Bent my macbook :(

Well then, I wish you the absolute best of luck.

You may want to look at these disassembly pictures for a guide.

Do let us know the outcome.

--Travis

Well, all I can say is that mine is fine, but I did notice how thin it is in that area.

And the old joke about the guy who asks a doctor for free medical advice. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." And the doctor simply says, "Then don't do that."

So, for everyone out there, be sure not to pick up your MacBook or MacBook Pro in that sweet (sore?) spot because you know something may happen.

I only pick mine up in the lower half where the trackpad area is, if I need to move it or pick it up.

"and hey carl wolf - don't judge me. In your whole life can you sit there and tell me that a glass never slipped out of your hand and broke on the ground? or a plate?"

I have never dropped a glass or a plate that cost $2500.

Mine is bent too, only down in the trackpad area. It is the right hand side, the same side as the hard drive.

Message was edited by: Zurge

Thin sheet aluminum doesn't have a lot of rigidity. Designing the case with curved edges adds a lot of rigidity where it's needed to keep the whole case from flexing. But anywhere you have thin sheet aluminum it will be prone to bending.

This is as much a problem on a Boeing jet as it is a MacBook.

Of course they couldn't really put a radius on the edge above the ethernet jack because of lack of space. So you have to be careful there.

Buy a stainless steel laptop, or one with a case as thick as a Mac Pro, and you won't have this problem. Plastic doesn't hold up well under these circumstances either.

So if you buy a new BMW your not supposed to drive it over 75 cause you might >break it? I had my Miata up to 110 and it didn't break.

The complaint wasn't that it broke when he ran a big application. A more accurate analogy would be if you used a bumper jack on the side of the Miata trying to lift the car up. Would you expect the body to stay completely rigid and have no damage?

I'm thinking that a combination of the softened heated metal in that zone, plus >all the port holes etched out there making the structure flex when hot from the >9600.

I'm thinking the temperature at which aluminum softens enough to bend easily is a lot higher than you think. And repeated heating at that temperature would make it very brittle, more likely to break than to bend.

If it gets to 400-600 degrees Fahrenheit, the aluminum becomes very malleable and could bend. Do you think yours gets that hot?

Source: The Mechanical Engineer's Pocket Book, William Kent

I never had any problem with it bending by picking it up one handedly, but today i dropped my backpack and the only damage my mac received was the aluminum around the ethernet 😟 I really wasn't even expecting damage at all because I had my computer in a case AND in my backpack and it wasn't even a hard fall. I know that it was a mistake on my part, but I do feel that this, once again, proves that this small area is probably the flimsiest part of the entire computer and for an Apple it's a little disappointing 😟 upon purchasing my computer i was told it was so durable that someone had even ran over it with a car... i guess it'll be fine as long as you don't run over the ethernet port... 🙂

...upon purchasing my computer i was told it was so durable that someone had even ran over it with a car...

Oh, please. I don't doubt that someone has run over his MBP with a car, but if you believe the MBP was fine afterward, I have some land in Florida and a bridge in NYC that you'll definitely be interested in buying. You have to be alert enough when you're shopping to distinguish moonbeams and fairy dust from what is plausible in the real world.

It isn't rocket science to figure out that where there are holes in the case, the case will be weaker than where there aren't any holes, and where the largest hole is, the case will be weakest. This is self-evident, and it should be ample reason to make anyone cautious about handling the MBP in a way that stresses the case near the ports or the optical-drive slot. It shouldn't take even that much common sense to realize that no notebook computer can be expected to survive being dropped without damage — even if, through sheer good luck, one occasionally does.

I have a colleague who threw a Dell desktop out of his 2nd story window then ran over it with his car. He said that it worked just as well after as it did before...

Really? It didn't improve? 🙂

It was just user-based assessment, not benchmarked!

While I agree with Eww on this, I can confirm that the sales people at the Apple Store that I go to in Toronto, Canada, far from Tennessee, keep talking about some YouTube video that shows a unibody MacBook Pro that survives being run over by a car.

I have yet to find such a video on YouTube, and they never seem to have the link when asked.

Of all the reasons to purchase a MacBook Pro, including its strength, I have found the "watch it get run over by a car" reason to be incredibly odd, especially when coming from Apple Store employees.

MBP (not unibody) http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=477582
iPod Touch http://tr.truveo.com/iPod-Touch-still-working-after-being-run-over-by-a/id/26852 49920

Message was edited by: Kenneth Gorelick