Defective NVIDIA Video Card in Some Macbook Pros

I happen to be one of the lucky owners of a defective MacBook Pro (MBP), and although it is not my main MBP, it still caused downtime. The culprit is a Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT Graphics processor. Nvidia has publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate, however, I just found out on Wednesday the 6th. My Second monitor and MBP screen went black.I went to open my MBP on wednesday the 6th and I heard the usual sounds when waking from sleep, but nothing on the monitors. I thought it was locked up in sleep mode or something to that effect. I rebooted quite a few times, but to no avail. Eventually I got the bright idea to see if the unit would show up on one of our other Macs, It did.

I then decided to run all the normal system utilities. I ran a disk permissions repair, which coincidentally , still generates a long list of wrong permissions due to OS 10.5.5 and higher (an Apple rep confirmed it is not an issue to worry about… right.). It found no other problems. I also ran Disk Warrior as well. I didn’t get any errors (except the permissions due to OS 10.5.6). I then decided to try Screen Share. Interestingly enough, I was looking at my desktop as expected.

I began to scour the net looking for answers and found Apple Support Release Article TS2377. This document states that there is a problem on select MBP’s and that it should be repaired free of charge… If that is really the issue. The article said to contact your Apple Authorized Repair center. I did just that. Since an actual “Apple Store”, is two hours away, I tried the local authorized shop, The Mac Store. I was told that I would be better off going through Apple. I called Apple and they said that I should go through The Mac Store. I told Apple what The guys at The Mac Store said and They seemed quite interested why The service center would say that. They asked for information on the store itself. I couldn’t help but think that Apple’s interest meant they were going to look into it further.

When I talked to Apple, I got the impression that, unless changed by an authorized service center, I should have all the original components in the MBP. I took out my 320GB hard drive I installed and put the 160GB HD back in. I also took the 4GB of RAM out and put the original 2GB in. I had the impression that they could damage/change things and didn’t want them to make a mistake. Since it only takes about 10 minutes to take apart my MBP I felt it wasn’t an issue to quickly remove the items.

So by the time I made this call, it was Friday the 8th. Before the end of the day, they had a box at my door that I was to pop my MBP in and hand back to the Fedex guy. The Fedex guy said he had to drop off two more things by noon and would be back in 15 minutes. He never came back. I then called and scheduled a pickup. Fedex told me it would be on Monday… until I mentioned the lying courier. They had the package picked up in the morning.

I received my MBP back on Tuesday, installed all my upgrades back to where I had them (320HD, 4GB RAM,etc) and am writing this post. Overall, I am amazed at how fast the turnaround was from door to door with Apple. I cannot say the same about The Mac Store and FedEx, they sucked!

If you happen to own a MBP, I would make sure yours is not one of the faulty ones. It took 2 years and 6 months for this to show up in my MBP.

Update 05-18-2009: I Received my MBP back, however they either ruined my battery or gave me a dead one. The battery now crashes any and all MBP’s I put it in. I took it to The Mac Store, and they wanted my whole machine for a minimum of 5 days (why?). They ran a hardware diagnostics and it says the battery is fine, yet it crashed every time it was used.

I called Apple back a few times, but have to keep leaving messages with the guy working (or not) my case. This sucks.

UPDATE 6-2-2009: I finally got through to Apple and they said the battery is my own problem. I wished I had wrote the serial Number down before I sent it in.

Also in this update, is a link to Macrumors post about the video issue being under warranty.