At about six months of age, my son, Alex, was lying on the floor next to my wife, who was using her laptop. She had placed her phone down to speak with me, and in an instant, Alex reached over and pushed the lid closed, inadvertently cracking the screen where the phone rested. I experienced an immediate sense of dread. While I am adept at performing minor repairs myself, I lacked experience with M-series Macs and decided to seek professional assistance from Best Buy.
Upon speaking with the Geek Squad via phone, they provided a quote of $120 for the repair and advised me to bring the device to their store. Upon arriving at Best Buy, I was required to pay a deposit before the device could be sent out for repair. However, I was informed that the actual repair cost would be significantly higher than the initial quote. Reluctantly, I agreed to send the device out, and upon receiving an official quote, I discovered that the total cost was approximately $800. At that time, we were able to purchase a new laptop with similar specifications at a cost that was nearly equivalent. Consequently, I decided to undertake the repair myself.
Finding Parts
Sourcing good parts can be difficult. I usually try
iFixit first, and although they have always sent me good quality parts, the cost was a bit higher than I wanted to spend and after some research I went with a display from
DV Warehouse because it was significantly cheaper. If I were to do this repair again, I would go with iFixit parts, because of some issues I had during the installation.
Research
Before any repair I do, I spend a good amount of time researching requirements and experiences of others who have done the same repair. Here again, I start at iFixit where you can find great guides and tear-downs for devices that otherwise don't have service manuals publicly available.
I used the guide you can find
here. I don't like to try and reproduce guides that are already available with my posts. They do a great job with theirs and I recommend to follow it.
One of the most significant things I learned about this repair is that true tone technology is unavailable for replacement displays. I also found the automatic brightness to be an issue. But, with those things disabled the display functions well.
About the Repair
I did this repair close to a year ago, and I waited to write about it because the real story of a successful repair comes with use over time and I wanted to be able to provide a useful review of the part. There were a few things that came up over the past year of daily driving with this new screen that I think are important to mention.
Quality of Part
The flex cable connector that connects the display to the board was where I first realized I should have went with a higher quality part. The original display connector is held down with a two piece plate. The replacement part combined the connector into one single piece and it made assembly very difficult because nothing lined up very well. I think I spent most of the time it took to complete this repair on trying to get the cable to connect and sit properly. These connectors are very small and resemble those found inside phones and tablets and can be damaged if not seated correctly.
The next issue that surfaced after some time of use was with the web cam. This part comes as an assembly and the facetime camera is preinstalled. With pre-assembled parts you are reliant on the quality from the manufacturer and it wasn't great. The camera itself isn't adhered securely in place and would move around. To use it my wife would have to lightly press against that area of the glass to push it back into place.
Other than those two issues, the only other thing that has been noticed is this display seems to draw more power than the original and battery life has been significantly reduced. I am not certain if this is specific to this particular part so I can't blame DV Warehouse parts for it.
In the end though, I was able to replace the screen on this 2022 M2 Macbook Air for far less than it would have cost for Geek Squad to do it. It has held up to daily use for about a year now and works pretty good other than the few issues I noted previously.
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