Design flaw behind MacBook Pro’s “stage light” effect

I really don&#x27;t understand Apple&#x27;s obsessions with thinness. Do they really think that a few millimetres off the depth of a laptop is worth sacrificing reliability like this?<p>I thought the same during the last iPhone keynote where they touted &quot;an extra 30 minutes of battery life&quot; as a major feature: just make it slightly thicker and you could add <i>hours</i> to the battery life.

The most important quote from the article:<p>&gt; <i>But the bigger problem is that, in an apparent effort to make the display as thin as possible, Apple designed the cables as part of the display, so they cannot be replaced. This means that when (not if) those cables start to fail, the entire display unit needs to be replaced, as opposed to one or two little cables—effectively turning a $6 problem into a $600 disaster.</i><p>This is beyond crazy. How much more space would it take up to make the ribbon cables replaceable?

In Norway we have 5 years of &quot;reklamasjon&quot; on products that are supposed to last considerably longer than two years, such as a laptop. It is sort of a government mandated warranty on top of the regular one. I have had 4 year and 11 months old stuff that I have gotten replaced or repaired free of charge.<p>Wonder how products would have been designed if this was a thing globally (or at least in the top 3 biggest markets). Anyone else who thinks &quot;a whole lot more durable and repairable&quot; is a reasonable guess?

I don&#x27;t understand the arrogance and the stubbornness of Apple to keep that stupid Touch Bar. They have completely lost me as a customer because I absolutely refuse to buy a Macbook Pro until they give me the OPTION of a regular keyboard. The fact they are arrogant enough to think they don&#x27;t need to provide me with the option makes me angry as a consumer, and I&#x27;m about to ditch it completely at this point and go to a Surface Pro.

I love my MBP - when my employer pays for it. I&#x27;d never buy a $3K machine with this many issues on my own dollar.

You can use flat-flex cables instead of wires without these issues, for example all of the Nintendo folding handhelds use them. And those are durable enough to stand up to children abusing them for years on end.<p>They have the flat flex make a loop to allow the flex strain to be spread out, rather than bending it at one specific point.

I just can’t see any sane person buying these machines with their own money. I am still on my 2015 13” rMBP, but boy if I had to upgrade to a new machine, I would probably look elsewhere. And mostly because of the hardware, what an irony...

This generation was the one that made me finally give up on MBPs, and now I&#x27;m even more glad. The lack of 8th gen intel, removal of magsafe (an innovation they were previous, rightly, proud of), lack of actual touchscreen, and ever increasing prices. Other friends who do a lot of photography (a key market for apple!?) were miffed at the removal of the SD card slot.<p>I went for a HP Spectre and have been very impressed. touchscreen changes things entirely - reading papers is a joy. Giving a demo is easy with a 360 degre hinge so i can prop it on the table... oh and it was half the price, for better specs (the resolution is crazy).<p>I&#x27;m still open to MBPs in the future, as I loved my 2010, 2012, and 2014 versions, but they need to look at what made them great for the &#x27;pro&#x27; market, and think about how to servie that, not just turn them in to a more expensive version for the image conscious.

The farther this goes the more I just want my 2012 body with 2018 specs.<p>I&#x27;d actually pay <i>more</i> for this option.

I&#x27;ve been using a MacBook Pro 13&quot; or 15&quot; professionally for the last 9 years. I wouldn&#x27;t use anything else. I don&#x27;t use the touchbar but I don&#x27;t mind it. I also appreciate that they are getting thinner and lighter as I regularly carry them in a bag on my shoulder or on my bike.

I like the Touch Bar. I use it all the time contextually in whatever app I am using. For regular, non-tech users, I&#x27;ve noticed that they use it too. It allows those folks to quickly access options that were previously keyboard shortcuts.<p>As an aside, I also enjoy the quick access to emojis.‍

Hopefully more regulations will come forcing the manufacturers to think about reparability. Not sure where the EU right to repair ended up, but it seems more to be optional and just give better labelling.

I&#x27;d love to get something other than a MacBook, but the trackpad compensates for every other flaw. It&#x27;s also nice that there&#x27;s no air vent on the bottom.

I bought an iMac because I needed an upgrade and couldn&#x27;t stand the 2016+ laptops models.<p>Before the iMac I bought a 2015 MBP and sold it a couple of months later because the integrated GPU was seriously lacking and the 4th gen CPU got extremely hot and loud.<p>Thank god I don&#x27;t need portability anymore because Apple laptops have been nothing but disappointment for the past 4 years.

Apple, providing mere 12 month standard warranty does not feel like a premium product. $270 apple care(~20% of product price) pushes the cost of fixing product design mistake on the users. This is not how it should be.<p>Edit: You may consider buying your next apple device using a credit card that offers extended warranty. For example, C___ double cash adds 2 years of extended warranty on top of manufacturer&#x27;s. Am__ offers 1 year extended warranty.

