Fixing my Macbook Screen

Getting around the Apple Tax, DIY style

Long long ago, in an office not so far away, I found myself in the front lines of an impromptu game of football. One Hail Mary later:

1. football hits light fixture
2. fixture hits laptop screen
3. palm hits forehead.

The damage wasn’t bad at first: a bit of blue leakage in the top corner and a column of dead pixels that mysteriously fixed itself. The Apple price tag of $900 (!!!) certainly didn’t help convince me that I should do anything about it.

Recently however, things took a turn for the worse and the leaking began to spread and appear in new places. Without an external monitor, the laptop was beginning to be unusable.

Ebay swooped in to the rescue. I ordered the replacement LCD screen for less than $200 and a few days later, it arrived. Andrey decided to donate some time and experience to install it (being my birthday and all that).

How it went down

1. The state of screen, pre-op. For months, there was only a tiny corner of leakage. In May, things mysteriously started getting worse and I was losing around 50 pixels a day to the blue invading force.
2. Casing removed.
3. Andrey removing the old screen.
4. It works! We turned it back off to screw everything back in properly. Putting the middle hinge cover back on was ridiculously hard.

In general, swapping the screens was pretty straightforward, albeit with a few pitfalls (certain snaps). We were both pretty impressed by the Lego-like quality of Apple’s mechanical engineering. All in all, I’m thrilled to once again have a laptop in near pristine condition (along with a new hard drive and interior case / keyboard replaced by Apple recently, but that’s another story).