about two years
How convenient.
It’s exactly the time, where they are legally required to fix that in the EU
I know, that’s why it always catches my eye when there’s “2 years” in there somewhere.
Warranties are now 3 years in the EU.Edit: nope, just some countries.
Pathetically weak flex cable and connector. Obvious problem and design weakness that’s persisted for years.
It would be a relief if that was the problem. Even if Apple won’t issue a recall, third-party cables can be made and sold for a reasonable price by places like iFixIt.
If the display itself is defective, then this is going to be real bad for a lot of people unless Apple bites the bullet.
Look at the 2016 MacBook Pro.
They had a problem with the display cable and it can’t be easily replaced since it’s soldered to the display.
You basically just need to get an entirely new display even though it’s just the cable.
Additionally, some shops will resolder the cable, but it’s not a long term solution.
Even replacing the display by Apple is not a long term solution because they replace it with another display that has a cable that’s slightly too short and will eventually break again.
So the only real solution is to buy a new computer.
Heck my SO has a 2nd gen Macbook air and it has the display cable problem as well.
Perfectly good laptop, but no OS or hardware support and a repair quote for more than the machine is worth.
Yeah, there is a way to get modern macOS running on it unofficially. I’m debating between that and just putting Linux on it.
Happened in 2022 to a 2017 MBP belonging to someone I knew. She went out and bought a new one, and put the old one in a drawer. She brought it to me in 2023, I investigated and found the shitshow - Apple saying “nuh-uh”, the ACCC (Australian consumer advocate) saying “you’d better”, then Apple quoting me $1100 because the ACCC never enforced it, and me getting it fixed locally for $550. It needed a new screen, not because the screen itself was faulty, but because the failing flex cable was integrated with the screen. Screw Apple.
Same with my mbp 2019. Failed on me earlier this year, every works fine except a $0.10 flex cable that they decided to solder inside the panel so it can’t be changed.
I remember replacing that cable on my 13 in Wallstreet PowerBook. The cable made a 180 degree turn causing it to break internally. Apple replaced it the first time, but I had to do it when it broke the second time.
Apple builds obsolescence into their products on purpose.
If you’d bought a PC, a faulty screen would be easily replaceable. I had to replace my laptop screen myself several years ago, and with a $60 part and ten minutes on youtube, it was an easy repair.
Not really anymore. They make them expensive to repair, but they also don’t want you to switch to another brand, because for them a user in the ecosystem purchasing apps and subscriptions is worth way more than a frustrated user purchasing a one time display replacement. Their whole strategy now (for a few years really) is to make devices that last at minimum 5 years, because it makes the user happy that their 5yo phone still works, and that means they are likely to get another iPhone, and because as long as the user is in the ecosystem, they are making money by taking their cut of everything that happens on the device
I still use a 2011 MacBook Pro. It’s running Linux Mint now and hasn’t been my primary laptop for a couple of years now, but it’s still a solid machine. In fact, as is the norm with Apple stuff, it lost OS support long before it stopped being a viable laptop.
Fortunately, Opencore Legacy Patcher exists…
Let’s hope Asahi linux becomes usable enough as a daily driver before the M series laptops stop getting updates
Yeah, that’s the route I’m expecting to take. It’s why I’m dipping my toes into Linux now.
I should put mint on my SSD/16GBRAM 2011 MBP…
Can you dual boot with OSX?
That’s the same spec as mine, though I also replaced the DVD drive with a second SSD.
And yeah, in theory you dual boot, but in practice I managed to bugger mine up, so it’s 100% Mint.
Oh my SSD was absolutely my optical drive before I replaced it hahahaha
So we rely on expensive things hard to fix with controllable lifespan.
That will be 450$ and you’ll have to send your device in for 3 weeks. -Apple Genius
Oddly enough, the reason why I did the repair myself was that the shop quoted me $400, haha. It’s nice to live in a world where you can fix your own stuff, something that Apple also does their best to prevent.
It sounds like you quoted the “piss off price”. They didn’t really want to do it, so they just quoted a stupid amount of money if you’d taken them up on it it would have been worth it for them to do it but they were hoping you wouldn’t.
