Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

akamyself wrote:

 

hard to figure out his purpose, it's not his TOU fixation or even his lack of trying to help but really his attitude that is a problem, but enough talking about Csound1. he'll be back anyway.

Maybe it's a virus ?

haha, I see similarities but I wouldn't jump to any conclusions so easily.

so you're back, I will email you pretty soon.

Well, the 13" don't have the same configuration as the 15" and 17" (only come with the Intel one) so clearly you won't have issues with it, so I will try this one more time, what would you do if you had this issue? this are the options I read so far in this discussion:

- Go to Apple Care and pay for a new Logic Board that will fail in say a year or even less (this is what happened to me but I didn't have to pay cause my Apple Care wasn't expired the first time but now it did)

- Try fixing it outside Apple or any authorized place and risk loosing any possible call back Apple might do about this in the future (clearly they just did one for the iMac with similar if not the same issue)

- Wait and see if Apple ever recalls this and get a new notebook in the mean time?

- Go to Apple Care and if they confirm they have to change the Logic Board and will charge you for it ask to see if you can maybe get a newer model paying the difference from your 2011 MBP to the new one you might be getting? (this is what actually worked for me the second time I got the issue and my Apple Care was already expired, but I know not all of us have the money to get a newer model)

Being such an Apple expert and having so many points for "helping" people in this forum might be helpful here with my questions.

I'm just trying to help you change your image around here, that's all.

Regards.

I just got my repair summary email back from Apple. $1,240 (US) to fix mine. They say "the product is outside the coverage." So then why did I pay for AppleCare?
Mine is a similar story to some here. I have a G3 (2002) desktop that still boots as fast as it did the day I bought it. I also have a G4 (2006) that works perfectly. Sad that these two machines, 12 years old and 8 years old, work fine. But my 2011 laptop has already crapped out on me… again. The first time was 3 months after I bought it.

My loyalty to Apple is waining. I have been a Mac user and evangelist for nearly 20 years. My dad had an original 1985 Mac. Not that any of that matters because Apple doesn't know who I am nor do they care, nor should they. But this is the first time Apple has made me feel like I'm just a number.

It's just a sad day for me.

Weighing in for the paper trail. My 17" MBP, early 2011 is experiencing similar issues as described in earlier posts. I haven't any issues booting (yet), but any time the GFX card switches from integrated to discrete, the laptop crashes hard to gray screen and you can hear the fans spin up. Installing gfxCardStatus and forcing "integrated" only *seems* to have resolved the issue, but that's a stopgap approach at best.

With the literally THOUSANDS of people reporting similar problems with the discrete graphics card, you'd hope Apple would step up and make amends, but I'm starting to believe that's wishful thinking. I love my Mac. I'm a long, long, LONG time PC aficionado that converted and thought I would never look back. But after this issue (and a similar problem with my iPhone's wifi antenna) I'm seriously considering moving back. My 7 year-old Sony and nearly 11 year-old IBM Thinkpad notebooks are still chugging along. Granted, they're slow and not nearly as sexy as my MBP, but I haven't had to nerf one of their biggest features in order to get them to work.

I am in the same situation as you. I have an 17" MBP, early 2011 and it has show some graphical problems but has not totally gone yet. I am just using iStat Menus to manually control the fans an keep the temperature down. Disabling the GPU is not an option for me so I doubt this will last that long.... the fans will probably pack up as well.

I'm having the exact same issue, everybody has.

One fix for me, was to always bypass the Nvidia card and always use the Intel instead (by using gfxCardStatus).

It's absolutely ridiculous, that this is not fixed by apple for free. Definitely not a component that should fail after 2-3 years!!

Also it's truly absurd, that they replace the whole logic board and ask 500$ for it..

Adding mine, as well. I have a 17"MBP, early 2011 with the same discrete GPU issue. I can sometimes get it to boot from the integrated card, but once it goes for the discrete GPU it freezes up. I will be taking my machine to the genius bar. Apple really should issue a replacement. I paid a lot of money for this machine, because I imagined that I was buying quality. If the Apple brand doesn't represent quality, I guess it is just overpriced electronics. Maybe we should take all of our 2011 MBPs and drop them off on the lawn of Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, CA.

One more with the same problem ... this is a shame

When is Apple going to address this problem?

I have spend a lot of money on this particular product and I am only hearing this story over and over again.

Some of reside in 3rd world countries and cannot drop X money for a product that should last longer than 3 years, I saved and saved for my Mac, now I feel the fool.

My 2011 Mac doesn't even turn on any more, the issue started and ended my Macs life within a week while I was on a big job, I have been told it is unrepairable.

I have searched and found a petition online, hope all of you find it and sign it too, frankly, Apple needs to address this.

Add me to the list! Have been to the "Genius" bar today and they simply told me that it's out of warranty and that I will have to pay for a new logic board.

Seriously, Apple? I've paid >£2k for this piece of metal...

Hi all. I posted on here ~5 months ago when my LB failed the first time. It's now happened a second time.

The first time I emailed executive relations, got an offer for the ~$300 flat-rate repair, and took that option. If Apple doesn't fix it for free this time, I'm done.

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Its  quite unfortunate, I got an email saying I should reset my PRAM, unfortunately this has done nothing.

I first posted about my MBP doing weird things in July. It started in June, when I was using preview and image capture for adding photos to a project I was working on. First my exterior HD apple monitor went,  then my  MBP did the same thing. It froze, so I had to use a hard shut down. When I tried to reboot, it wouldn't start up, just a gray screen with vertical purple lines, so I did a hard shut down again and restarted  using option key. Then went to utilities and all my permissions were messed up. Repaired them and it ran fine for a few hours, then it froze again. I tried to reboot but it did same thing so I again used the option key. Repaired permissions that were out of whack. Every time I use preview very much, it does this.  Rebooted Friday the 4th in the evening and it started up fine, although it took longer than usual. Put it to sleep after a couple hours.

Woke it up on the 5th and it seemed fine but I hadn't been doing any graphics. Just text and safari, mostly looking for answers on Apple support discussions. Looked at logs and seems Flash player was responsible for one crash so I dumped it. In all this time, no warnings, alerts or messages had displayed.

Installed update to software after this happened to see if it would help. It didn't. Now running 10.7.5 Lion. I downloaded gfxcardstatus vs. 2.3 and set it on integrated card and it has been running fine. Still not doing anything really graphic intensive, no iPhoto, or anything. And haven't shut it off since. Just putting it to sleep after using.

I called the apple store in nearby town, nearest genius? is about 300 miles away, and they said 450.00 for a new logic board with a 30 day guarantee. I said no. I used the feedback on apple to tell my story, but still haven't gone to have it checked. I have it running good as long as I don't push it and don't want to take a chance on them screwing it up. What would you do?