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IT Apple Technology

MacBook Pro Stage Light Fault: Apple's Design Turns $6 Fix Into a $600 Nightmare (9to5mac.com) 166

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some MacBook Pro owners have complained of a 'stage light' effect, where they see uneven backlighting at the bottom of the display. For some, the symptom is only the first stage, with the backlight failing altogether. iFixit says that it has identified the cause -- and the way in which Apple changed the design of the Touch Bar generation for the MacBook Pro turns what would otherwise be a $6 fix into a $600 nightmare. The problem, says the company, is caused by Apple using much thinner ribbon cables instead of the thicker wires used in previous generation MacBook Pro models.
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MacBook Pro Stage Light Fault: Apple's Design Turns $6 Fix Into a $600 Nightmare

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  • by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:10PM (#58002066) Homepage Journal
    The article says the problem is the cables, but due to the design the entire display unit needs to be thrown in a landfill and replaced with a new one. Yet I always see tech companies talk about being "green", but they have moved away from designs that minimize waste. And I don't buy that "our parts are recycled" garbage. It all just gets sent to China where a "recycler" dumps it somewhere.
    • by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:22PM (#58002154)
      Don't be stupid, they don't just dump circuit boards like that!!! They have valuable metals in them. You burn them in a smoking heap, and when you can get close enough without hacking your lungs up, you recover the valuable bits. Then you dump it somewhere.
    • by Zorro ( 15797 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:25PM (#58002174)

      China no longer accepts recycled electronics. It just gets dumped in Africa now.

    • by blackest_k ( 761565 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:45PM (#58002268) Homepage Journal

      I believe in the quest for a thinner screen they moved the driver board from the screen to the body with some too short cables bridging the gap instead. This can lead to back light failure if you open the screen out too far.
      I like my old macbook pro but I dislike intensely their recent design choices over the last 5 years or so.

      Mag safe a reliable keyboard upgradeable ram ssd / hdd sd card slot all gone and replaced with junk.

      If only you could buy a modern mainboard that would fit in a macbook pro chassis.
      That way keep what is good and upgrade to something more powerful.
           

      • by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:12PM (#58002380)

        In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.

        Apple has backed themselves into a corner. IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price. However, this is only going to get into a negative feedback loop as other device makers come out with $1500 models with folding screens, 3+ cameras, ability to run x86 programs and operating systems, so the phone can run as a desktop PC, and other stuff.

        As for Macs, same thing. Apple needs to look at splitting the Mac line into "toys", stuff that looks great, but has issues, versus "workhorse" machines which may not be as thin... but are well built and can be upgraded if need be. Apple can easily do this... the 2008 MacBooks are a testament to that. Barring that, maybe Apple should spin off the Mac line, a la Claris or Filemaker, and have it designed with something other than Steven King's "Thinner" in mind.

        • by jythie ( 914043 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:50PM (#58002646)
          This.

          I know so many people who use macs for work rather than media consumption, and the have been feeling increasingly abandoned. I would even be happy if they started some kind of official 3rd party system builder program that could still run OSX but had other companies trying to fill the market gaps.
          • Count me as one of them. IMO 2010 seems to have been the turning point. That's when they started using non-replaceable batteries. post-2015 was when they shit the bed entirely, with their idiotic all-TB3 models with the single shittiest keyboards I have ever seen (I'd take their old G3 keyboards over what they have now)

            I'm still using an old 2011 MBP at home for basic stuff, and a MBP 2015 at work. My primary 'heavy hitter' machine is now a thin gaming laptop that dual boots between windows 10 and linux.

        • In general, Apple's form over function has been the cause of a number of big issues. At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.

          Well that wasn't always true and Jobs opinion of "decent" wasn't infallible. But you are right that they seem to have trouble keeping focused without someone at the top playing red-light/green-light. The Mac line seems to have been relegated to the garage and isn't seeing much love these days. The iPad has proven to be nothing more than a supersized iPhone without the ability to make calls - unfortunate since it could be so much more with the right software and a decent stylus (the current ones suck).

