it as a cost of business at this point. 2009 (macbook display): https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/222100056/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-against-apple-over-allegedly-defective-displays.htm https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/222100056/ju... 2012 (Iphone display): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/judge-tosses-lawsuit-over-cracked-iphone-4-glass/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/judge-tosses-lawsuit... 2013 (macbook motherboard): https://www.law360.com/commercialcontracts/articles/485286/apple-shuts-down-faulty-macbook-class-action https://www.law360.com/commercialcontracts/articles/485286/a... 2015 (macbook motherboard): https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/09/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-over-allegedly-faulty-apple-macbook-logic-boards https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/09/judge-dismisses-l... 2017 (using refurbished parts): https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-kills-apple-warranty-class-action/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-kills-apple-warranty-cl... 2019 (butterfly keyboard): https://www.girardsharp.com/newsroom-news-apple-keyboard-order https://www.girardsharp.com/newsroom-news-apple-keyboard-ord... All of them are dismissed. The last one got settled for $50 million, which is peanuts. Edit: looks like the judge already dismissed this new one too... https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/5--21-cv-07109/Almeida_v._Apple_Inc/40/ https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri... (technically a different class action lawsuit, but it alleges the same facts)
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > Apple must treat it as a cost of business at this point. As should every company, because it is. Not saying Apple SHOULDN'T make decent equipment, but nothing is perfect so these things just have to be part of the accounting/business plan. They clearly are relying on their customers' brand loyalty as part of that calculation, and that + cheaping out or whatever else is causing these bi-annual issues is clearly more profit than fixing them.
9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
Do you have a photo of the crack before it was repaired? Apple Technicians have access to a document that provides instruction on how to classify (in warranty / out of warranty) display cracks. There are actually plenty of display issues that look like the result of physical damage, but are instead categorized as 'in-warranty' by Apple's documentation. Reach out to me at my username at gmail.com, I can maybe help you if you have a photo of the screen before it was replaced.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rowanG077 4y ago

While I believe $800 is way too much I do actually believe the screen is an extremely expensive component. It's a 120hz microled screen with a very good webcam. I wouldn't be surprised it's the most expensive part on a mbp.

rowanG077 4y ago
Correction: MiniLED not microLED
newaccount74 4y ago
I agree that the screen is fantastic, but you are wrong about the webcam. The webcam on the new 14"/16" Macbook Pros is complete crap.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Then why does the notch exist? And compared to what is it crap, webcams have always been utter shit if you compare it to smartphones or dedicated video cameras. If I look at a review comparing the Intel based Mac webcam and the 14 inch Macbook pro webcam you see how insanely better it is: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-2021-14-inch https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/macbook-pro-2021-14-inch
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    I made some side by side photos and videos (that I don't want to share because of privacy) of Macbook Pro 2015, M1 Macbook Air 2020, 16" M1 Macbook Pro 2021, and the front facing camera of a cheap android phone. My conclusion: - the only good camera is the front facing camera of the cheap android phone - the 2015 MBP camera has low resolution and lots of noise, but the image at least looks natural - the images from the M1 Macs look very similar. They added extreme smoothing to hide the noise. The result is that there is no details at all in the images. Skin looks unnaturally smooth and facial hair is a blurry mess. When you move your head, there are weird artefacts near the eyes. - comparing M1 Macbook Air 2020 and M1 Macbook Pro 2021 looks similar, except the smoothing seems even stronger on the 2021 Macbook Pro - even in perfect lighting the resolution of the camera is very low. There is no way this is actually a 1080p camera. The 720p image of the 2015 Macbook Pro has more detail than the cameras in the new Macs. - the only good thing about the cameras in the M1 Macs is the low light performance. The algorithm is pretty good at producing a usable image even in very low light. It's really not a good camera. It really sucks. Everything else about this laptop is perfect: The display, the speakers, the keyboard -- everything is wonderful, apart from the fact that whenever I facetime with someone I look like a blurry mess.

umvi 4y ago

> My 14" M1 MacBook Pro repair cost was $809 My custom Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC built from parts cost less than this, so a repair of this magnitude just boggles my mind. At that point just buy yourself a new computer.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
May I ask how long the battery lasts on your your Ryzen 7/RX 570 Linux PC?
- jxy 4y ago
  You can last a "full day" on AAA batteries. A manageable configuration is likely double-suitcase with copper link, each contains 10000 Alkaline AAA batteries.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  A CMOS battery lasts probably something around 5 years.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Does it scale down your graphics and sound to look like Tiger handheld LCD games when you're gaming on the CMOS battery?
    - Krasnol 4y ago
      I plug it in just the same way I'd do with a gaming laptop.
wtallis 4y ago
Is a desktop whose price doesn't include any display really the best comparison you could come up with for a discussion of laptop display repairs?
- brewdad 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

So after all the hype that I have heard about the Apple Silicon computers, it seems like it takes a screen crack to make it useless and issue a repair cost of almost the price of a new one. Especially when as soon as the computer fails to boot or stops working, you have lost all data on the computer as the data cannot be recovered. Sounds like a total scam. Glad I never bought one on launch day.

