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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.
If they're doing that then they're playing with fire, because all it takes is a manufacturing defect that causes widespread breakage within the warranty period, and all of a sudden the malicious design works against them.
Macs can be hard to pull apart and generally they are getting worse but "malicious design to prevent repair"?? I've pulled plenty of Macs of all kinds apart, repaired and upgraded them and while I can imagine many more pleasant things to do, "malicious design to prevent repair" is a quite deliberate exaggeration. There is a large set of laptops other than just MacBooks that are a bitch to repair. Is there some kind of international cabal of laptop makers engaged in a conspiracy against the public? Personally, I'll go with brother Occam's razor and choose the simple explanation. I think people here, and the Apple & Microsoft critics in particular, have a tendency to attribute to malice, conspiracy and even satanic influence to that which can be adequately explained as incompetence.