          IMHO, they don't seem to be selling as many devices, so they are jacking up the price

          It'

          • Flat sales are definitely not good. Especially with China's economy growing as it is. This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.

            Apple's worst enemy is Apple now. They need to start doing some serious innovation. Something more than adding "5G", another camera, or yanking some feature out of "courage". The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending

            • Flat sales are definitely not good.

              Flat sales are far better than the falling sales of the competition. Esp. in China: https://www.gizmochina.com/201... [gizmochina.com]

            • This means that people are buying Huawei flagships and other Android phones which have more features, both hardware and software.

              After 10 years of Apple phones you still don't get that people don't buy phones just because they have the longest feature list? There have ALWAYS been phones that had more and sometimes better features than the iPhone and yet the iPhone continues to be the best selling phone on the market most of the time. Obviously there is more to it than features. How those features are implemented, what people are accustomed to, ecosystem lock in, and much more all matter.

              The Chinese makers are starting to get ahead of them, and even though Apple is has stashed away more usable spending money than the GDP of a lot of countries, they better start doubling down, otherwise they may end up like Sony... strong brand, but more of a relic of the past than something bringing stuff new and cool.

              More likely Apple just buys their way into a

          • Re:Apple problems (Score:4, Insightful)

            by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @03:23PM (#58003146) Journal

            > as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.

            How could they be? Product features tend to follow a logarithmic curve that asymptotically approaches some steady value. At least in the perception of the consumer. So, for instance, in the early PC days people were likely to dump their current machine when a new architecture came out because it really was substantially faster. Now, Intel or AMD comes out with a faster proc and only a few people care.

            OS has the same issue. Both Apple and M$ have struggled to differentiate their new OS from the previous version, sometimes going backwards in features, or making the interface clunkier, apparently because being different is better than being better. Neither company seems to understand that at some point osx, ios, Windows are good enough, and they should be concentrating on bug fixes and security fixes and just leave the GUI alone for awhile. (WinCE and Windows Mobile were never good enough, and I don't see how they could be fixed. It was just a poor concept.)

            Inevitably, at some point, the iphone approaches Good Enough. There comes a point where making it thinner doesn't add value, it just increases the likelihood of damage and makes the device harder to hold. The rank and file are eventually coming to realize that having the "latest and greatest" isn't worth the money, and that a battery that will no longer take a charge is a poor reason to replace the entire phone. And this is entirely normal. Cell phones as a device have asymptotically approached the point where only minor bug and security fixes are necessary, until such time that the entire concept changes.

            Wildly overcharging on storage, at a time when solid state storage has never been cheaper, isn't helping.

            So it's not just that iphones weren't a big enough improvement, it's that making substantial improvements is becoming more and more difficult.

            I just ordered a phone (my Note 3 is literally coming apart, being held together by scotch tape, and the GPS no longer works) and the new phone (not an iphone) has a quarter TERABYTE of internal storage. In a PHONE. For a total unlocked cost substantially less than $1k. That's equivalent to what's available in my laptop. I don't have a use case for that much storage, but that's what was available. Resources have expanded beyond what regular users can conveniently use.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          At least in the Jobs era, he would not let something ship unless he personally checked it out that things were decent.

          I wonder how he held the iPhone 4? Clearly we were all doing it wrong but he never really how he operated the thing.

        • Oh please, the Jobs era was just as bad. This is a company that sold a transparent-cased PC that cracked under thermal expansion of its metallic parts, sold a phone whose antenna could be shorted by holding it wrong, and also sold defective with defective dvd burners that gave up the ghost prematurely for years. Jobs was just better at barefaced lying.
          • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            I had a 2009 macbook pro with a defective dvd burner, thing is i used that laptop for 5 years before i noticed the dvd burner was defective (it wouldnt even read a dvd, let alone write one)...
            Then i realised it was much better to just get a laptop without a dvd, and use a usb one on the rare occasion i need it.

