Comments on: Back to the Apple Store… (more Macbook Pro fun)

By: MacMusoDude

MacMusoDude — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:05:13 +0000

HI, I recently (like less than three weeks ago) bought a new MBP in Australia, and have experienced exactly the same problem. Can you confirm that it was Apple themselves who explained right out of the box that you need a new machine?

I called the store I bought this in (we don’t have Apple stores here on the west coast only authorised resellers), and they were very defensive even on the phone, insisting it was a software problem. I called bullshit and they said to do a firmware update, which is kind of hilarious because that’s a hardware problem.

If Apple themselves said you need a new machine through official channels, then I’ll just go direct through Apple rather than waste my time trying use vaporware solutions.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:51:37 +0000

Hi Dan, I gotta say I’m a bit dubious that the replacement fixes it as well. I’m hopeful but not counting on it. Before I shipped it out on Friday, I reformatted the drive, did a clean install and ran this way for a day. Everything ran swimmingly and my efforts to get the display issues to appear all failed. I thought about keeping it around and slowly adding things to the system to see what I could find out, but the desperation for a quick replacement and the hope this does the trick won out. You’ll definitely hear more as I get it up and running…

By: Dan Warne

Dan Warne — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:22:32 +0000

Very interested to hear if the replacement system solves your problem. If it does, I’d say Apple has a very expensive problem on its hands. As much as you might not want to hear this I’m kinda hopeful the replacement system has exactly the same problem because that would demonstrate that it’s a software problem. I’m the guy that wrote the original APC article that drew all the attention to this problem and have been suffering from this problem since getting my MBP in Feb. I think Apple has improved things a bit with the 10.5.4 update because I certainly see the problem less often than I used to, however it will still reliably start happening eventually — usually after I have had the MBP running for a couple of days without a reboot.

I’m disappointed with many aspects of this MBP:

- the ambient light sensor is clearly faulty, with the keyboard flashing on and off constantly if I switch on keyboard backlighting at all

- the sound output port has annoying R2D2 sounds at the end of any audio playback… and although this can be worked around by using high impedance headphones, I’ve never had this problem with any previous MBP or PowerBook G4.

- the graphics output has this annoying glitching problem (fortunately the actual screen corruption rarely affects Firefox I find, so as long as I don’t use Safari I can keep it at bay most of the time — though the flashing video is pretty much system-wide.)