heartbreak 4y ago
How did we get from a broken screen to unrecoverable data? MacBooks can book with an external display connected.
z9znz 4y ago
Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype. This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. It rarely even gets warm, even with Docker, several containers, JetBrains IDEs, Spotify, Firefox with a million tabs, etc. all going. > the data cannot be recovered For most HN readers, not having an adequate active backup/cloud sync system is difficult to imagine. When you can transfer about 1GB/s to a modern fast solid state external drive, plus we mostly have fast internet, it's easy to have live and periodic physical and remote backups. If there's a scam to be found, it's that Apple has a real problem affecting more than a few users, but they are denying it. The scam is not in the computer but in the warranty/repair practices.
- Ycombigatorz 4y ago
- paulmd 4y ago
  > Obviously there is a defect problem affecting some of the new Macbooks, and Apple needs to step up and take responsibility. But that said, I personally think the Apple Silicon computers (the Air in particular) are worthy of the hype. > This 1 year old M1 Air with 16GB RAM is twice as fast as my colleagues' Intel MBPs (comparing same year devices), and it's _silent_. According to the comments in the apple forum thread, this bug affects people with older Intel-based MBPs as well. Taking the thread at face value, if this is a super common issue, then your coworkers should also have observed significant numbers of "random failures" on their legacy Intel MBPs because those laptops too are cited in that "50 page thread" as being subject to this supposed failure mode. Do you find that to match your experience? It is, of course, unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just a catch-all for people who damaged their screens (micro-fracture) from various drops/impacts, and then over time the micro-fracture eventually worked and became a macro-fracture. They do that - glass can be damaged without actually being visibly damaged until you put it under a microscope, and then some later much smaller stress (even just thermal stress) causes it to fracture along the weak spot. 50 pages of people sounds like a lot, but Macs are the most popular single-series laptop in production (other laptops have more in total, but it's fractured over many manufacturers and series) and if that translates to 500 posts / 200 unique users who broke their screen, across 10 years of usage... that's not actually all that much, or that surprising. Once it hits the internet it gets blown all out of proportion... remember when RX 480s were "killing motherboards", or NVIDIA GPUs killing themselves due to "bad drivers", or EVGA 1080s were "dying en-masse" due to bad VRMs? Remember POSCAP vs MLCC on Ampere GPUs? Once a social-media pitchfork mob gets started, it becomes basically impossible to measure because all kinds of random failures get attributed to The Current Thing and people trumpet every random failure as being evidence of it. I'd believe there are some amount of "childhood mortality" in a screen - the person in this thread whose screen delaminated right in the middle after a couple weeks isn't the only person to have a bad screen. But it's very difficult to distinguish which users have that, and which users just dropped it and then later had a crack start working at that fracture point. And once it becomes public that there's "an issue" (regardless of if a significant issue actually exists) there is a huge amount of piling-in where everyone whose screen ever micro-fractured from a previous bump will pop up and tell you about their screen that "randomly shattered". Genuine question but how is a manufacturer supposed to handle that? Let's say Framework puts out a glass screen model. Do you just give everyone who says their screen shattered a replacement screen? So you're providing unlimited warranty screens for customers who aren't being careful but know to say "it did that by itself"? Do you limit it to one freebie per customer? What if that one also shatters? Do you just do it for the first 3 months, and what happens when someone says theirs shattered after 4 months? And any customers you let fall through the cracks will post a thread like this one about how you've wronged them... Worst of all Apple is involved here, and that just sets people off like crazy. I know I'm going to get various un-civil responses for all this. There’s no question that the design of the screen is certainly worryingly fragile, but, I really don’t think that all of these are truly manufacturing faults, they’re people bumping an overly fragile design and then later having a micro-fractured screen start working on them.

haunter 4y ago

And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. Even if the screen broke you can probably buy a 3rd party one from Aliexpress for $100. But $800 for a replacement one? I’d rather sell the MBP for parts on eBay and buy a new one if must then pay that much. Like you would get more for that with a broken screen for sure, some people would fix it on their own or use it as a desktop computer. But I don’t have a SV engineer salary so what do I know

z9znz 4y ago
> And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. Most people is a sketchy expression, but I would venture a guess that "most people" buy cheap laptops because they don't really care, they don't know how to adequately judge which ones are worth more, and they also just don't want to spend much on a computer. It's hard to imagine, but "most people" actually care little about computers.
- comprev 4y ago
  For many people outside of HN demographic $500 is a lot of money for "a computer" A macbook would be like buying a top spec Mercedes when all they need is a no frills base model Ford.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    That used to be true, but somehow Apple gets them. Probably still more true of non-mac computers - where high-end sales I imagine are almost exclusively to businesses and gamers.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Except the Mercedes is actually repairable.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Not anymore
    - 4y ago

threeseed 4y ago

I just had my 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen crack a few days ago and it was replaced for free. Be curious about your circumstances whether it was repaired at an Apple Store and when this happened. Perhaps there is a policy that isn't being disseminated around properly.