            • Doesn't change the fact that Apple sold laptops with these defective "SuperDrives" for years and Jobs kept lying about it not being a problem.
      • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:25PM (#58002472)

        The Quest for Thinner and Lighter, is actually causing a lot of problems in general. Remember the Note 7 catching fire. That is because they made the device too thin, and jammed the battery in too tight that it didn't allow for the battery expansion.

        Being that the displays with the computing force behind it, is thinner, then the plastic bevel covering the glass CRT from my first Computer. We are in general (not just Apple) is sacrificing too many features for thin and light, where most of the devices are already not too heavy or too thick to be practical.

        Me I don't care that I lost my headphone jack on my iPhone, but a lot of people do, and I understand why they do mind. The reason for waterproofing, and giving extra space for the battery and keeping it thin and light, we are at a point where thin and light means feature sacrifice, perhaps we should temporarily step away from that goal.

        • by jythie ( 914043 )
          And as much as we want to blame companies for this, ultimately it has been consumers driving the demand for these form factors. Getting consumers to step away is challenging since it means getting large groups of people to consider issues that only have a probability of occuring long after their initial purchase.
          • by Big Boss ( 7354 )

            While consumers are certainly part of the problem, even those of us that would like something else have no options. If there is no other choice, you can't vote with your wallet, other than to not buy at all, which is actually stated as one of the reasons Apple growth is slowing. People are keeping machines longer. This isn't just because they are being cheap. I would buy a new Macbook Pro right now if they would offer one I'm willing to spend money on. My existing machine is from 2010 and works great still,

            • A lot of the issue is getting the right balance. A laptop should be thin enough to fit in a book bag, and carry one handed and be with you all day.
              a Phone should be thin enough to fit in a rather tight fitting pocket. But trying to make performance laptops like the Macbook pro, and making them thin enough to go against its own Mcbook air is counter productive. A Macbook Pro can be about 1" thick and small enough to be portable and useful, but thick enough to hold modern features people want, and more the

            • by Anonymous Coward

              Dell XPS 13 is a great linux laptop. Thin, light, 8hr battery life when surfing. About the only thing I would change from my 2012ish model(9640 I think), is to double the size of the SSD to 256GB.

              • by Big Boss ( 7354 )

                Thanks for the tip. I'll check out the compatibility with the latest models as I consider options.

            • by steveha ( 103154 )

              I'd be willing to consider something else, but I really don't want to go back to Windows and there aren't any interesting Linux laptops available.

              I'm running Linux on a Thinkpad T-series and I recommend it. There are several models, ranging from thin-and-light to the "performance" model.

              I currently have a T460p, from the older generation that have a special docking port on the underside. The newest Thinkpads have a docking station that uses a USB C port on the left-hand side of the laptop, and I haven't t

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Thing is even if they designed it properly and it didn't suffer from any flaws, being thin is still crippling it.

          Being stupidly thin means no sockets for storage or RAM or radio cards. It means a weak cooling system that limits the kind of CPU/GPU they can fit and how long it can run flat out. Even the charger being too thin means that the battery drains (or at the very least doesn't charge) under load.

          When you look at the very small size difference of a Lenovo 65W and 95W charger, or how an NEC laptop is 1

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • We've gotten to the point where phones are too thin. Dilbert poked fun at this, something like "Our phone product is so thin and slippery that a significant number are broken when the customer drops them while unpacking. But the customers blame themselves. And we've won several design awards".

          I've just ordered a phone, first time in several years. The frame on my current phone is physically coming apart, and resources like GPS no longer work. It's time...

          I researched the phone I chose, and interestingl

        • That is because they made the device too thin, and jammed the battery in too tight that it didn't allow for the battery expansion.

          Nice conflating of issues there. No sorry it has nothing to do with the device being too thin. Heck it's more than a full mm thicker than its smartphone 7.9mm vs 6.8mm, and half a mm thicker than the previous Note.

