The above video shows what a growing number of MacBook owners are complaining about, the inexplicable flickering of their LCD screen. The cause has not been determined, but assumptions are rife and ranging from defective screens and problematic inverters to inadequate power transfer. Janete1 describes the problem:

my screen started blinking occasionally, it seemed to go back to normal if I changed the angle of display. Then as I started using my macbook more, it now gets to the point where the flicker becomes completely blank screen…it can last several minutes at a time…even restarting or plugging in doesn’t help…

I contacted Apple care and reset the PRAM however 24 hours later it started again and now worse and then ever. I can’t write, email, watch film, play games or look at photos without it going blank…It is driving me mad…

The user Ricapar observes high CPU load to be a contributing factor on his MacBook:

I’ve experimented a bit, and I’ve found that the screen usually starts to flicker when the computer is under high load, such as playing a few YouTube videos, or playing a game.

Apple’s Discussion Boards have many complaints about this problem, searching for “screen flicker” turns up over 100 results. What is really peaving MacBook owners who are afflicted with the flickering screen is that Apple has started to lock threads on the topic, for no apparent reason.

The MacBook isn’t the only Apple to suffer from a random screen flicker, searching on MacinTouch turns up many results for ’screen flicker’, with PowerBooks and MacBook Pro’s also having the problem. We’ve reported on similar problems in the past with the PowerBook 17″ and the MacBook Pro after the 10.4.7 update.

We hope Apple figures out an easy fix, without a functional display it is virtually impossible to use a laptop. A few other videos on YouTube show the problem as well, you can see them here and here, or an extreme example here.

Update: It looks like some of the newest MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo machines also have this problem, according to Powerpage.org.

Update 2: The original YouTube video we linked to was inexplicably removed… odd