Hi all,

Using the 2015 MBP that was provided to me by my institution (I posted about it awhile back), I was using it earlier today without a problem except that I was running off battery power rather than with the charger, and closed up the machine (physically) as I often do. When I later opened it back up, the screen would not come back on. I tried a few different things suggested on webpages, including a PRAM reset, PMC reset, etc., but nothing seemed to fix it. On impulse, I tried connecting an external display, and voila... video. Then I tried closing it up and voila... login screen on the external display. Then I took a flashlight to the back of the screen and could see the desktop as I shined the light through.

So I'm thinking the backlight has gone bad... machine is running OK otherwise, in fact I'm using it now with the external monitor and keyboard/mouse to write this. Is there anything else I should try, before I go forward with getting them to try to get this repaired under AppleCare? I just find it so odd that I've used this machine for under a month and am having these sorts of problems.

TiA

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)

Sounds like you diagnosed the problem pretty well, good luck with the repair.

I concur.

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It is what it is.

if your institution has any decent amount of Macs they will probably be self servicing and fix it onsite.

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C(-)ris
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The institution is very poor when it comes to supporting Macs. I end up teaching them things rather than vice-versa.

I'm just wondering if there's any possibility it could be a software problem, rather than hardware... I'm reading all sorts of stuff online that suggests that doing PRAM zaps and such fixes this kind of problem, but it just didn't seem to work in my case. Is there anything else I should try? (Oh, and did I just get unlucky and get a lemon/road apple?)

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2015 07:55PM by PeterB.

did you reset the PRAM properly? did you hear the start-up sound at least 2 times? some people recommend 3 times

[support.apple.com]

[support.apple.com]

Electronics are most likely to go bad in the 1st month or so of use. The burn-in period.

Apple is not immune to this principle.

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s-t, yeah, I did the three chime thing. Also I found instructions somewhere on how to do a separate NVRAM reset and I tried that, but no joy there either.

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)

did you do an SMC reset?

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C(-)ris
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C(-)hris, yes, I'm pretty sure I did, but will try again anyway.

Also-- another symptom I forgot to mention in my original post, that might be relevant: the machine is sometimes running with fans on full blast, and when I check activity monitor for CPU usage, kernel_task is running at some outrageous percentage (636%?!?) ... rebooting the machine doesn't seem to fix that, but what does is booting into recovery mode and running repair disk/permissions (though it doesn't find anything wrong)... at least that seems to work for awhile, until it happens again. Could the two things be related? Loss of backlight = kernel_task going into overdrive?

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Freya says, 'Hello from NOLA, baby!' (Laissez bon temps rouler!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/2015 12:42PM by PeterB.

Did you shine a flashlight on the screen and check for images?

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You mean since his original post?