Screen does not work

did he have apple care? if he did he can transfer it over to you. but if not im afraid you are on your own. you can see if a third party tech shop will do it for less.

 

First thing to do would be to check AppleCare if you have it. If you don't then you're going to need to either claim it on insurance (Home and Contents insurance for example) or pay.

Something very similar happened to my PowerBook back in 2006. The screen backlight totally died for no reason (we'll get to how exactly I know this in a sec) so I claimed it on insurance, paid about $A500 (having only been with this one company for a couple of months), and got a brand new MacBook Pro. The only difference between our situations is that my PowerBook couldn't be fixed. The only way to repair it was to gut the entire thing and have everything replaced. It was going to cost the exact same amount as a MacBook Pro.

Now the reason your screen repair costs so much is because to replace the screen they need to cannibalise another computer. The only time they don't is when they're replacing the screen on a 17" Mac laptop because Apple make extra 17" screens separately. I did work experience at Next Byte back in 2007 so I was told about all this, as well as learning why my PowerBook was unfixable. There's a certain piece of hardware in the screens that when it fails, kills the backlight. It's not fixable but the screen can be replaced. In my case, however, the problem lied somewhere else unfixable.

Thankfully my MBP is still running strong and I still have the PowerBook, which I have plugged into a monitor right now.