Black line on built-in display...

2016 rMBP 15". Was fine previously. Ran on external monitor for a while. Opened it to look at a thing... There's a black line about 2/3 down the display. Not affected by resolution, not affected by GPU. Doesn't show up on external monitor, obviously.

My guess is that a cable going to the display is loose, but it turns out they switched to special 5-pointed star bits to make it hard to look at things, and I have misplaced my Fancy Weird Screwdriver Bit Set, so I can't check to see whether it's trivial.

Sooooo. I get to back up the drive, then take it to an apple place where they may or may not be able to repair it within a week, and if they have to do anything they may well swap the logic board, which indirectly results in loss of all data, because the data is soldered on.

A+ customer experience, here.

 

Very helpful of you to point this out, I guess?

 

It's a BTO machine. If they don't happen to have a spare display on hand, they can't just give me a different machine.

Because, with the parts soldered on, even Apple can't just have a bunch of logic boards. They have to have logic boards for every combination of CPU, memory, and SSD.

Which strikes me as a sort of fundamental and severe flaw. Even the repair techs can't swap out a defective part anymore.

 

Well, I'd argue that it's a flaw in that, if they can't get me a working machine very quickly, I'm probably going to go with the simpler solution of returning it. I haven't really got a plan for what to do instead, but this machine has pretty much disappointed me on every level. Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, even if I can find a 2015 with a discrete GPU, it's apparently unstable and may fail badly, and apparently you can't just upgrade the SSD in those because even though they're standard form factor, they're a special proprietary interface that's not standard, so there's no way to get comparable performance from after-market. Wheeeeeeeeee.

... Of course, then I'm out $hundreds in USB-C cables and widgets, but I guess they'll probably be useful eventually someday.

 

Long story short, after thinking about the repair process and all that, I realized that I just plain don't like this machine enough to spend $3,500 on a computer, plus $350 on a support deal, plus tax, for the dubious privilege of having a machine every part of which disappoints me.

I haven't figured out what to get instead, but I am pretty sure that $4k will get me something I'd like.

 

Oh, I have a backup. But I live far from Apple stores, so I either do repair-by-mail, or repair-by-driving-two-hours, twice. And either way I'm out the computer for a while.

And then I look at PCs, and for a bit over $2k, I can get a machine with 32GB of faster DDR4 memory, upgradeable to 64, PCIe slot for an SSD and 2.5" drive bay, anti-glare display... Basically, I can get a machine a lot closer to what I actually wanted, hardware-wise. Downside? A lot of apps I want aren't available for Linux, and I hate Windows. But for a nearly $2k lower price and much better hardware?

Apple got the sale initially just because they hadn't updated in a year and a half and I was way overdue for a machine, but the machine was just plain too disappointing.