Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. Apple
  4. News

Suffering from video woes on an old MacBook Pro? Apple comes to rescue, free of charge

Add as a preferred source on Google

Although Apple has updated its uber-successful MacBook Pro line several of times since 2011, there’s no shame in holding on to machine you’re perfectly happy with. Unless you’re experiencing various video mishaps or random reboots.

Actually, that’s not reason to ditch your MacBook, either, as Cupertino is apparently taking all blame. No need to throw 15 or 17-inch MacBook Pros manufactured between 2011 and early 2013 at the trash bin! Repairs are being offered, free of charge, whether you bought AppleCare or not.

Recommended Videos

Owners can choose to send their glitchy Mac by mail, or personally hand them to an authorized technician. Either way, you’ll want to make sure you qualify for the “Repair Extension Program.”

First and foremost, are you seeing distorted or scrambled video on the computer screen, no video with the MacBook powered on, or are you bugged by constant unexpected restarts? Good. That means there’s still hope.

Next, you’ll want to enter your hardware serial number here, and definitively find out if the problems you’ve been having are tied to these faulty batches. Apple stresses only “a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems” exhibit the symptoms in question due, so don’t celebrate too soon.

After all the online verification, a certified troubleshooter will need to run a final diagnostic test and give his blessing for the complimentary restoration to happen. American victims of the video plague can apply for the program starting today, with the rest of the world following suit on February 27.

Last but not least, it’s worth pointing out Apple will have your backs for malfunctions connected to this disease until February 27, 2016 or three years from the original date of sale of your MacBook Pro, “whichever provides longer coverage.”

Adrian Diaconescu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Adrian is a mobile aficionado since the days of the Nokia 3310, and a PC enthusiast since Windows 98. Later, he discovered…
Your MacBook trackpad can now purr like a cat, and it’s surprisingly convincing
A clever new Mac app uses your MacBook's Force Touch trackpad to recreate the feeling of a real cat purring under your palm.
PurrPad featured

Mac developers keep finding new ways to make their laptops do things Apple never intended. Earlier this year, an app went viral for making MacBooks moan when slapped. Another unique app lets you feel a webpage's buttons through the trackpad before you click them. Now, a developer has built one that makes the trackpad purr like a cat.

PurrPad makes use of the Taptic Engine built into MacBook trackpads, so instead of hearing a purr through your speakers, you feel one under your palm. Developer Francesco Pavanetto, who shared the app on Reddit, says he tuned the vibration to the actual measured pitch of a real cat purr and built it so the pattern never repeats exactly.

Read more
MIT researchers found a new Spectre attack that can slip past Intel and AMD defenses
AMD Ryzen CPU inside a socket installed on a motherboard

Spectre has been haunting CPU security since 2018, and MIT researchers have now found another way to make it misbehave. The new TONTOU attack can bypass some of the defenses Intel and AMD have added over the years by exploiting a tiny gap in how those protections work. The research comes from Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Their findings show that even after a processor wipes or isolates information used by its branch predictor, there can be a brief window before that information is actually used. TONTOU, short for Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use, attacks precisely that gap.

The tiny gap that TONTOU exploits

Read more
Microsoft accidentally gave Windows 11 users another OneDrive app, and you can’t easily remove it
Microsoft says the wider-than-intended rollout was an accident, but removing the app currently means removing OneDrive too.
Microsoft OneDrive Featured Graphic

Windows 11 users have been getting a new OneDrive app whether they asked for it or not. The problem? Microsoft says it wasn't supposed to happen. Microsoft has confirmed that its OneDrive Photos app was rolled out to Windows 11 PCs more broadly than intended, including enterprise machines where the app isn't even designed to work. The company says it is now working on a fix, but there's an awkward catch: users currently can't uninstall OneDrive Photos without removing the main OneDrive app too.

So, what exactly got installed?

Read more