          You should actually read the RCA and learn that there were multiple design problems which worked together to create the Note 7's problems including incorrect spec, incorrect spacing, incorrect electrode design all working inside a space that is quite a normal limitation for a modern smartphone / p

    • by Gabest ( 852807 )
      If only there was a way to regulate this, by some authority that makes laws and another that enforces it.
    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Apple is pretty good about these things, actually, most manufacturers would take apart the 'expensive' parts if they can be reused. Apple's lineup is pretty much consistent across the board, the displays in this model can be used in similar sized lineups elsewhere or even reused after repair in a bigger case.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    This may not be a symptom of Apple, but a larger sign of reductions in manufacturing due to economic slowdown. Apple is now starting to feel the pain, since they pay a premium for better parts.

  • shaving those pennies.
  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:19PM (#58002130) Homepage Journal

    Didn't the hinge cable issues get solved with the Powerbook 500 series?

    Does anybody still work at Apple who has experience?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Wear on display cables across the hinge of a laptop or other portable has been a known problem for at least 20 years and should be an immediately obvious point of failure for anyone with a bit of common sense.

      Apple have simply stopped giving a shit about anything other than form.

      • It happens a lot. Honda used the wrong wire across the door hinges about 10 years ago (for about a year). But their warranties are long enough that it landed on them.

        It comes down to buying thousands of miles of wire. The temptation to push the costs down is strong. Until it bites them.

  • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:22PM (#58002158)

    Typical Apple misdesign, or rather malicious design to prevent repair. This isn't new, though. Remember the old iBooks that were literally built around a 2.5" spinny hard drive? Or the newer iMacs where a fragile glass screen is GLUED over all of the replaceable parts. What about the last-generation Time Capsule, where replacing the hard drive would be child's play, except for a short cable routed below the drive with fragile connectors buried deep in the unit which are almost impossible to unplug without damage. If the cable were a few inches longer, it would be easy to replace the drive.

    Apple are masters of malicious design to prevent repair and reuse. They pretend to be an environmentally responsible company, but they're really shits in this respect, since the best form of recycling is long-term use.

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:15PM (#58002404) Journal

      Unfortunately, very true ... although as someone who once worked as a Mac technician (not for Apple)? Their repair-ability really comes and goes in waves. You can tell that over the years, Apple went back and forth on how easy they wanted their systems to be for users to service or at least upgrade.

      There was actually a time-frame (somewhere around 2010?) where Apple took considerable interest in letting users open up their own Macs and do a number of warranty repairs on their own. They used to have a self-service section of their web site with instructions for some of the work required, if you opted to just receive the repair part and do the work yourself.

      Right now, in this Tim Cook era? Apple is on a full-on crusade to make everything difficult to impossible to open up and service. All of the Macbook Pros and Macbooks are nearly disposable designs. If you spill liquid into one, you're looking at a repair that amounts to them just selling you all new innards, put back in the original shell - at a cost that's only $300 or so less than buying a new machine.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Unfortunately, very true ... although as someone who once worked as a Mac technician (not for Apple)? Their repair-ability really comes and goes in waves. You can tell that over the years, Apple went back and forth on how easy they wanted their systems to be for users to service or at least upgrade.

        There was actually a time-frame (somewhere around 2010?) where Apple took considerable interest in letting users open up their own Macs and do a number of warranty repairs on their own. They used to have a self-service section of their web site with instructions for some of the work required, if you opted to just receive the repair part and do the work yourself.

        Right now, in this Tim Cook era? Apple is on a full-on crusade to make everything difficult to impossible to open up and service. All of the Macbook Pros and Macbooks are nearly disposable designs. If you spill liquid into one, you're looking at a repair that amounts to them just selling you all new innards, put back in the original shell - at a cost that's only $300 or so less than buying a new machine.

