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Comment by sylvinus | Hacker News Reader

I got a frozen pixel on mine and then it went completely dark! First time I have had to return a brand new Mac to the store...

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From 2000 through 2005 I purchased four LCD screens. Not a single one came without either (A) dark pixels, or (B) pixels that were "Always on" - in one case I had three dead pixels. Dell and Apple (vendors of these screens) indicated that the failure rate/location of the bad pixels was low enough, that they wouldn't take a return. I lived with it.

I find it interesting that since 2006, the three Screens I've purchased have had 0 bad pixels. And, in general, people are reporting significantly fewer LCDs with bad pixels (either always on or always off).

With regards to your Mac - was it within the first 30 days? Is Apple now allowing returns for a single bad pixel?

One nice thing about the Retina Display MBPro - a single dead pixel is probably irrelevant - you'll never notice.

I'd suspect two causes behind this. 1) as the manufacturing experience increases, the defect rate will (probably) drop. And 2) there is now an established market for minorly defected LCD panels in cut-price no-brand-name monitors, so panels sold to brand names can afford to have QA tightened up more by selling marginal panels into the secondary supply chain instead of just shipping or junking them, allowing the "brand name ship" cutoff point to be somewhat higher.

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