I don’t see this as an artifact of Steve Jobs’ absence as much as I see it as an artifact of any company that gets so successful behind just a handful of products. Eventually to drive revenue growth you start needing to focus on gimmicky bullshit instead of just power and features, like absurd thinness and the natural consequence is flexible iPads and unrepairable MacBooks.

I wonder how this type of &#x27;small&#x27; issue with a &#x27;big&#x27; effect gets past QA&#x2F;QC. You&#x27;d think it would have failed during standard mechanical usage tests, but apparently it didn&#x27;t, or didn&#x27;t fail reliably? It&#x27;s a stupid issue of course, but I&#x27;m more interested in how this type of thing isn&#x27;t caught.

That&#x27;s why Apple sells applecare+ for these machines. Expect the lifetime of these new MBPs to be 3 years.

Been considering upgrading my last-gen-design MBP to a new one... maybe I&#x27;ll hold off on that.

Have you seen the new mac commercial with all the different artists? They were all using the pre-usb-c macbooks. The usb-c macbooks aren&#x27;t tools, they are accessories. I&#x27;m still using my 2014 macbook and will never likely buy another mac.

Does this affect only touch-bar MBPs or every post 2016 model?

The article mentions the possibility of a similar problem with the new Air. For curiosity I went to iFixit to see what the current (2017) macbook has. It appears[1] to be a much longer cable that flexes over a longer radius.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;Retina+MacBook+2017+Display+Assembly+Replacement&#x2F;104756#s178616" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;Retina+MacBook+2017+Display+Ass...</a>

Happened to me, Macbook now has a useless display and I can either spend $600+ or have an overpriced desktop. Didn&#x27;t even use it that much.

What are some good alternatives these days to MB-pros? I&#x27;m likely not going to get another, and don&#x27;t mind giving up a little in size&#x2F;weight for ports, simplicity, etc. Any good threads on the web to point me to to save me some research time?<p>I still think my 2014 11&quot; MB AIR is the best laptop I&#x27;ve ever owned, despite the screen being woefully drab this day and age.

This is yet another consequence of Apple&#x27;s new approach to design, &quot;Reality Distortion Field 2.0&quot;.<p>I posted this here a few days ago, but seems relevant to this discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;geophile&#x2F;reality-distortion-field" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;geophile&#x2F;reality-distortion-field</a>

I was about to buy a MacBook Pro 15&quot;, 1TB of storage and 32GB RAM, for work, and this weakness made me reconsider it. One thing that I don&#x27;t understand: I&#x27;m pretty sure Apple has a machine to open&#x2F;close the lid a million times to test the hinges etc, how didn&#x27;t it catch this &quot;flaw&quot;?

While the article blames the quest for thinness in the current generation of MacBook Pros, I have a 17&quot; MBP from 2006 that also has this &quot;stage light&quot; issue. And this is a machine with a full optical drive and removable battery.<p>At least now I know the cause. Too bad my hands are really too big to fix it on my own.

A YouTube channel named UnboxTherapy posted a video showing keyboard problems with the latest gen butterfly switch. The switch design is inherently flawed, no amount of rubber can fix that. They need to go back to whatever they had in 2013.

Wouldn&#x27;t one of the things you test on a laptop design be how many times you can open and close the lid? Surely Apple has a robot already that does this? If not, why not? This seems like it would have been caught had they done this.

The worst part of this is it&#x27;s not replaceable. I have a mid-2011 MBP still running in great condition. Its flaw is the HDD SATA flex cable that is prone to break which is replaceable and available on Amazon.

I wonder if Apple&#x27;s hardware design troubles would be ameliorated if ICs had to buy their own work machines using their own post-tax money.<p>EDIT: And could only use machines in the workplace that are release+12 months old?

Slightly off-topic but I&#x27;d like to mention -- I have never been happy by their decision of getting rid of the Headphone jack (and other ports).<p>Laptop is meant to be a portable device and it needs to be self-sufficient. But in case of the new MacBooks you have to keep adapters handy at all times. Using bluetooth for audio draws more battery than wired ones, though negligible, but still matters over long runs. Also, you have to make sure your bluetooth earphones&#x2F;speakers are charged as well.<p>EDIT - Disregard my comment. I had Apple iPhone in mind while writing for MacBook. Guess I was misplaced in space and time.

The Mitsubishi Pedion had this exact same design flaw almost 20 years ago. I stupidly spent $400 on a replacement screen only to have it happen 6 months later.

Reminds me of the old plastic iBooks (white ones) which would either snag the cables in the housing, or have the backlight power lines crack in the logic board.

The right thing to do would be for Apple to offer extended warranty replacements for this issue (like they finally did with the whole keyboard fiasco).

Have had the same issue with a 2015 MBA. Got charged 300 USD for a display swap.

When will people finally realize that Apple hardware is a status symbol, and not indicative of quality any more?<p>How many more disasters, mishaps, and otherwise shoddy QA do they have to have before people start demanding something else?<p>Edit: &quot;Nice&quot;. Disagree and suffer the wrath of -1&#x27;s and ratelimiting.