        ...and that is why I have resolved never to buy another crApple product. Because they are shit anymore, and will continue to be until they replace their shitty CEO, and most, if not all of their senior so-called leadership.

        The current crop are so obsessed with thinness that they need an intervention.

        Have you seen that they are now selling externally attachable batteries to augment the INADEQUATE battery their overly skinny, crappy, defective-by-design new iPhony sort of comes with? This is a sign the desi

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      It's rather easy to take apart with the right tools. Even stuff that is 'glued together' - get a warming mat and most of the stuff will come right apart.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    This is why I use a Thinkpad T4X0 series (T450, T460, T470, T480). If the keyboard breaks or gets too dirty, it's not a $600 and take it to the shop problem. It's a $50 problem easily solved by unscrewing two screws and popping in a new keyboard, which, for the record, is a lot easier to type on than these new "butterfly" keyboards (typing on those is like having sex with a condom--there is just no feeling when using them, and, of course, no MacBook has that nipple/clitoris knob to play with. Apologies to

    • This. And they can even run OS X if you're not morally concerned about Apple's "intellecschual property."
    • Thinkpads have a large and helpful user community

      https://forum.thinkpads.com/ [thinkpads.com]

      and excellent Linux support. Their HMMs (Hardware Maintenance Manuals) are very well done. They are designed for ease of service. Gobs of off-lease 'Pads are available cheap. Parts new and used are plentiful via Ebay.

  • by f00zbll ( 526151 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:36PM (#58002226)
    this freakin stupid fad of thinner and lighter laptops passed the point of diminishing returns several years back. No, I want a laptop that lasts longer, not one that gets less batter life just so it can be .02mm thinner. All the stupid people going stupid over "it's thinner" are partly to blame.
    • Apple's laptop and desktop products basically went to shit after Steve Jobs croaked. Blame Tim Cook as well -- the captain goes down with his ship.
      • By all accounts, the iMac Pro is actually a fantastic machine, so there's still hope. But the laptops are the bestselling Macs, so they REALLY need to get on top of that. There's basically nothing in the lineup that I could recommend to a friend or family member that wants a laptop.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Malicious design has been a trait of Apple since the first Macintosh. They were more flexible with the Apple ][ but had to be. The first Mac had zero expansion options. There was no place in the case for even a hard drive. Any upgrades were done at your own peril.

      • It varies. The whole Apple II series (other than //c) was very expandable, as you said. Macs in the 90s and 00s were also very flexible. We seem to be lurching towards the Mac culture of the 80s again, where everything was controlled.
      • by jythie ( 914043 )
        Well, the very first one they cut down options quite a bit after learning from the cost overruns of the Lisa, but on the whole the 680x0 macs were offered with a wide range of expansion options including external chassis if you really wanted to throw in cards and disks.
  • I think this will be seen as a particularly dark time in Apple's laptop history. Between the butterfly keyboard and this, we're seeing problems that even long-time Apple fans won't stand for. I'm actually of the opinion that Apple can make a laptop as unrepairable as they like, as long as it doesn't break or they're willing to replace it without any fuss, but that's just not what we're seeing here.

    Their nickle-and-diming is truly baffling. They used to pick the more expensive options (and charge for them) knowing that cheaping out would just cause trouble down the road. Buy it nice, or buy it twice, as they say.

    I'm glad I don't need to have a laptop in my life. If I did, I would really be looking at buying something old and used. None of these new laptops looks like a good investment right now.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:52PM (#58002304) Homepage Journal

      Being unrepairable is never acceptable. No matter how well built it is, if you knock it off the table or you get it wet then they aren't going to replace it under the normal warranty.

      Lenovo make laptops that are only a tiny bit thicker and which are easy to maintain and repair. There is no excuse.

      • I look at iPhones and iPads and they're effectively unrepairable and this doesn't bother me in the least. Apple repairs or replaces them quickly, and that's a perfectly acceptable model to me. We dropped a brand-new iPad Pro at home, and with AppleCare they just replaced it without any fuss.

