The Apple Repair shop gave back my MBP with a broken iSight. I got the laptop back on Thursday only to have to return to the store again today and ask them to look at it.

The guy who repaired my MBP happened to be at the shop and offered to double check the connection.  I returned in an hour to find that it wasn’t as simple as the iSight connection to the logic board but more likely another faulty logic board (or part soldered to the logic board, or display). Basically another major fix.

I’ve been without my laptop for 20 days since August 7th and it has affected my efficiency at work and even my quality of life!

I phoned Apple Care UK about the issue and argued for a new laptop since this will be the third major repair, and usually in these cases they’ll replace it. But, since it’s a Saturday and Customer Service only has limited staff, the most they could offer me was to have a courier service pick up the laptop and run some sort of diagnostic check on the entire thing to determine if it’s likely to fail again. If it is, they’ll issue me a replacement.

I bought my Macbook Pro (a refurb because I was broke) in September of last year. My original warranty had nearly worn out when I started having problems with my graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. First the screen started to go funny blocks of colour. Then I occasionally had trouble getting the display working from sleep.

Then one day it stopped working. Bummer. But these things happen, right?

My colleague, Max, pointed me towards online forums where other MacBook Pro users were having the exact same problems. We* were able to diagnose the problem fairly easily, and I took it to the Apple shop.

The problem is with the graphics card being crappy and overheating. We were able to connect remotely and discover that my beloved laptop wasn’t recognizing the graphics card for what it was, but as an integrated Intel chip.

Because the graphics card is soldered to the logic board, the whole dang thing needs replacing which is essentially a new laptop, right?

Wrong. Two weeks later the exact same thing started happening again, which we half-expected based on customer complaints in the forums.

So now my laptop is in getting fixed again and I am trying to work on a Dell, which would be alright if I didn’t keep trying to use Apple shortcuts and having random things happen…

* by ‘we’ I mean Max. I just stood around.