Q: MacBook Pro Retina display burn-in?

Do you let them win? Ask directly for a samsung display or a cash refund!

I tried to get mine replaced, but because it passed their test, they said it was fine. It's not fine, it's unacceptable. I won't be able to resell this computer in good conscience either. This is really frustrating. I expect more from Apple.

Hope a proper solution gets found soon. I am waiting to see if its worth buying one, I don't fancy all the hassle.

Hopefully the court case will bring more attention to this woeful problem.

Does this problem occur to 13" retinas as well?

I wouldn't recommend buying a retina, not after this. I used to have a MBAir and iMac. One for travel and client meetings, the iMac (with a second 27" display) for normal work. Dropbox kept both up to date (iCloud is awful and unreliable, Dropbox has been a Godsend). Now that the SSDs in the iMac are reasonably priced, I'd recommend that. I liked my MBAir WAY more than I do my retina. The ghosting ruined it for me.

It's a shame that Apple has to be sued to take care of this. It's also a shame that (in my opinion), no hardware is really a serious competitor yet. Too bad Ubuntu can't steal Ives away from Apple.

Agreed. My perfect MacBook Pro is not so perfect anymore. There is no image retention, but earlier this morning, found a few dead/stuck pixels on it. :(

There's a class action against this retina ****.

I really hope customers could win it!

Jajaba,

tkxdev is, in fact, correct. Any power is measured in Watts, including energy not released as heat. The heating or cooling power released by thermal appliances like air conditioners or heaters is typically measured in BTU per hour. But not all energy released by an appliance is automatically released as heat, and CFLs have a high efficiency, meaning that relatively little power is released into heat, compared to incandescant bulbs. Just because power can be measured in BTU per hour does not mean that all power is necessarily released into thermal energy, i.e., just because two numbers have the same units does not mean that they measure the same thing. The fact that you can see light produced by the CFL inside your screen means that not all the power goes into heating your macbook.

1 That's pretty much what I was saying, too.  Watts doesn't always equate to heat. tkxdev's post was almost identical to what I said earlier.

@ s57 and Chuck

I'm going to try this one more time.  Watts ALWAYS equate to heat!  Are you aware that horsepower is actually a derivative of Watts (1Hp = 745.7W or 42.4 BTU's/min)?  A 3HP lawn mower will produce the exact same amount of heat as a 600HP Lomborghini once it produces the same total horsepower, it would just take 200 hours for the lawn mower to do it.  Calories are also a derivative of Watts, 1 calorie = .00397 BTU's

Any device drawing 115Wh of energy MUST dissipate 392.4 BTU's of heat.  It is a basic FACT of physics!  By the way, I guess I didn't make it clear before.  A Joule is a Watt Second, or 1/3600th of a Watt Hour. Just a different scale of time.

If you put an incandescent lamp and a CCFL light source in seperate sealed boxes with the same volume of air and run both until they consume 115Wh, while measuring the total heat generated, they will both produce exactly 392.4 BTU's.  It doesn't even matter if it's a 1000 Watt incandescent bulb and a 10 Watt CCFL.

A MBPr, for example, generates heat from resistance, friction and radiance, (eg., silicon based electrical curcuits / wires, the friction of the ball bearings in the fan, the backlighting etc.).  If the MBPr consumes 115Wh it will dissipate exactly 392.4 BTU's of heat once the MBPr returns to the same temperature it started at.  The only variable in this example could be if the battery is charging.  The battery can store some of the 115Wh, but guess what? When the battery discharges the stored energy it will produce exactly enough heat to account for the 115Wh consumed which will total 392.4 BTU's.

Jajaba,

This is incorrect. Energy released into photons from your display is _not_ heat dissipated in your Macbook. Some of it may be absorbed in your retina, at which point some of the energy is transferred to heat in your eye, some of that photon energy is transferred electro-chemically into your nerve cells, some of it is going to be reflected off of your cornea. Other photons released by the CFL in your macbook will travel elsewhere and may get absorbed or eventually add to the cosmic radiation background if they manage to leave the earth's atmosphere. But they are _not_ going to be transformed to heat inside your macbook (heat, in the case of a solid object, can be represented as phonons, essentially quantum heat particles, just as photons are quantum particles of elecgtromagnetic energy, but phonon does not equal photon, thus the two distinct terms).

So, to recap: Not all energy is heat, though, by the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of a system is to increase its amount of heat energy if work is done within the system. Yes, some of the energy released by CFLs is in the form of heat, but some of it comes out of the display as light - where else do you think the energy for the photons emanating from the display comes from? The photonic energy may eventually be turned into heat, but once the light has left the laptop, that heat will not contribute to the temperature of your laptop.

How much of the energy used by the display ends up in heat depends on its efficiency. That is why LED light sources are the preferred option, since they generate more light per amount of energy used (and thus less heat).

As for your thought experiment: You could envision a box inside of which you mount some photo-voltaic cells that capture photons emitted by that CFL. You can charge a battery with the electricity generated by those cells, thus storing energy chemically. Clearly, that energy will not have gone into heat (that is, until the battery is fully charged and can no longer accept input power).

Now, the energy released as light from your display may admittedly be a fairly small amount of the overall energy budget of a laptop, and virtually all of the energy consumed by most of the electronics inside the laptop (such as the CPU and SDD)  _will_ get released as heat. But if I recall correctly, the question was about the light source in the display, which is specifically designed _not_ to release all of the consumed power as heat.

I said it MUST  DISSIPATE 115Wh of heat which is 392.4 BTU's.  Which it is doing exactly as you surmised.  if you measure alll the heat dissipated it is exactly 392.4 BTU's.  Thats why they use vaccuum chambers ans reflective materials in scientific heat measurements.  I never said all the heat was inside the MBP...  this all started with someone arguing that a Watt is not always a Watt which is just not true.

As for the rest you are way overthinking it.  I suggest reading Einstiens Theory of Relativity if you really want to grasp the simple complexity of a Watt is a Watt....

bought a refurbished rMBP 15" and lucked out with a samsung.  looks and feels brand new and the screen looks great.

@ all the Watt guys

Isn't there a thread focusing on high school science projects?

Jajaba,

You are still incorrect: The power must not all dissipate. If you lift a heavy object and put it on the top shelf in your room, a good fraction of the energy you expended ends up in the gravitational energy potential of the book. The book can stay there indefinitely. Watt is a unit of energy per time. Energy can take different forms, and not all energy is heat. Plain and simple.

As for your very kind suggestion, I know my relativity quite well, and it is not necessary to undestand that a Watt of eletromagnetic power is not the same thing as a Watt of thermal power. And since the argument was about the light source in the display heating parts of the powerbook, it does matter whether the energy is dissipated within the laptop or not.