        But that's not how it is with the MacBooks right now—and maybe it will never be, so you're right. If you can't guarantee that the device is going to work for its entire operational life without breaking on its own,

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          We dropped a brand-new iPad Pro at home, and with AppleCare they just replaced it without any fuss.

          In other words you bought an over-priced insurance policy on top of an already over-priced product.

          PROTIP: it's generally cheaper to just get a home insurance policy that does new for old to cover stuff like that. For me the increase was less than the cost of a year of AppleCare and covers every device I own, even when out of the house.

          • Overpriced is relative. It's exactly perfect for the work my partner does as an academic, and there's nothing else even remotely in its category. Apple is the only player in the tablet space worth talking about, so when the options are 'get the product that works best for my workflow' or 'have nothing', the choice is relatively clear.

            Honestly, if we hadn't had AppleCare, the insurance policy on my credit card would've covered it, but for $200, we got an insurance policy that covers both accidental damage AN

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              $200 would buy me five years of coverage on my policy. Consumer laws mean that design defects have to be covered by the retailer, no matter how long they take to come to light.

              • I didn't say 'design defect', I said 'manufacturing defect'. If the device breaks 2 years in because some RAM took 2 years to fail, that's not a design problem, that's just a part that happened to die.

    • I think this will be seen as a particularly dark time in Apple's laptop history. Between the butterfly keyboard and this, we're seeing problems that even long-time Apple fans won't stand for. I'm actually of the opinion that Apple can make a laptop as unrepairable as they like, as long as it doesn't break or they're willing to replace it without any fuss, but that's just not what we're seeing here.

      Their nickle-and-diming is truly baffling. They used to pick the more expensive options (and charge for them) knowing that cheaping out would just cause trouble down the road. Buy it nice, or buy it twice, as they say.

      I'm glad I don't need to have a laptop in my life. If I did, I would really be looking at buying something old and used. None of these new laptops looks like a good investment right now.

      What's wrong with the butterfly keyboard? As long as you hoover out the breadcrumbs once in a while (or blow them out with compressed air) the thing works fine. Now, you can tell me you don't like the short key-press, ergonomics, feedback, that you want a Macbooks with a IBM Model M built into it but don't tell me the butterfly keyboard is unreliable, the first ones were but the later generations are fine.

      • by AC-x ( 735297 )

        What's wrong with the butterfly keyboard? As long as you hoover out the breadcrumbs once in a while (or blow them out with compressed air) the thing works fine.

        Many people claim that they were not able to fix stuck keys.

        Not to mention should a $1,300 - $2,800 laptop really require you to carry a can of compressed air with you in case your keyboard keys get stuck?

        but the later generations are fine.

        Apparently dust is still an issue with the newer designs [extremetech.com]

      • What's wrong with the butterfly keyboard? As long as you hoover out the breadcrumbs once in a while (or blow them out with compressed air) the thing works fine.

        I prefer the keyboards for 1/4 the price that don't need regular work on my part just to continue working.

        Some people like having stuff that just works. The others buy Apple ...

      • Because those things shouldn't be necessary. The old keyboards (and the magic keyboards) didn't need that sort of babying.

        There's nothing wrong with butterfly switches per se, but they've built an unreliable keyboard. It not only costs buyers money and time, it costs APPLE hundreds of dollars every time one of these dumb things needs to be replaced—and the problem is sufficiently large that the keyboards they released a few years ago are under a replacement program that extends beyond any normal warra

  • by Anonymous Coward

    As with previous engineering and/or manufacturing defects (this seems like the former), Apple will no doubt adopt a policy of authorizing Warranty Repair no matter what on the MacBooks that exhibit these symptoms.

    Now, if Apple then REFUSES to repair those units (even if out of Warranty, with or without AppleCare), THEN there's a story.

    But at this point, this wouldn't even BE a story if it were Dell or Asus or Microsoft or HP or... ANYONE ELSE.

