If you ask most MacBook Pro owners about their experience with Cupertino’s flagship notebook, they’ll probably have nothing but good things to say. However, there’s a bunch of people on one thread in the official Apple forums that have been reporting issues with video on the Early 2011 MacBook Pro.
We could describe the issues to you, but we figure that these photos, posted by Apple forum user “johnsolo” earlier this morning, will paint the picture pretty clearly.
The culprit seems to be the early 2011 MacBook Pro’s AMD GPU, which allegedly overheats while the notebook is engaged in heavy duty, GPU-intensive tasks, like video editing, playing games or watching HD clips. The display begins to become distorted, and while a reboot could temporarily solve the problem, the issue almost always returns from the dead and persists until the display is put out of commission.
According to multiple forum users participating in the thread entitled “2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card,” those still covered under AppleCare were able to lug their afflicted MacBooks to a Genius Bar and drop them off to have the laptop’s logic board replaced. However, that process took weeks for some. Multiple people on this thread indicated that they’ve also been using British based bga_repairs, which appears to specialize in repairing Apple and Sony notebooks, as an alternative to AppleCare.
A fellow by the name of Raj Dsouza created a Change.org petition in an effort to bring attention to these issues with the early 2011 MacBook Pro. The petition is addressed Apple CEO Tim Cook and has 302 signatures as of this writing, though we wouldn’t be surprised if that number spiked shortly.
It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, Apple will do if these problems continue to persist.
What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.