Screen replacements for laptops are a pain because it’s never all that obvious from the beginning how easy it will be. For you it was apparently simple but it depends massively on the laptop and they may not have an encyclopedic knowledge of which laptops are easy and which laptops are hard.
Huuuuuh
Hmm. I’m still using a 2014 iMac, as its 27" 5k screen still very good for coding (with added memory). Sometimes develops a bunch of thin vertical lines, which come and go maybe dependent on temperature, but hasn’t changed for for ten years and i can live with those. Just wish they’d continue providing security updates for it.
27" 2015 iMac here. No problems whatsoever. I’m going to use this thing until it dies.
Edit: Gotta love the downvotes for literally just owning a Mac. Good luck breaking into the industry as a video editor without one, guys.
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It’s called an industry standard. You have heard of those before, I presume.
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No, I don’t care to hold your hand and explain to you the whole idea of an industry preferring you have a specific piece of technology over others and how finding out you have that piece of technology helps you get work. You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself.
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Let me introduce you to a little thing called media production workflow, where there are over 500 different file formats in active use, and getting it right forms the basis of most links in a chain hundreds of links long.
You start sending me botched files with the wrong codecs and see if I don’t find another subcontractor immediately.
Well you clearly know my industry better than I do, so I’ll defer to your expert knowledge.
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I’m pretty sure the standard is building your own can be slightly cheaper, depends which peripherals you already own since those aren’t usually part of a build every time.
But anyways, the advantage is that the built device will last longer and is made of replaceable parts that are cheap and easy to find. Easy to upgrade.
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Wow thanks, never heard of this before. I was getting all set to buy a new Macbook so I could install the latest versions of Xcode and keep developing iOS apps. Looks like I can keep on abusing my 12yo Macbook instead.
I have a 2014 MacBook Pro which I love more than any computer I’ve ever had. This is in my list of things to do. Before I was just going to install Linux on it but this seems like a better solution to keep all the apps I was using.
I keep pondering grabbing one of those on the cheap and getting one of those kits that turns it into a really nice 27” monitor.
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Linux runs great on Intel iMacs. Just sayin’.
What does this have to do with “Apple Silicon”? Unless it’s not screen deterioration, but something with graphic output.
Might just be to indicate when it started happening. They could have written “M1” and still cause the same confusion, and I believed that’s what the model is called.
“According to an investigation by one of the affected users, the Apple iMac screen uses a flex cable that must sustain a voltage of around 50 volts when the screen is set to high or maximum brightness. This causes the connector to burn out over time, it was theorized, resulting in short circuits that cause the black lines to appear on the screen”
Oh. Makes sense it’s a cable. This way they can profit on spare cables and keep the reputation of reliable hardware for their fanbase.
This flex cable is bonded to the LCD and requires a replacement of the whole display assembly
Oh, so they can sell the whole matrix in addition to cable. Even better.
A true marvel of engineering, pushing the boundries of business and technology
Tap for spoiler
/s
Not that kind of cable
Oh. Makes sense it’s Cable. This way they can profit on spare Cables and keep the reputation of New Mutants for their fanbase.
It refers to the affected models, not the cause. The apple silicon iMac was a complete redesign.
Just bought myself a late 2011 17" MacBook Pro, it was listed as untested but I took the gamble… Yeah, its logic board turned out to be dead.
I bought far older ThinkPads for less money that worked perfectly.
Imo untested always means dead. Especially when it is something easy to test - like a laptop
Yes, probably should have seen that coming to be fair. Especially since the A1297s are so prone to failure.
It’s just that confirmed working ones are still so goddamn expensive and I kinda wanted to have one but not enough to drop 200€ on it
Rule of thumb when buying electronics (or anything for that matter) is buy it cheap, buy it twice.
Nervously looks at the 10€/TB refurbished drives that just arrived
70€ isn’t cheap for a laptop from 2011, to me at least…
But I get what you mean, 10€ per TB sounds too good to be true :D
PS3s regularly go for €115 so I guess it’s not that surprising. It’s about demand, if a lot of people want one then it doesn’t really matter how old it is.
I would be extremely skeptical of buying something listed as untested. How hard is it to test if a Mac works you just turn it on if it doesn’t turn on it’s broken. It takes like 30 seconds.
