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The flickering of a 2019 MacBook Pro

 

It started, late one summer evening...

This laptop is pretty much lightly used, was package well for shipping, and only sat on my desk after arrival. 



description:  a computer monitor with a silver base and black border with a photo of a desert landscape. white lines dance across the surface.

I see other people have tried steps listed as to remedy the problem, to no solution.

One person on Apple's forums even received an entirely new (to them) machine, and it still persisted, so I'm thinking it's a software problem. 

After restarting several times, I restarted into the diagnostics tools.

I had dead pixels on my old MacBook Air and I dropped that more than once - no flickering. How can a laptop that simply sat for a few months flicker on the display?

[I forgot to make a video while the issue was happening. If it starts again - hopefully not - I will edit one in]

The stripe is only on light backgrounds.  Anything darker than white does not see the stripe.

 There are occasional flashes across the screen almost as a whole. The task bar / drawer at the bottom remains unaffected by all glitches.

I tried the steps listed here. The one things that did some temporary good was minimizing the amount of white on my screen. I dislike this because I don't really like dark modes. Also turning down the brightness helped a bit.

Eventually, I started purging software I no longer used - Roblox Studio, Blender -- surprisingly, that seemed to stop the issue. I do remember Roblox in particular taking up a lot of resources and getting the laptop fairly hot. 

 I do think I have narrowed it down to one particular piece of software - a Safari extension that blocks websites for productivity. The problem returned in full force when I reinstalled it. Pity, as I liked it, but there are other options.

 Eventually, it got so bad that the monitor no longer works, and the keyboard no longer works either.

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