Are some M1 MacBook screens cracking themselves? Maybe!

Macbook Air M1 (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

A growing number of people are reporting M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebook screens cracking during normal use.
People report opening their machines to find cracked screens despite them not being dropped or mistreated.

A growing number of people are reporting that both the M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Pro are suffering from mysterious screen cracks. People say they are cracking despite not being mistreated or dropped.

According to multiple reports across Reddit and Apple Support Communities that were first reported on by 9to5Mac, people are finding their cracked screens when opening them after a period of not using the machines.

I have an M1 Macbook Pro. I purchased it in March 2021. Yesterday morning I opened it up to discover cracks in the screen. I contacted Apple and was forced to pay £570 upfront in order for them to repair it. I told them that I had done nothing to damage the screen but their response was that their technicians would decide if I had damaged it and would, in that case, lose my money.

Another report suggests one student closed their machine and noticed that the display had failed when she returned to it later.

My 17yr old daughter was at her desk, working on her MacBook Pro (M1 display) and shut it to take a break. When she went back to work, on opening the device she noticed that the bottom of the display was covered by flickering black and white lines and that there were also perpendicular coloured lines on the left hand side of the screen.

Apple is yet to comment on the phenomenon, but one possibility is that the displays are simply not strong enough to withstand any kind of pressure or flex. It's also possible that the screens are so thin that the slightest amount of debris on the keyboard is enough to cause enough pressure to crack a screen when closed.

I'd suggest anyone using one of the new M1 notebooks should be very careful when closing and transporting it for the time being. While Apple has reportedly repaired some impacted machines for free, that isn't the case for the majority of instances.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.