However if you turn it on and it’s broken but you don’t want to sell it for parts you can always just sell it as “untested”.
I guess not everyone has Magsafe 1 adapters lying around…
2011 AMD Graphics MacBook Pro all over again
I’m so blessed that I still use my 2011 15” MBP and never had issues.
Yes, Apple! :-) Obviously Apple doesn’t have the win margins to put proper parts in their hardware…
Just yesterday I realized my Thinkpad Edge 330 is running w/o any trouble for 11 years now, cost me little above 300€, brand new back then. :-)
Most durable modern Apple’s hardwares:
I think their Vision Pro will be the product with least reported defects. However, that’s because its only job is to hold down paper on a desk.
I read that the outside glass breaks by itself when used as a paperweight https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/23/apple-vision-pro-front-glass-cracked-reports/
Yeah, depending on how widespread this is, it’s probably worse than staingate.
I bought a 2014 MacBook Pro earlier this year, I got a good deal on it partly because it’s got severe delamination issues. With dark mode, it doesn’t really bother me enough to spend several hours with a bottle of Listerine to fix it yet.
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I find victim blaming counterproductive. It would be more helpful to discuss stronger consumer protection laws.
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If you were in their shoes, you’d probably say otherwise.
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Don’t cut yourself on all that edginess.
I was like that too, in 2004 when I was a teen. “BUT THEY DONT EVEN GAMERS!”
Now I just replaced my six year old iPhone that still worked fine, just because I wanted 120hz and a better camera.
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Glad you thought so. 👍
We shouldn’t blame the victims that society failed to properly educate. You’re right that if people intimately understood apple the way you probably do, they’d never buy an apple product. I would argue, however, that it’s a failing of education not an informed choice to be corporately cucked.
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I hate apple with an intimacy and intensity you likely don’t, but the alternatives are either equally indefensible or difficult for average users and thus also anti-consumer.
Just never buy an iMac, get a Mini or Studio with adequate RAM (you can add storage later) and a nice 4k monitor and you then get what you are paying for with some reliability.
I note that you only denigrate, and are not supporting a viable alternative.
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Thunderbolt4 is perfectly usable in high bandwidth situations. WTF are you on about. Do you even compute?
Framework = Windows (consumer hostile in extremis) or Linux, fine for me and thee but user hostile for most.
The thing about rational actors, is when given the same information they should make the same choices. I would argue that they’re most likely, instead, just at the peak of mt. stupid
I’m not saying you will be.
Ehh…iOS is arguably the most secure mobile operating system (excluding something like GrapheneOS) currently on the market.
I don’t give a shit what brand you use, because I don’t have brand loyalty, but I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks. Shitting on the consumer here does no good. All consumers deserve the same amount of consumer protection, regardless of which tech overlord they happen to purchase their hardware from.
I can see valid reasons for why someone might want to use Apple Macbooks
I use one because I write apps for iOS and you can only do that on a Macbook. It doesn’t make me a fanboi.
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By that rationale, we should be blaming those who picked a certain brand of hamburger meat for getting salmonella poisoning? I would think we’d want to push responsibility on the corporation and governmental oversight for change in food safety standards than mock those who got sick.
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I mean, it’s not really a false dichotomy though? Your statements suggest that we assign fault/root cause to the consumer. I’m suggesting we assign root cause to the manufacturer/lack of regulation. If at the end of the day, it’s the consumer’s fault they chose a product without conducting a comprehensive quality review of all components within the product they purchase, then the action of pushing government regulation contradicts that. Funding regulation doesn’t do anything to fix consumer behavior; i.e. root cause. But maybe I misinterpreted your statements.
As for your first statement, there are many problems with this reasoning. How can we reasonably expect consumers to perform comprehensive research studies on everything they purchase? If it turned out the specific manufacturer of Grade B wool that’s used for a certain sweater from a certain clothing brand is known for causing latent forms of cancer if worn for 2 years, that’s really on the consumer? C’mon now.
Besides, in this specific case, it turned out to be a catastrophic latent failure. It wasn’t even possible for an informed consumer to have predicted this sort of catastrophic failure.
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Not defending Apple for bad design, but this has happened before with displays from different manufacturers. The ribbon cable burning from a tight bend was also what killed my first LG Ultrawide.
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