A growing number of PowerBook G4 owners are reporting some nasty problems with their LCD displays, including inexplicable columns of dead or miscolored pixels, severe color distortion, and in some cases complete failure of the LCD unit. A tipster did a little research and discovered that many of the complaints are coming from PowerBook G4 17″ owners whose machines were created in February or March of 2005, and they are beginning to show signs of failure at a similar rate. Coincidence, or were these models shipped with a defective LCD?

A thread on Apple’s Discussion Boards contains a series of pictures from effected users machines, each with their LCD showing signs of failure. Here’s one defective LCD story from the thread:

I was working with my 17′’ PowerBook G4 when suddenly I realized a 1 pixel wide vertical pink line crossing the entire TFT display. First the line flickered then shined permanently, stretching a handwith from the left side vertically across the TFT. Nicely within sight. First I thought it was a graphic card driver bug, faulty VRAM or simply dead pixels…

…I was disappointed because my device is now 16 months old and I did not purchase AppleCare (- hey, it’s 2500-bucks-high-end-Apple-quality, isn’t it? -). Meanwhile it got worse: Within a couple of weeks, my TFT showed 8 lines clustered where the first line had appeared and on the right side of TFT.

There are many threads on Apple’s Discussion Boards related to this issue, seen here, here, here, here, and here.

The PowerBook G4 17″ model was aimed at high end professionals who needed large screen real estate in a portable package, and it came with a hefty price premium. The LCD problems appear to show up just outside of the one year warranty range, leaving consumers with an enormous price tag to fix the troubled screen. Is it acceptable for a 1.5 year old $3000 laptop to be failing in such a way? What can users do?

Discuss this in the forums