High Res Powerbook display issue?

I went to my local Apple store today to investigate this, as I was planning on buying a 15-inch. Of the PBs on display, the 15's clearly had it, but the 12's and 17's did not. I asked a store employee about it. She responded that she had not heard about the line problems, and that if it were a real problem she would have heard about it. She said all this while I'm standing there staring at the very problem she's telling me doesn't exist.

I guess this is good. I bought a Oct2005 15" PowerBook the day after it was announced, and I have yet to see this horizontal line problem. From the linked gallery, I see both horizontal and vertical lines, but I don't find that surprising given the magnification. I am totally loving my new PowerBook, which replaced a TiBook-800.

One of the users in the lab where I work just bought one of these systems. He brought it into my office to show it off. I was eager to see the new screens, but disappointed when the first thing I noticed was the lines mentioned in this article. They're subtle, but they're definitely there, and they shouldn't be. Shame.

I also have the lines. Although they are not terribly anoying (for my taste) they get more obvious in certain situations. I can understand they can be unacceptable for people doing graphics/photo or video. Since mine is just general purpose (mail, websurf and such) I can live with them.

I just got a 17" Hi Res PB last week and I don't see that problem on mine. The display is beautiful and crisper than any portable I've ever owned.

I have the lines too. Especially this site would bring them up: http://crankycat.com/pb15_problems.png

I was reading these reports at Macintouch while my new PB 15 was on order earlier this month (November 2005), and was hoping that I wouldn't see the lines. I now have the PowerBook, and I can see the lines. Our 12" iBook doesn't have them, and they don't appear on an external display. I thought the glossy refelective screen on the new HP laptop at work was annoying--now I think it's a MUCH nicer screen than my PBs. Pretty dissapointing. I can live with it because I'll use an external 20" Cinema Display as my primary screen for Photoshop work, but I really expected better from Apple. Is this something to do with the price drop over the previous model? It's pretty ironic that the new screens are being touted as a selling point.

This looks like the exact same problem that the Dell 2001FP had several years back. My lab ordered 5 of them but every one of us could perceive the problem on every single monitor. It's a somewhat subtle effect, which is why many people don't seem to perceive it, but we all could. I personally made a real effort to use my monitor, since I didn't really want to wait for a new one, but it was just too annoying. We returned the Dells and bought Samsungs instead and have been using them happily ever since. Unfortunately, this is not a defect, it's is a design problem inherent to the technology used to build the LCD. I don't remember where it came from, but my friend found a graphic depiction of various LCD technologies. This one involved tiny wires running horizontally across the width of the screen, which we decided must be the problem. I'm pretty sure the Apple problem must be that they're using the same tech in the new PowerBooks. Here's a link to info about the Dell problem: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sys.pc-clone.dell/browse_thread/thread/b5671dc545aa571a/4a4ac79cb4e9cc96%234a4ac79cb4e9cc96?sa=X&oi=groupsr&start=1&num=3

Oops, Dan. Thanks for the heads up! Fixed.

Hey, Keating, Sorry we missed your email. We try to read every email we receive, but we do get a veritable buttload of emails daily and sometimes the diamonds get lost in the piles and piles of rough stuff that we skim through. We get lots of "love the site" emails, "you suck" emails, and sometimes it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry yours was overlooked and thanks for sending it in.