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General discussion

vertical green line on MacBook Pro 15 inch purchased 06/2009

Dec 5, 2010 8:47AM PST

I wanted to make people aware of a vertical green line which appeared 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty expired. The Apple Store said the display assembly needed to be replaced ($492.00 to fix). Pretty disappointing to get such an expensive hardware problem on a fairly new computer. Just wanted to make people aware.

Discussion is locked

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You might get lucky.
Dec 5, 2010 9:00AM PST

Some states have a rule where your warranty is extended but the number of days it was in the shop.

Has the machine ever been in the shop?

And isn't your story a good reason to extend Apple Care before it expires?
Bob

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As what they say
Dec 5, 2010 10:43AM PST

As what they say "nobody dies a virgin because in the end life ***** us all" life would always be unfair for everyone. What matters most is that we should move on with such kind of experience.

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Back on topic?
Dec 5, 2010 10:49AM PST

I had some outside hope this machine had some time in the shop to help you get over the line and back inside warranty.

Sadly I didn't read back from you about that.
Bob

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Thank you for your thoughts
Dec 7, 2010 1:45AM PST

You're right about extending Apple Care!

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It happens
Dec 5, 2010 9:45AM PST

It happens, and sometimes it's just kind of dumb luck it happened to you when it did.

Not really sure what it is you hope to accomplish by this post. Life is not fair, deal with it. These things happen, and there's nothing to be gained by sitting around pouting about it, and posting a "Woe is me" message on a forum like this. It's not like we have a magic wand we can waive that will magically fix one of the 6+ MILLION transistors in your display panel that went bad.

About two years ago I bought a new car. Nothing fancy, just a Toyota Corolla, but it was the first new car I've ever owned. Didn't even have 5,000 miles on the thing before some moron in a pickup truck decided they just HAD to get in front of me on a short merge where two freeways met. Their front wheel scraped from about the point where the passenger and driver doors meet, all the way up to my front fender, and caved in the outer part of the driver's door. To top it all off, it was a total hit and run. I got a picture of the guy's license plate, but the cops seemed more interested in grilling me, and long story short, the jack@$$ got away with it. My insurance covered the damage, but I was without my car for about a week. THEN, a couple of months later, I was JUST sitting down to eat some lunch, my car parked in a parking lot without a single car for like 5 spaces on either side, when someone came in asking if this was my license plate number. Some lady had lost control of her car and plowed into mine. At least in that case the lady owned up to it, so all is forgiven, but I still only have like 16,000 miles on this car, and it's already had these two incidents. Fortunately nothing since then, it's been a nice boring experience, which is exactly what I want from a car.

Moral of the story is that sometimes life sucks. Bad things happen to good people. I could have easily sat around feeling sorry for myself after either of these events, but I chose to press on. Sitting around feeling sorry for myself wouldn't have solved anything. I'm sure everyone here has their own war stories they could tell. So just file it under, "Sometimes life sucks" and get on with it.

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Probably too late now,
Dec 5, 2010 9:00PM PST

but I have found that a call to Apple, when the problem first occurs, and a little pleading will get you the work done under warranty as a "one off" gesture of goodwill.

Shouting and screaming does not help, actually makes things worse.

I would ALWAYS advocate AppleCare on any laptop. One repair and you have got all of your money back.

P

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I'd go one further
Dec 5, 2010 10:16PM PST

I'd go one further, and just advocate AppleCare on ANY Apple system. Apple's AppleCare Protection Plan (APP) is dirt cheap compared to pretty much EVERYONE else in the computer manufacturing business, and like already stated, virtually any single repair will more than make up for the cost of the APP. It doesn't cover accidental damage or abuse, which IMO is a missed opportunity on Apple's part, but it definitely would have covered this repair.

Given it's only been about 2 weeks since the warranty lapsed, you could try floating the idea of buying APP now and they just post-date the purchase so there was no coverage gap. Sometimes that sort of thing works, but it sounds like you may have already burned every good will bridge that might have been. Still, it has a better chance of working than whining about it here does.