It’s easy to bitch about bad customer service experiences and even easier to forget to praise the good ones, so I thought I’d share my recent Apple Store experience. Spoiler: it has a happy ending.

A while back, my MacBook developed a crack in the plastic casing to the right of the track pad. I hadn’t dropped it or manhandled it in any obvious way, so I figured it was a fluke and fixed it with super glue. Several months later, the glue stopped sticking and part of the plastic broke off, leaving a little gap that you could actually see into the computer through. I wasn’t happy about it, but it didn’t occur to me to look into it. The laptop (which turns four years old this week) was well out of warranty and other than looking bad, it wasn’t really an issue.

Crack #1, to the right of the track pad. Gluing the cracked plastic worked for a few months.
Then part of it broke off, leaving a hole.

The Friday before last, I noticed a similar crack developing above the screen, in the upper left corner (not the same side as the first crack). Since I’m relatively careful with my laptop, I couldn’t understand why this was happening. Suspicious, I Googled “MacBook crack” and soon learned that this is a common problem with the 13″ MacBooks of this vintage. I saw pictures of cracks that looked exactly like mine.

Crack #2 developing in the upper left corner.

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