Yes, I fired up my MacBook Pro today with the intention of getting on with some more Dx10 work, but was greeted with a completely corrupted display. It appears that other things are still working, as I can still make some things out through the garbage – right from power on I get the top third of the screen as mostly greyish blank, and the bottom two-thirds as a ‘smeared’ version of what I should be seeing, although when I tried sleeping and waking it, I temporarily got a correct login screen view in the top third but it slowly faded into garbage, whilst the bottom section was still smeared. Grr.
So, it’s completely unusable. Only just over 3 months old too, and it worked fine on Monday with no ‘events’ in between that would suggest breakage, it just died on its own. Looks like I’ll have to take it down to our local Apple reseller – I only hope they can just replace the LCD or something, since I spent ages setting up both OS X and Vista the way I like, and I really don’t want to do that all over again. I also had some work in progress code on there I’d prefer not to lose, although it wouldn’t be a disaster if I had to.
In all, grr.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I assume you’ve tried firing up with an external monitor?
Might be an option to make sure you can backup your stuff and also make it usable while the part arrives.
With my PowerBook G4 I used to take the hard drive out when I shipped it back to Apple because of the sensitivity of the projects I was working on – wasn’t ever a problem.
[)amien
October 25th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Yeah, I’ve connected an external monitor and that works fine, it’s the LCD that’s shot. Trouble is, since I can’t see what I’m doing on the main screen I can’t log in anyway – tried various tricks like starting it up or waking it from sleep with the lid closed but that didn’t seem to work. As it happens I found I’d copied the code onto the server anyway so no huge problem, it’s just frustrating to have it bust so quickly. I’d heard a few stories about Mac hardware being prone to failures but I thought they might be exaggerated, but perhaps not.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
In practice Apple hardware is usually solid, but they do have “problem child” lines, and sometimes it can be tough to get Apple to acknowledge them. The iBook logic-board suit was a good example of this, and unfortunately it seems the MBP . Hope it works out for you!
October 25th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
OK, I apologize for being a fumble-fingers–this is the second time I’ve munged a link in your blog comments, and I swear I’m not usually this bad with markup.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:10 am
I’d keep the harddrive before sending it in, if they let you
October 26th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Brrr thats some bad news…my mbp arriving on monday…really bad feeling
October 26th, 2007 at 10:32 am
[...] MacBook Pro Dies [...]
October 26th, 2007 at 10:33 am
You could always start your Mac in target disk mode (press “t” during boot). That will make it act like a usual firewire disk. You could then connect it to a second machine via FW and create an image of your Mac’s HD. Just in case it gets deleted / replaced ruring repair. If so, just write it back via FW and boom
restored your system.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Hey, that’s a neat trick, I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:52 am
[...] MacBook Pro Dies [...]