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Apple defects
Yesterday I described the newest failure in my MacBook. The plastic of the palm rest – the so-called ‘upper-case’ – broke. Something which obviously isn’t supposed to happen but which doesn’t seem to be a unique problem. So I went to our local Mac dealer once more to let them have a look at it. And they handled the situation excellently.
I feared this would turn into another event of investigations, ordering spare parts, waiting for those to be delivered and then finding a convenient slot in their repair queue. But this time things went quite differently. After a minute the technician had seen the problem, said that it was familiar to him and that he’ll need to replace the top case. When trying to figure the when and how of that he realised they still had a top-case around, checked that it would match my model of MacBook (seems like there are differences between the CoreDuo and Core2Duo models and possibly even the different clock rates) and then offered to replace it immediately as this is a quick fix.
Of course I said yes and less than a quarter of an hour after arriving I was walking out of the store with my fixed MacBook in the backpack. Which is probably the best possible outcome from such a situation. And thanks to the MacBook’s ingenious design the ‘top case’ doesn’t just include the palm rest but also the keyboard and the trackpad. Expensive for Apple, I suppose, to replace all of that for some broken plastic . But nice for me in this case as it means I got all new keyboard, trackpad and palmrests. Now the key caps and the trackpad are matte again. And the palmrests don’t have those dark stains. For a while, anyway.
April 15, 2007, 0:02
Tagged as
apple, apple defect, broken.
I had the exact same thing happen to my MacBook today! I hope I can get mine fixed like you did.
December 1, 2007, 1:32
was this a warranty repair? if so, how old was your macbook? i have the same issue on 1.5 year old macbook
February 8, 2008, 20:40
It was a warranty repair for me as it happened about half a year after I got the machine. I guess that Apple will charge you once you’re past the warranty time. They want to peddle their ‘AppleCare’ stuff after all.
February 8, 2008, 21:23
Hi,
What sort of damage are we talking about here? It’s just that my top case is sort of chipped at the side (from me dropping it…). Do you think I could get it replaced under applecare?
thanks,
peter
October 16, 2008, 10:57
Probably not. MacBook cases may be poorly designed, but I doubt the warranty covers dropping them. Also note that what Apple call the ‘upper case’ is the part with the handrest and keyboard on it, not the computer’s lid. Look at the photo in the post I linked to to see the damage referred to here.
October 16, 2008, 14:47
