Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card
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Feb 19, 2015 3:43 PMby kayazuki,ChickenMuffin wrote:
I worry that the problem is not yet resolved given the faulty part. Have they actually fixed the underlying issue, or is this a placebo/band-aid solution?
Excellent question... Maybe they did finally instruct their production facilities to change the soldering profiles for these boards to ensure better soldering of the GPU.. To make as sure as possible that the boards will survive beyond February 27th, 2016
This is also an interesting line in their repair extension program article:
"You will be notified about any additional repair charges that are required."
Luckily there is no reputation of informing you that you spilled coffee/whatever in your machine or did something else that caused oxidation.
The oxidation trick alone might already be enough to first have to replace the board on your costs before looking that the real problem..?
Or maybe some other parts. Whatever it might take to take a few $..
We'll see!
ChickenMuffin's question remains a really good question...
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Feb 19, 2015 3:49 PMby vsingha2k,Sure Darrell,
I was quite appalled and dismayed by the "Apple watchdog handling" of you/thread.
Even I had to buy a used MBP for $900, while Apple diagnostics/repairs etc were going on, as I couldn't stop working.
If Apple had come forward earlier, I wouldn't have to spend so much time, energy, frustration and loss of production/income.
APPLE create a corporate culture of "Do the Right Thing" in first place, specially in support/customer service groups.
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Feb 19, 2015 3:50 PMby Darrell Stall,And then you might be "lucky" enough to join the failed Retina MBP club whose members are rare, few and far between and end up SOL all over again, waiting years for membership to grow until Apple decide's if and when it's in Apple's best interest, not its customers, to replace their logicboards.
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Feb 19, 2015 3:55 PMby D3us,ChickenMuffin wrote:
AMAZING THANK YOU APPLE!
Think you should thank the people starting online petitions, telling magazines, advising people to open a case.
The ones starting the facebook pages.
The ones starting the lawsuits.
The ones that after reparing their machines, kept going back when it failed again, making screenshots and/or vids of it for proof.
Those are the people you should thank, not Apple.
It took em over 3 years to aknowledge a problem....
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Feb 19, 2015 4:20 PMby raffaellos,TODAY I got back from repair my computer from an Apple authorised laboratory, they did not change the board but put back together the graphic card with the board so at least I can continue to work. I paid 350$!! (changing board would cost double 700$) now it should save few months.
I'm traveling to Italy for work and had to use emergency service. I lost
WILL APPLE PAY BACK THIS COST OF THE REPAIR? ..AND WILL APPLE DO A BETTER REPAIR/REPLACEMENT TO THE COMPUTER THAT NOW IS UNDER "DIEING" CONDITIONS...
I WONDER!!!!
APPLE WHAT A MESS DID YOU DO THOUGH ALL THESE YEARS WE WERE SUFFERING?
YOUR BEST CLIENTS ARE THOSE WHO SUFFER.. Proifessionals that always believe in the product. Myself, spent on this computer almost 3000$ at the day of the purchase.
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Feb 19, 2015 4:27 PMby Nickiwi,Thank you corentiny1 for finding this and telling us!
And thank you Apple for finally recognising the problem and acting on it.
I don't know however if they will reimburse me my first logic board replacement as just after the 4th logic board replacement, in January this year while it was still working OK, I contacted Apple Support by chat, pointing out that the subject concerned a recently added Apple component in order to avoid having to pay to chat.
I expected the 4th replacement board to fail before the process with Apple finished, but no - the chat resulted very quickly in a telephone call from a Senior Adviser in Apple in Ireland, extremely helpful and pleasant, who agreed to replace my early 2011 (i7 8GB memory 500 GB disc with the dreaded AMD processor) MacBook Pro with a new 2014 (so current) 15 inch i7 Retina (16 GB 500 GB SSD) MacBook Pro. He agreed I could pay the normal upgrade price to upgrade to the 2.8 GHz i7 and a 1TB SSD, which I did. This meant they collected my machine, which I had managed to Time Machine AND Carbon Copy Clone and I duly de-registered iTunes etc. and wiped the disc. And because of the extras they delivered the new machine from China to me in Belgium, which took 6 days. This part of the operation was followed by a very helpful lady from AppleCare Support in the Netherlands (by the way I had never bothered with AppleCare as until that machine, all the Macs in my family had been extremely reliable and long-lived). One thing the Senior Adviser said was "as you have paid for the first of a series of faulty repairs", which is why I don't know if they will reimburse it, having replaced the whole machine.
Another thing - I told him I had bought the machine partly to run professional graphics and photography applications on and that this was impossible with the failed logic boards - he seemed a bit surprised and said most people seemed to buy high-end machines even though they had no real technical need of them and just used them for email, web access and bit of office applications. I pointed out the huge tip of the enormous iceberg of hurt professional users on this thread; another factor being that most of us seem to be highly mobile - for example I spend a quarter of my days travelling or away from base and thus an iMac or a Mac Pro are not much use to me.
Nonetheless I shall send in the request and see what happens. I have the serial number and characteristics of the faulty machine and all the proofs of the multiple repairs.
Now for something interesting - I had decided to do do a clean install of my software and files on the Yosemite the machine came with, rather than taking over the cumbersome layers upon layers of old stuff accumulated since Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks, and had expected to need to do this by transferring stuff gradually from the clone, as I had thought this Yosemite machine would not run Mavericks, having heard that new machines would not run previous operating systems. Nonetheless I created a second partition on this huge SSD and cloned my Mavericks clone to it, and lo and behold, it worked immediately like a charm. Presumably because the machine is technically a "mid-2014" model while Yosemite was officially launched on 16 October 2014. This means I can gradually transfer programmes and stuff as I need them, and use my Mavericks partition directly when required. I also have an old emergency Snow Leopard partition cloned, but this would indeed not boot immediately and I have not had time to investigate further, probably impossible and not worth it.
One small detail - I couldn't get the iWork '09 applications to work under Yosemite until some helpful people in another thread pointed out that one needed to load them from a .dmg or a DVD and update it, the only problem being that it's disappeared from iTunes and the AppStore so one has to update it from elsewhere (I still have the original DVD, luckily).
Once again, thanks Apple for at last recognising the problem and at least offering to repair free of charge. Even though the free-of-charge logic board will certainly need replacement several times! But personally I am extremely pleased at this outcome. Good luck everybody and thank you for our collective voice, advice, experience-sharing and support.
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Feb 19, 2015 4:41 PMby Darrell Stall,juanfromalamo — I started looking into Linux too, especially 'cause Linux folks claim that OSX is Unix base, the code "stolen" by Apple to create its "proprietary" OS. But while there's been a Windows emulator for Linux under development that's currently operable, the OSX emulator has stalled and is't operable and there's no telling when it will be. On top of that, Linux software seems to be very rare, and there's no such thing as Photoshop for Linux, etc. So if you move to Linux, what will you do for software? Rely on Open Source? Gimp is fine for what it does, but my understanding is it still falls well short of Photoshop.
