Just got off the phone with the service center they sent it to, and I'll be getting my dead MBP (late 2007 -- about three weeks shy of their four-year cutoff, 2.4GHz) back without being fixed, and $50 poorer for the privilege. Yay.
Same symptoms as lots of folks, machine got hot, crazy scrambled video, then just kind of died. Would power up but the screen would be all checkerboards/stripes and wouldn't finish booting. Took it to my local mac store, they couldn't figure out what was going on with it, and seemed only vaguely familiar with the "nVidia problem."
Here's the initial report from the technician:
verified video distortion and freezing while playing videos. faulty logic board. ran the NVIDIA GPU test all night, starting immediately after the unit froze while playing videos. unit passed the test and continued passing the test all night. problem is unrelated to the NVIDIA failure.
I asked them about it when I talked to them, specifically if they could get it to boot, and he said "yeah, if he could run the test, it booted" which is just bizarre, if they could get it to boot, but still diagnosed a logic board failure. I'll have to play with it when it comes back and see if I can eek anymore life out of it. It would be great to be able to de-register some of the software licenses off of it so I could use them on other machines. Thankfully I already had a fresh backup of the machine.
This is quite unfortunate, and is the last Apple product I'll buy, after a long history of good luck with their recent products (pre-intel iMac, new iMac, Mac Pro, iPods, etc., I even had a NEXT cube back in the day). Even if they had fixed this unit, my confidence in their build quality, quality control, and support response is shot.
Their support staff has been mostly friendly, but didn't seem particularly knowledgable of the history of the problem (or wouldn't admit it), and are pretty dismissive of the whole thing. They mostly wanted to get rid of me and weren't interested in listening to any arguments from me about the issue.
Evidently I could get the machine fixed for $385, here's their second reply:
flat-rate mail-in cost is $385. this is less than the cost of the logic board alone and will cover any hardware that needs to be replaced. need approval to facilitate repair.
I appreciate that is cheaper than the $900 logic board replacement, but it's still same price I can buy a brand new Thinkpad SL410 for (and I have a few 5-10 year old Thinkpads that are still running just fine). Heck, I can do most of what I used the MBP for with one of the new netbooks that are even cheaper and super light. Why would I pay that kind of money for a machine that's going to break again immediately? The contact I talked to acted a bit offended that I didn't think this was the greatest deal in the world either. Whatever.
This has been a really unfortunate experience for me, and I'll now not be able to recommend in good conscience replacing our aging Windows machines here at work with macs like I had hoped. I hope their desktop systems are better quality and the top-of-the-line 2 year old Mac Pro sitting on my desk that I'm typing this on right now continues to work.
