It seems that some of the most recent generation of 17″ MacBook Pros are experiencing screen glitches. The finger of blame had initially be pointed squarely at Nvidia, however, it seems that the real problem has to do with heat rather than hardware; apparently the screens are glitching because of the extremely high temperatures within the case, including CPU temperatures around 202F and GPU temperatures around 150F; that is 94.4C and 65.5C, respectively.

There actually is heat management on the 17″ MacBook Pro, the fans will spin at up to 3500 RPM if the conditions require it, however, on the machines that have experienced glitches the speed tops out at around 2050 RPM. Apple will probably release a firmware update to deal with the issue sometime in the future, but users can improve the situation if they find themselves a 3rd party fan management app – but they shouldn’t have to.

People pay a premium for Apple hardware, but does Apple really deliver a premium product. Sure, the new MacBook Pros look good, and for the most part they no doubt perform well in most cases, but for the extra cost, people should be able to expect a flawless product. The occasional faulty product is unavoidable, but the screen glitch appears to affect a significant number of machines and that is inexcusable. Further, you have to wonder at whether the heat is causing any longer-term damage to the screen; something that a simple firmware upgrade will not be able to fix.

With these kinds of faults occurring with Apple, you really have question their claim to hardware supremacy. There are plenty of cheaper machines that are not released with widespread defects. Make no mistake, a MacBook Pro working as it should is a great machine, but a MacBook Pro working as it shouldn’t is no different to any other piece of half-baked junk that could be had for a lot less money. [Slashgear]

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