- 6,584
- Kent, UK
- GTP_Jondot
Ok, so I think my MacBook Pro is sort of dying. It's only a year and a half old, and I'm getting a nice catalogue of problems by this point. Let's have a run-through...
1.
The case its self is bent in various places. Particularly so around the DVD drive, which bows inwards. You can't see it particularly well because I fixed it to a degree a while ago by forcing it open and placing a pound coin in the gap to attempt to bend it back (hence the nasty chips).
2.
The screen makes a nice sort of 'crack' noise when you adjust it. There are now hairline cracks appearing in the casing around the screen, and you can physically see the metal split when you move the screen (see the second shot).
3.
The keyboard and touchpad no longer work. At all. The caps lock light doesn't come on, for example, so it's definitely a hardware issue. Before now they were acting intermittently (I could take out the battery and press on a bit of ribbon cable to get them to work), but now they're gone completely. External keyboards and mice work fine, though.
4.
The webcam doesn't work at all. I've tried Photobooth, Skype, even gone into system profiler and it doesn't seem to exist anymore.
5.
It seems to be Kernel Panicking if I try to do anything remotely intensive. I've never had it happen before, but about a week ago the dreaded message popped up about 5 times in one evening. The one pictured below happened when I was moving a video inside Keynote.
5.
The dock is now crashing quite randomly. I don't seem to have an icon for iMovie either, which is slightly odd. (Sorry, couldn't be bothered to crop)
6.
Every now and again, the display decides it's going to get stuck on one level of brightness, and won't adjust. You can move the little slider, but nothing happens.
7.
The screensaver now has these bizzare scrolling lines that travel up the screen every second or so. It's sort of like watching a video of an LCD
display on your TV - the refresh rate isn't quite the same or something. Kinda impossible to take a photo of, but I tried.
Just above the arrow, you can see a sort of vertical line. They're more pronounced in the flesh, though.
8.
The display now has a permanent 'smudge' on the left hand side. It's not on the outside of the screen (I've tried wiping it off to no avail), and seems to disappear if I look at the screen from a higher viewing angle. It's visible in the left image, but not the right one:
8.
The battery is lying to me. Quite often it'll get to about 25% full, and then suddenly go to sleep and claim it's empty. If I then plug it in for about 30 seconds and then remove the plug, it'll say it has 30%.
9.
Oh, and just before I started dragging and dropping the photos for this, Finder crashed too. So, expecting that Camino (my web browser) would probably crash too, I quickly copied this post into Pages and tried to save it. Pages, firstly wouldn't open, then when I did get it open it refused to save or export anything. So I emailed it to myself sharpish. And then Camino did crash afterall.
So guess what? I'm writing this on my mum's Vista laptop because my Mac isn't being reliable enough.
I've got Applecare on it, but I'm not exactly sure how much it'll cover. Things like the cracks and the bent DVD drive probably come under 'wear and tear', annoyingly.
Also, a few months before the keyboard started being funny, I managed to spill fruit juice directly over it (it was apple juice too, appropriately). I'm 75% sure it had nothing to do with the problem (as I could fix it simply by refreshing the PRAM or pressing on a bit of ribbon cable), but I don't think they'll see it that way. For that reason, they're quite obliged to refuse to fix anything on it.
However, my home insurance does have accidental damage protection, presumably meaning that if Apple start being stroppy about water damage, I can simply let the insurance company deal with it. In theory, anyway...
Something tells me this is going to be a complete nightmare to get sorted...
1.
The case its self is bent in various places. Particularly so around the DVD drive, which bows inwards. You can't see it particularly well because I fixed it to a degree a while ago by forcing it open and placing a pound coin in the gap to attempt to bend it back (hence the nasty chips).

2.
The screen makes a nice sort of 'crack' noise when you adjust it. There are now hairline cracks appearing in the casing around the screen, and you can physically see the metal split when you move the screen (see the second shot).


3.
The keyboard and touchpad no longer work. At all. The caps lock light doesn't come on, for example, so it's definitely a hardware issue. Before now they were acting intermittently (I could take out the battery and press on a bit of ribbon cable to get them to work), but now they're gone completely. External keyboards and mice work fine, though.
4.
The webcam doesn't work at all. I've tried Photobooth, Skype, even gone into system profiler and it doesn't seem to exist anymore.

5.
It seems to be Kernel Panicking if I try to do anything remotely intensive. I've never had it happen before, but about a week ago the dreaded message popped up about 5 times in one evening. The one pictured below happened when I was moving a video inside Keynote.

5.
The dock is now crashing quite randomly. I don't seem to have an icon for iMovie either, which is slightly odd. (Sorry, couldn't be bothered to crop)

6.
Every now and again, the display decides it's going to get stuck on one level of brightness, and won't adjust. You can move the little slider, but nothing happens.

7.
The screensaver now has these bizzare scrolling lines that travel up the screen every second or so. It's sort of like watching a video of an LCD
display on your TV - the refresh rate isn't quite the same or something. Kinda impossible to take a photo of, but I tried.
Just above the arrow, you can see a sort of vertical line. They're more pronounced in the flesh, though.

8.
The display now has a permanent 'smudge' on the left hand side. It's not on the outside of the screen (I've tried wiping it off to no avail), and seems to disappear if I look at the screen from a higher viewing angle. It's visible in the left image, but not the right one:


8.
The battery is lying to me. Quite often it'll get to about 25% full, and then suddenly go to sleep and claim it's empty. If I then plug it in for about 30 seconds and then remove the plug, it'll say it has 30%.
9.
Oh, and just before I started dragging and dropping the photos for this, Finder crashed too. So, expecting that Camino (my web browser) would probably crash too, I quickly copied this post into Pages and tried to save it. Pages, firstly wouldn't open, then when I did get it open it refused to save or export anything. So I emailed it to myself sharpish. And then Camino did crash afterall.
So guess what? I'm writing this on my mum's Vista laptop because my Mac isn't being reliable enough.
I've got Applecare on it, but I'm not exactly sure how much it'll cover. Things like the cracks and the bent DVD drive probably come under 'wear and tear', annoyingly.
Also, a few months before the keyboard started being funny, I managed to spill fruit juice directly over it (it was apple juice too, appropriately). I'm 75% sure it had nothing to do with the problem (as I could fix it simply by refreshing the PRAM or pressing on a bit of ribbon cable), but I don't think they'll see it that way. For that reason, they're quite obliged to refuse to fix anything on it.
However, my home insurance does have accidental damage protection, presumably meaning that if Apple start being stroppy about water damage, I can simply let the insurance company deal with it. In theory, anyway...
Something tells me this is going to be a complete nightmare to get sorted...