Display · 2 minutes
Is the panel clean, and as fast as it should be?
Six full-screen colours, each of which exposes a different fault. Get close to the screen and look across the whole surface — a single dead pixel is easy to miss and impossible to unsee once you own it. Press H once you are in to clear the labels off the panel.
Measured refresh
Measuring…
Late frames
—
Still measuring. Keep this window in front and give it a few seconds.
Once you are in: space for the next colour, H to clear the labels off the panel, esc to come back here.
Or jump to one colour
Faults the colours will not show you
Worn anti-reflective coating
Tilt the lid under a bright light and look for cloudy patches in the shape of the keyboard. It is cosmetic, permanent, and Apple no longer replaces displays for it — so it is a straightforward deduction.
Stage light
Open and close the lid slowly, watching the bottom of the screen. