[Music]
so the first time we started hearing
about flex gate was last year we started
getting a bunch of forum posts on our
answers page and people were saying that
they had this issue where they would
open up their laptop and some of the
back lights weren't working so along the
bottom of the display when you open the
laptop you can kind of see alternating
patches of light and dark further down
the line after you get the stage light
effect people were noticing that if they
would open their laptop past a certain
angle the backlight would completely
stop working in 2016 they redesigned the
chassis and introduced the touch bar and
those are the only machines that have
been affected so far so now that it's
been a year or two since those machines
were introduced
they are running past their one year
warranty from Apple and people with this
issue are taking them into third-party
repair shops and they are actually the
ones who have kind of gotten to the
bottom of this issue the issue is the
cables that connect the display to the
body of the laptop are wearing out over
time and that wear is just normal use
you opening and closing your laptop and
in one or two years they're starting to
wear out when we started to get into the
issue we found that there were two
things that are contributing to this
problem the first one is Apple opted to
use thin flex display cables for this
MacBook Pro as opposed to the beefier
wire cables that they used in previous
ones the other problem is they wrapped
those display cables partially around
the display controller board so that
when the laptop opens those display
cables are getting pulled to top around
a corner of that board and that's what's
causing them to wear at the time
normally when a laptop display cable
goes bad it's pretty easy to open up the
laptop and swap out the display cable
what makes this particular issue so
difficult to repair is the fact that the
display cables are built directly into
the display so there's no way to just
swap out the cable which essentially
turns the six-dollar cable replacement
into a $600 screen replacement in the
meantime since this is a design issue
we are hoping that Apple will come
forward with an extended warranty
program like they have with other laptop
problems in the past but we are not too
hopeful seeing as they have been
deleting discussion posts on their
online forum but there is a petition
going around that you can sign and Apple
does have a dedicated feedback page that
you can let them know about the issue on
and we are looking into any kind of
do-it-yourself solution that you can do
at home