MacBook Flickering Screen
I seem to have an issue with my MacBook, namely that when the screen goes from full brightness to as dim as possible, the screen will begin “flickering.” It may or may not stop on it’s own. This seems to be a relatively new problem–one that I think started happening shortly after one of the MacBook firmware updates from Apple.
When I called Apple and asked them about this last week, they said I needed to prove that this was a hardware issue by booting up on a CD and seeing if I could reproduce it from there. The installation CDs for MacOS proved unhelpful because the install CDs don’t give me a way to adjust the screen brightness.
Meanwhile, I turned to a Kubuntu CD that I had lying around. I was able to boot, but of course no
program built-in to change the screen brightness. However, I was able to download a .deb file that has a program to change the screen brightness. Fortunately, Kubuntu and presumably other Ubuntu variants allow you to install programs when booting from the LiveCD. I was able to do something like:
$ wget http://ubuntu.desrt.ca/macbook-backlight_0.0-1_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg –install macbook-backlight_0.0-1_i386.deb
$ sudo macbook-backlight 255
$ sudo macbook-backlight 0
And lo and behold, the problem instantly reproduced. Yay. Now it’s time to call Apple and say “fix it, it’s a hardware problem.” Of course, that means potentially being without my Mac for several days while they do their magic. Too bad AppleCare doesn’t loan you a machine while yours is getting serviced.
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[...] One thing I am making sure I do when I send my MacBook back to Apple to fix that annoying screen flicker is that the drive is backed up. Last time I sent the drive to Apple, I just used the good old fashioned Unix tar command to back up the /Users partition. That turned out to be annoying to deal with. [...]
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[...] It took two trips to Apple, but my MacBook no longer has a flickering screen! Yay! [...]
Comment by tim
still waiting for parts to come in from backorder.. sucks living with flicker
Comment by Scott Aiges
And I thought I was the only one with this problem. Just started out of nowhere. Annoying as hell. MacBook is less than a year old.
Comment by Paul
You know I had the exact same problem. I took it to the apple store, and after a few tries, they reproduced it. They first replaced the power inverter for the display, which they thought fixed it, but after picking it up and turning it on (before leaving the store, thankfully), it was still happening. So they ended up replacing the entire display, the housing, several boards inside, and a few other things I can’t remember, which fixed it. However, I’m recently finding that four months later, the backlight flicker is starting to happen again. Strange. Must be a design problem.
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[...] MacBook started developing that damn screen flicker again. Swapped the RAM and the hard drive for the original components. For [...]
Comment by James Earwood
I am currently experiencing the same flicker. Sometimes the flicker only lasts a few seconds, sometime a few minutes, and sometimes not at all. Here is my question. Does this problem get worse or will it just stay the same? Unfortunatly I am not under warranty any more and I don’t know what to do. This has really put a damper on my day!! Can anyone help me by asnwering my question?
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