    Typical Slashdot. Apple Hatred; nothing more.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )
      Because having to hand over your laptop to a "Genius Bar" for a week while they "wait for parts" is such a great option. And of course, you can't remove the SSD or HDD before doing so, because the fucking thing is part of the system board, so they may have access to your persona data. Nah, fuck Crapple and the whores they rode in on.
      • Because having to hand over your laptop to a "Genius Bar" for a week while they "wait for parts" is such a great option. And of course, you can't remove the SSD or HDD before doing so, because the fucking thing is part of the system board, so they may have access to your persona data.

        That's what encryption is for.

        • Thanks to encryption, we now have the opposite problem. There's no longer any point in making the drive replaceable, because the secure enclave would flip out and brick itself if it detected a new drive. (source: a comment made here when the new Mac mini was introduced)

          • Bullshit. If the secure ENSLAVE would flip out at a new drive, then it's not designed correctly. A drive is storage -- if only encrypted data is being written to/read from it, there's no security risk in an aftermarket drive. Apple designed it this way for two reasons: dollars and cents.
        • That's what encryption is for.

          No that's what basic common sense is for. There is simply no justification for laptops designed in such a way the user is prevented from replacing hard disks.

          If I can't pull a drive from a laptop it may as well not exist because I sure as fuck will not be wasting my money on such defective crap.

    • by AC-x ( 735297 )

      But at this point, this wouldn't even BE a story if it were Dell or Asus or Microsoft or HP or... ANYONE ELSE.

      Actually Surface devices do get mentioned here whenever they have repairability issues [slashdot.org]

    • As with previous engineering and/or manufacturing defects (this seems like the former), Apple will no doubt adopt a policy of authorizing Warranty Repair no matter what on the MacBooks that exhibit these symptoms.

      Now, if Apple then REFUSES to repair those units (even if out of Warranty, with or without AppleCare), THEN there's a story.

      But at this point, this wouldn't even BE a story if it were Dell or Asus or Microsoft or HP or... ANYONE ELSE.

      Typical Slashdot. Apple Hatred; nothing more.

      Actually... I was just talking about this with someone the other day. Apple told them to just replace the laptop because it was unrepairable. They would not warranty repair it. The person took it to an unauthorized rep and found out that the pins for the backlight had bent away from the pad and the guy just resoldered the pins. Did it for free, too. He said that he couldn’t provide any sort of warranty as the pins appeared to receive so much stress that he felt that the cable would break eventual

  • Wait till he hears about this. He'll be happy to hear this
  • by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @01:37PM (#58002550)

    FTFS :-

    The problem ... is caused by Apple using much thinner ribbon cables instead of the thicker wires used in previous generation

    But isn't it the thinner the better?

  • My Late 2013 MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB RAM, 512 SSD) has been running very nicely since I bought it just over 5 years ago, but I'm not going to be able to keep using it for another 5 years. I'll have to replace it in a couple of years or so. I don't like the idea of buying newer, dodgy Apple hardware so I'll have to go back to Linux I suppose (no, I'm not doing a Hackintosh). If Apple don't lift their game by the time I need to upgrade, I guess I'll be spending most of my Christmas/New Year holidays distro hopp

    • That's easy to answer, especially since you are willing to switch to Linux - a ThinkPad.
      • by mfearby ( 1653 )

        Well, that's two ThinkPad recommendations and one Lenovo Legion, so that's Lenovo 3, Apple 0. I was actually considering some kind of desktop PC since I use the MBP in clamshell mode 99.9% of the time, but you never know when you might want to take it somewhere else I guess. And, no doubt, Lenovo would offer some halfway decent docking station or port replicator which Apple has never believed in. Thanks.

  • Could be a documentary title about anorexia or Apple's design.

  • Expect a $60 repair kit from iFixit soon.
  • what else did you expect from a budget laptop?
    that they'd use high quality components?

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