The Wench has a 17" Macbook Pro, about 4 ish years old. Part way through the week it decided to stop giving out any screen output at all.

Tried a cold reset, no change, but wasn't expected as the system can be heard booting even if nothing showing. Have just had the opportunity to try plugging it into my monitor here and I'm not getting anything either; although the monitor clearly knows something is plugged into it from what it shows on screen. Hit F7 a number of times but again no change.

Any other diagnostics I can try or is it a trip to the Apple store to talk about GPU repairs?

If it is that, does anyone know if it is likely to have a discrete GPU or whether it will be integrated into the motherboard?

There is a Apple fix for this.

They put a thingy on the site to say that if this happens they will replace it for free.

Try to find it on the site. I'll have a look also.


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=53.843031,-1.532908

Take a look here...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=53.842674,-1.532871

Awesome, putting the serial number into the Apple site and it's got that card in, thanks Oli, that's a huge weight off the Wench's mind.

No probs.

Same thing happened to mine which is why I know about it.

Hope you get it sorted.


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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=53.842627,-1.532601

Just had a text from the Wench, it's covered by the issue. Would have been about £700 otherwise, which strikes me as bloody expensive for even a full motherboard replacement (if it's an integrated chip).

Consider that pretty much everything in the case is soldered to the mobo, and that it's Apple bespoke stuff, I'm not surprised at all...

Seriously, everything is hard soldered onto the motherboard?

That's some staggeringly piss-poor design right there.

On the mbp you have you can update the hdd and memory and that's it. Everything else is soldered. Oh, maybe the CMOS battery if they have one?

if you want paper thin, you can't have sockets or daughter boards. You have to surface mount. If 'make it thin and make it light' are in your design requirements and 'make it easily and cheaply serviceable' are not, then surface mount is exactly what you do and not doing it is 'piss-poor design'.

I suspect the percentage of MacBooks that get any kind of servicing is bordering on the miniscule, yet making them light and thin makes for great sales copy and therefore more sales. So, to put it bluntly, commercial sense means we get exactly what we get.

On a similar note, the same thing's happened to my mate's iBook. Common problem, but there's no replacement program. I guess because it was cheap at the time. Anyhow, I thought I'd have a bash at soldering it. I appreciate that it's not necessarily something I can learn in five minutes, but it would be a useful skill to have. Does anyone know where I can learn to solder?!

Not sure I buy the argument Jon. I've got in front of me the parts diagram for the Portege Z830 which is basically Toshiba's answer to the Macbook Air (not as powerful as a Macbook Pro but the same form factor as the Air give or take). There's integrated graphics on it, which are on the motherboard; other than that, it's all daughterboards and sockets...

On the flip side, the Wench dropped her Macbook off at 11:00am this morning at our local Apple store and had a phone call at 4:00pm to say it was all done and ready to go.

As someone in a very similar bit of the industry, that's seriously impressive indeed and much respect should be accorded.