display anomalies

Yes sad but true.......i tend to praise apple products for the operating system, i do believe it is a better OS, but now ive started to warn people to stay away from early release of apple products because of dodgy build quality in hardware. So someone asked me the other day if they should buy a new MBP, i told them of my experience of buying a first generation MBP, (actually its a 1.2 which begs the question how far down the road do you need to go before you can buy an apple product that works as they say it does?) and recommended that they should wait at least a year.


I have actually ended up buying a new machine, yes an apple, but one that is now established i hope. My work demands i use apple (again sad but true) and i believe if i can hold out and enough people complain about the faulty ATI x1600 Radeon display problems then maybe this MBP will eventually be fixed at a reasonable price.

Come on apple at least try and meet us half way here.
I still need the MBP for work due to its portability..

Here is what I did...I called Apple and told them what I suspected my issue was and that I had no Apple Care. He told me I could send it in and have it fixed for a flat fee no matter what was wrong with it and even if 20 things were wrong with it (as long as the damage wasn't caused by dropping it or by liquid damage). The flat fee is $348 including tax and shipping. I sent my MBP via FedEx on Thursday (Apple sent the empty box to me for me to ship it to them via FedEx) and I got my MBP back this morning.

They replaced the logic board, both fans (one due to noise or it wasn't working and one because of a heatsink/thermal module issue), one of my 1 GB RAM modules and fixed the drive formatting issue.

I am well pleased with my experience with Apple and I am very happy to have my MBP home again.

ambarta,

Thats brilliant news, I guess all of us with this ATI Radeon x1600 problem and with no Apple Care can take your good news as an official apple policy, refer to this thread and your post if need be and all get the same fair treatment.

Meaning we can get our machines fixed at a reasonable cost. I hope the policy is a global apple standard, now we all have to test this out and report back our experience from our various parts of the world.

Lets face it, there's always the exception to the rule to consider.

Good luck everyone!!

Message was edited by: spagbol23

Hi you,

this really sounds good, but that was exactly what some of us tried before. Did you referenced them to this thread or did they accepted your description without any question?

I will try it now again and i will let you know if i get the same service or not. $348 Bucks seems to be a fair value.


Good luck everyone

So i am back from the long call. At first m sprecs:

MBP 2+Years Old no Apple Care.

At first: I got a clear and sharp NO. No replacement, no repair for fair value.

i didn't dropped the phone but started to explain directly to the apple what's about my machine, referencing to the thread and explaining that i am not the only one, angry about a defective piece of aluminum on my desk.

After some minutes after explaining to him that the ATIX1400 GPU is defect, its not from coffee in the machine or somewhat else, and pointing to the unfairness of handling nvidia gpu's in another way than our's, he decided to give the information up to someone else.

I pointed him to the thread, but he didn't go there while we where talking. but its easy to find, if someone of them take a look they should see that there is something wrong with our gpu's.

pointing at the nvidia gpu case seems to be a good point to argue with them 🙂

good luck

null

Dont mean to confuse the matter but check this thread out on MacPros.

Sounds (and looks) like the same kind of display issues, freezing etc but with different ATI cards:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=17830992



What exactly are we seeing happen here with traditional apple product line?

Hi to all!

Same issues here,
Macbook Pro 17" Intel Core 2 Duo 2,33Ghz ATI Radeon X1600. no apple care

Since 1 Week i have some gray and black dots appearing random on the display and black lines in the shadow of application windows. The dots are multiplicating in the browser if there are a flash banner, they comes under the banner in the colors who are in the banner.

I reinstalled the system 2 times:

- First time Leopard white no solving of the problem and the problems also when is was booting from the Leopard dvd.

- Second time i deleted completly my HD (also the windows partition) and i installed tiger. During the installation of the first DVD, no problems on the screen. I was Happy because i was thinking the error comes from some strange thing whit the windows partition. After i rebooted to start the installation of the second dvd the errors appears again.

The strange thing is, that i have no errors when i run windows. I played 40 min. crysis to make the GPU work and nothing bad happens on the display.

I went 2 times to the apple store and the guys of the genius bar can't solve the problem.
They doe also the apple internal hardware test and they found nothing wrong. So they cant help me.
The last chance is call apple care..

Tomorrow i will call the apple care and hope!

Hi all,

You have no idea how happy I was to find this post. My MacBook Pro was purchased in June 2006, to use for me at college. Use it a ton, but that the point of computers, right, they are meant to be used. Have had lots of problems, my first battery was one of those damaged ones, had to get that replaced. Then installed Leopard, computer was freezing all the time, reinstalled Leopard and it seemed to work better for a while. Then last summer (pretty much right after my warranty expired) it started doing what everyone else has been describing, vertical lines across the screen and constant freezing, especially when watching videos.

Took it to the apple store a few weeks ago. Naturally, it didn't freeze while I was there, that would be too easy. The guy looked at it and said nothing seemed wrong. Since he couldn't figure out the problem, he seemed to default to "corrupted hard drive" and told me to reinstall leopard, since I said the problem began after I installed it.

I believe I installed leopard around january of 2008, and that was also around when the problem with freezing began. However, I think the problem has been my ATI X1600 all along, and it was just an unfortunate coincidence that my ATI X1600 problems began around the same time I installed leopard. This merely disguised the real problem for a while, since I blamed leopard. It's not leopard.
Does anyone know why this problem takes so long to show up? My computer was bought a year and a half before it started freezing all the time.

When I was in the store a few weeks ago, I asked the guy in the store what could be causing the horizontal line problem and he said the video card, and I see now that everyone agrees. I'm annoyed that I just paid $34 for reinstallation disks to fix a corrupted hard drive when that's not even the problem, but I'm more annoyed by the realization that this is going to cost hundreds of dollars to fix. I have a phone call scheduled with apple today, will let you know hows it goes.

Hi,


Its not a leopard problem. ATI X1600 is the fault!
Yes this problem take so 1,5 year to start.. the perfect time to be out of waranty time.

Today i talked with Apple Care, i talked about this topic, and about the nvidia issues. I was friendly, and the guy talked also with the supervisor but no way for a new logic-board.

I'M DISGUSTED!

macuser128 do you have some news from the german Applecare??

I think i will try the heat-conductive paste solution, if it not works, this is my only way..
http://www.applepalace.com/apple-mac/apple-parts/apple-parts-by-category/logic-b oards/macbook-pro-logic-boards/index.asp
and repair it at home.
Its the cheapest solution who i can find.

But this is my last apple product who i buy.

So I called apple today, the guy said that they haven't hear anything about the ati x1600, and the flat fee to get it fixed would be $1200, to replace the logic board. This is unbelievable, that's over half of what the computer cost in the first place. He said I could try going to an apple-authorized repair dealer and seeing if they had the board for cheaper, and those are my options. And btw, after the replaced the nvidia video card, they have switched to a new model, gma-something. that tells me that they knew about this, and they just don't want to spend the money to fix it.

last apple laptop i will ever have

Thank goodness this thread exists.

I have the same problem! The "distorted video" examples here are exactly what I''m experiencing.

I'm still under AppleCare, but very unhappy about this. At first, I thought it was a problem with my external display, but then I isolated it further and read the reports here. The issues seemed to have worsen in recent months.

Hi you,

no sorry no news from apple till now. think only chance is to concentrate public interest here up to a level apple can't longer ignore.

1.5 Years to problem start is a very good guess, it took same time here to start

I will stand for the rights of my MBP and will not stop so fast.

Proceed with apple care, and you will get a new board for free,

lucky guy

and please dont forget to leave a negative feedback here

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html