Things break all the time, and we all have different ways of dealing with broken goods. It’s our job to encourage people to consider fixing these things instead of throwing them out. Whether they do it themselves, give it to an independent repair shop like ours, or go back to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for repair services doesn’t matter. What does matter is having all of those options available,  So imagine the frustration of running into a repair roadblock, intentionally placed there by the OEM, to prevent DIY and franchise-independent repairs. 

More and more, we’re seeing this happen through software locks like parts pairing. For the uninitiated, parts pairing is an anti-repair tactic, especially when employed in critical infrastructure like agriculture and medicine.

Some DYI'ers have identified a potential parts pairing issue affecting screen swaps on the 14” MacBook Pro M1 and M2 devices. While parts pairing interferes with True Tone on all models, of particular concern is the artifacting that appears on all screen replacements on the 14” models. 

It’s puzzling that this would happen at all, especially since the 16” models appear to accept new displays without any artifacting. What’s more, OEM Genuine screens bought through Apple will also present the same artifacting right up until System Configurator is deployed.  While we at CLRC have the ability to run this "configuration software" because we're an Apple Certified Service Center in Apple's IRP program the fact that Apple’s OEM screens are presenting the same symptoms seems appears to demonstrate that this is a software only issue.

While that solution remains under lock and key in Apple’s System Configurator, independent repair shops outside the official Apple service chain are resorting to transferring the IC’s on the TCON boards from a donor screen to the new screen as a fix for the problem since the calibration data and serial numbers reside on those IC’s.  To be clear CLRC does not do this as we purchase these parts directly from Apple and have the ability to calibrate them.

The questions was posed to Hector Martin from the Asahi Linux project. As someone who reverse-engineers Apple’s systems day in and day out, he’s the go-to subject matter expert: 

That’s 100% a matrix backlight calibration issue.

[…]it all seems to be mostly automagically handled by the [Display Coprocessor (DCP)] firmware and the panel/TCON. My understanding is there has to be both some sort of factory calibration and some sort of running aging data store to keep the backlight consistent over time.

It would be very much appreciated if Apple could help document these things and provide tooling to do things “right” that works for things like swapping parts between machines, but it’s definitely not a case of deliberately making repair difficult. It’s more like nobody at Apple puts any effort into making repair easy (because that’s not something they’re told to care about / spend time on).

Hector Martin, Asahi Linux Project

So here we’re presented with an alternative possibility to parts pairing, a far more likely narrative even. The higher ups at Apple simply don’t consider outside repair. Let’s be clear though: they care about what they make, they assign massive manpower and resources to maximize the user experience, and they are uncompromising in their demand for quality. They just don’t care about anything that happens outside that defined focus. And independent repair, and the maintenance of hardware outside the Apple ecosystem, falls outside that focus.

I have to admit, what's seen on the screen could definitely pass as a calibration issue. Nothing about it has the clean, typically Apple-like approach of warning you about a disabled feature. It just doesn’t work properly without calibration. Does disabling True Tone constitute parts pairing? Yeah, probably. Does this artifacting issue? Given what's being reported, probably not. 

Regardless of whether this is a calibration issue, a software bug, or parts pairing, it's clearly something that prevents most independant repair options. It’s not like Apple is the only device manufacturer running calibration software, some Samsung and Google components also require calibration too. 

To be fair, manufacturing processes are controlled within a narrow tolerance and these screens appear to be an example of that, where to achieve the best picture quality requires the additional step of calibrating each and every screen. And kudos to Apple for going the extra mile, they are masterful at squeezing every ounce of performance out of their hardware (it’s not just the screens, there are lots of examples) . 

For now, you can repair your 14” MacBook Pro either through an Apple Repair Center like CLRC, an AASP, or the Apple Store.