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MacBook Pro Stage Light Fault: Apple's Design Turns $6 Fix Into a $600 Nightmare (9to5mac.com)
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 $600 nightmare. The problem, says the company, is caused by Apple using much thinner ribbon cables instead of the thicker wires used in previous generation MacBook Pro models.
The article says the problem is the cables, but due to the design the entire display unit needs to be thrown in a landfill and replaced with a new one. Yet I always see tech companies talk about being "green", but they have moved away from designs that minimize waste. And I don't buy that "our parts are recycled" garbage. It all just gets sent to China where a "recycler" dumps it somewhere.
Just Zip it OK... :| No every bit of it gets recycled damn it.
[($)]
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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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 $300 or so less than buying a new machine.
>very bit of it gets recycled damn it.
No, just the more valuable 1s.
he 0s go to landfills.
hawk
> as well as a generation of iPhones that wasn't a big enough improvement over the previous year models.
How could they be? Product features tend to follow a logarithmic curve that asymptotically approaches some steady value. At least in the perception of the consumer. So, for instance, in the early PC days people were likely to dump their current machine when a new architecture came out because it really was substantially faster. Now, Intel or AMD comes out with a faster proc and only a few people care.
OS has the same issue. Both Apple and M$ 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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.