volkl48 4y ago
The magic term is this: "single hairline crack". If there is one continuous crack with no point of impact or other obvious damage, it will generally be covered under warranty (assuming you are under warranty) and not considered accidental damage. That was policy in the past and I doubt it's changed. If there is more than one, in any way - not covered unless someone's being nice to you.
bozhark 4y ago
Sounds like Apple might be aware it’s their fault now. Perhaps they were intending on keeping that a customer responsibility for the comment above yours.
- millzlane 4y ago
  The warranty has always covered a single hairline crack. If there are multiple cracks, chips, or a POI on the outside of the glass. It's clear as day what happened to the screen. I can't count on my hands or toes how many people will say they don't know what happened to the physically damaged machine. Maybe someone else broke it and they didn't know. But I can tell you that we fix more physically damaged machines than we do single hairline cracks. So I would say this isn't a huge issue that people make it out to be. I think it's more plausible that people are surprise that their really expensive super thin and sleek computer breaks when it's physically damaged.
  - Crosseye_Jack 4y ago
    To me the super thinness out right screams to being part of the cause. Without taking one apart to confirm it for myself, going off past patterns I would guess Apple have thinned the lid and the display past its limits under every day use (not lab conditions). Pair that with People having got used to using a single hand to open/close their screen, heck even Apples marketing pushed one finger lid openning/closing. So people are not closing their screens "carefully" from both sides with two hands any more (and haven't been doing so for many years, as its easier to close a laptop lid than open it). But with thinness comes lack of rigidity, so closing the screen with a single hand unless you do it smack bang in the middle I would guess is putting more strain on one side of the lid leading to a premeture screen failure. Basically "Bendgate" all over again. But its not the first time we seen screen issues on macbooks come to light once the devices where in the hands of real world people. Look at the stage light defect which for the longest time Apple denied as a fault https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-backlight-service https://support.apple.com/en-gb/13-inch-macbook-pro-display-... which turned out to be that the flex cable was just a smidge too short and repeated normal use damaged the flex cable. I'm not saying the customers are not at fault. <edit>Heck I've seen plently of dropped devices and the customer swears on their first born they didn't do nothing. Until you point out the impact damage and suddenly it all comes flooding back to them.</edit> I just see a repeating pattern and would like to dig into it more before I dismiss the customer saying they don't know what happened.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> My 14" M1 MacBook Pro screen repair cost was $809. I was quoted, for the MacBook Air screen repair (it died overnight), 490 EUR VAT included in Belgium. Paid the M1 MacBook Air 1020 EUR or so 10 months ago. In addition to the price being ludicrous, I've got an interest close to zero in owning a laptop which can suddenly stop working for no reason. Serious build quality issues: I think it's simply a piece of shit and has to be called for what it is, regardless of whether replacement parts are highway robbery (which they are) or not.

fezfight 4y ago

I wonder if Tim Cook has a lot invested in rare earth mining companies or something.

phoenixreader 4y ago

But there is a product defect class action lawsuit against Apple literally every two years. Apple must treat it as a cost of business at this point. 2009 (macbook display): https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/222100056/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-against-apple-over-allegedly-defective-displays.htm https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/222100056/ju... 2012 (Iphone display): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/judge-tosses-lawsuit-over-cracked-iphone-4-glass/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/judge-tosses-lawsuit... 2013 (macbook motherboard): https://www.law360.com/commercialcontracts/articles/485286/apple-shuts-down-faulty-macbook-class-action https://www.law360.com/commercialcontracts/articles/485286/a... 2015 (macbook motherboard): https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/09/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-over-allegedly-faulty-apple-macbook-logic-boards https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/09/judge-dismisses-l... 2017 (using refurbished parts): https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-kills-apple-warranty-class-action/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-kills-apple-warranty-cl... 2019 (butterfly keyboard): https://www.girardsharp.com/newsroom-news-apple-keyboard-order https://www.girardsharp.com/newsroom-news-apple-keyboard-ord... All of them are dismissed. The last one got settled for $50 million, which is peanuts. Edit: looks like the judge already dismissed this new one too... https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/5--21-cv-07109/Almeida_v._Apple_Inc/40/ https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri... (technically a different class action lawsuit, but it alleges the same facts)

michaelcampbell 4y ago
> Apple must treat it as a cost of business at this point. As should every company, because it is. Not saying Apple SHOULDN'T make decent equipment, but nothing is perfect so these things just have to be part of the accounting/business plan. They clearly are relying on their customers' brand loyalty as part of that calculation, and that + cheaping out or whatever else is causing these bi-annual issues is clearly more profit than fixing them.

9935c101ab17a66 4y ago

Do you have a photo of the crack before it was repaired? Apple Technicians have access to a document that provides instruction on how to classify (in warranty / out of warranty) display cracks. There are actually plenty of display issues that look like the result of physical damage, but are instead categorized as 'in-warranty' by Apple's documentation. Reach out to me at my username at gmail.com, I can maybe help you if you have a photo of the screen before it was replaced.

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