MacBook Pro - The Vertical Stripe Issue
Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 10:16AM | Print Article I own a 15" MacBook Pro (Revision E) which was released in February 2008. I customised my build with a Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz (Penryn), 4GB or Crucial DDR2 Memory, 500GB Western Digital Hard Drive and an nVidia 8600M 512MB. Although I love this machine and use it for everything, I do have one complaint.
Unfortunately like many other people with the Revision E MacBook Pro, I suffer from the intermittent vertical stripe issue. This is a defect in which some of the LEDs do not turn on correctly, resulting in a "spotlight" or "vertical stripes" effect.
Although Apple have acknowledged this issue with Tech Support Note "TS1258" and ADC Bug "5751843" there has been no fix (official or otherwise). The main reason for this is that even after a year of trouble the root cause of the issue has not yet been confirmed.
All we know is that it effects both glossy and matt screens and that no software update/fix (including 10.5.6) has resolved the issue. In certain cases reported on the support forums, Apple has replaced hardware, however this has also not resolved the issue. To me this seems like a classic hardware/manufacturing fault, which Apple knows is not easy to fix without replacing/re-designing the "Revision E" MacBook Pro.
Thankfully the issue is intermittent, meaning you may go months without having a single issue. When you do get problems try one of the workarounds below which should resolve the problem:
- Hit "Ctrl-Shift-Eject" which will sleep the screen. After waking, the stripes will be gone.
- Put your machine to sleep by closing the laptop lid.
- Restart your machine.
For more information on the issue check out the following discussions on the official Apple support forums:
- http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1423301
- http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1627678
The reason there are two discussion threads is that the first received over 60,000 views (before the counter was reset) and due to the number of responses it was deemed unmanageable and moved to a separate thread.