My 10 day old Macbook with M1 Pro died suddenly last week. In India we don't have Genius bars like in the States, what we have is a franchise model where in small repair shops are given the right to repair (only part to part replacement) and they probably get some commission. The guys in these shops are very afraid of Apple and its policies. Even things which normally would get fixed in Genius bars without any second…
Had to deal with this recently. My iPhone's screen stopped working suddenly right before I was due to travel. Apple authorized service center in India said it will take 2-3 weeks to send and get it back from repair center. I decided to take it with me on my travel and just strolled into an apple store in Dubai mall the next day. It was fixed in literally 40 minutes there. It's surprising how Dubai with such a low pop…
MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
291–300 of 588 posts
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
I bought a Framework laptop, new screen is cheap and very very easy to swap in yourself.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#293My 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-in...
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 s…
My T440s is still going strong, and that was second hand back in 2016 (I did upgrade to an FHD matte screen).
They're not quite as good as they used to be though, the T580 definitely feels like a step down in build quality.
I may consider a Framework next go-around but for now, that's my strategy.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Except the Mercedes is actually repairable.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 c…
> 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.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#296I still don't understand the appeal of aluminum/glass construction. I couldn't think of a worse set of materials to make a laptop out of. For comparison, nearly every other ultrabook manufacturer has moved onto magnesium or carbon fiber for chassis construction. Both materials are much physically stronger, lighter, and (most importantly, imho) offer more intrinsic shock protection. I know people enjoy the "luxury" lo…
Carbon fibre chips and shatters. Metal bends. I really don't see how carbon fibre would be in any way better than what Apple uses right now.
Aluminum bends and flexes. Magnesium alloys would shatter (if you could even apply enough force). The chassis chipping or flaking seems preferable to bending and flexing for the longevity of the internals.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#297Doesn't the M1 air use the same chassis as previous Intel based MacBook airs?
It does, but the screen or how it is attached is probably different in some way. There is no way the M1 gets nearly as hot as my Intel machines.
Maybe that's why it's breaking.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#298First rule of a longtime Apple user: Never be an early adopter. Second rule of a longtime Apple user: Always use AppleCare+. Third rule of a longtime Apple user: When you have a problem with your beloved Apple hardware, always have a pile of cash on you, just in case.
if only there was some other approach!
You: there is a crack in my screen. It appeared spontaneously.
Genius bar guy: that's a point contact crack; it's caused by the user.
You: well, how do you explain this burn mark behind it? It's more likely that it overheated and then the screen snapped.
Genius bar guy: err, ok, we will have it fixed.
You: sorry, but I lost trust in your brand. The device could have started a fire. I want my money back.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
I bought a Framework laptop, new screen is cheap and very very easy to swap in yourself.
Also hoping we'll see them execute on some additional keyboard layouts (or someone will) - avoiding Mac-like keyboards is one of my primary desires laptop wise.
Re: MacBook Air M1 screen crack for no apparent reason
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
> And that’s why most people buy $500 laptops. It's also worth pointing out that the $500 laptop will probably last a lot longer than the most expensive Macbook. All plastic, they use a lot of older/reliable technology, they don't get used as rough - the most common failure mode is they get too old/slow for the user.
If you want to do more than rehash 4 decades of “PC/Macs suck” forum posts, try finding some hard stats on resell value or enterprise fleet longevity.