Over this winter break, a friend asked me to replace her MacBook’s display. It was cracked and showed no image at all, just frozen colorful static. Whatever trauma befell the poor machine broke more than just the display—hard drive, optical drive, and keyboard/topcase had just been replaced.
Repairing Apple’s older laptops is notoriously difficult. They are not easy to work on. They are not designed to be: they are designed to be compact, durable, and look nice. Even apparently simple tasks can require removing dozens of tiny screws and disengaging delicate plastic tabs. Just before I went to college, I replaced a PowerBook G3 Lombard’s infamous right hinge; that was a fun two hours. Optical drives can’t be done in less than half an hour. Hard drives are sometimes a bit easier, sometimes not.
But a MacBook’s display is a special kind of difficult to remove. My father, who does Mac tech support and repairs for a living now, wouldn’t attempt the screen swap—it takes so long, that at the going labor rate, it’s prohibitively expensive. But “fools rush in”, so I volunteered for the suicide mission.
So I spent a day performing 61 “Very Difficult” steps forward then backward. It took five hours.
It seemed like a good idea to make a timelapse video of the process.
There’s also a 40MB higher-quality version, at a slower pace, so you can see what’s really happening instead of a crazy blur.
I used printed instructions from the magnificent iFixit.com. A few times, I had to look at the higher-resolution color pictures on my computer to see exactly which screw I was supposed to remove; the orange, red, and yellow diagrams don’t translate well from screen to greyscale laser printer.
As I removed screws and small parts, I taped them to the paper right next to the instruction, arranged in the same left-to-right order as their points of installation. The tape kept all the parts where they were supposed to be, and none got lost; I never confused similar-but-not-identical screws; I had parts exactly when I needed to reinstall them; and I moved completed pages aside, along with all their screws and parts. This tape trick came to me in a flash of insight while driving around town. I know I’m not the first person to come up with this, but I thought it was pretty clever, if I do say so myself ;)
I hit two snags in the repair process. First, after I swapped panels and reassembled the machine, the backlight didn’t work. You can’t quite see it in the video, but when I powered the machine up, the grey screen with Apple logo appeared like normal, but very very dimly. The LCD worked but it was almost impossible to see anything without the backlight. At first I panicked: did I break it? Did I fry something with static electricity? The inverter board that powers the backlight: is it more delicate than it seemed? As I reviewed the iFixit instructions to be sure I’d done everything right, I noticed a comment that explained what I did wrong. I took everything apart again, opened up the top half, and checked that inverter connector. Sure enough, it hadn’t “snapped”. I reconnected the essential cables and tested again, and the screen fired right up. Perfect. Whew.
The second snag was reassembling the front display bezel. It’s hard to see from the iFixit pictures, but between the white or black bezel and the metal frame there are twelve small grey plastic pieces. These grey bits are supposed to pop into the metal frame and stay there permanently. The protrusions on the back of the bezel slide into slots in the grey bits, holding on the bezel by friction. When I slid a credit card under the bezel, the bezel was supposed to detach from the grey bits. Unfortunately, what really happened is that the grey bits stayed tenaciously attached to the bezel, and I pulled up bezel and bits from the frame. I don’t know if this was because of aging materials, manufacturing variation, or (most likely) my sloppy credit card technique. The grey pieces wouldn’t snap back into the frame—they just bent. So I had to carefully pull all twelve off the bezel, bend their tabs back into shape, and pop them back into the frame. Finally I put the bezel back on. The iSight lens really didn’t want to stay in the bezel, so I had to flip the whole thing upside down to let gravity keep it in place. That was a small pain.
The hardest part was slowing down, taking my time, and working carefully and methodically. I’m a naturally impatient person. I hate wasting time, or spending more than is needed. And yet every time I tried to rush something (taking out a screw) or let my attention drift (looking at the various chips on the logic board, instead of the screwhead), I made a mistake (screw fell into the deep recesses of the case and had to be retrieved). I constantly had to make myself focus, slow down, and be patient. These are not things I usually do. The real challenge of this repair wasn’t the dexterity of my fingers, the keenness of my eyes, or finding a way forward when reality didn’t match the instructions. The real challenge was to myself: to sit quietly and do one thing at a time, carefully and attentively.
All man’s miseries derive from a single cause: the inability to sit in a quiet room alone.
—Blaise Pascal (unsourced)
I want to clarify the reason I wouldn’t do that extensive repair is due to the time it takes. Even if I only took, say, four hours, that’s a lot of money for my client to pay.
I would have instead sent it to http://www.powerbookmedic.com, whose flat $95 labor fee would be far less than my $60/hour rate.
Assuming the computer suffered so much damage all at once, I wonder why one would bother repairing it. It would have been a bottom case and battery at that point…
I’ve updated the post to clarify, based on dad’s comment.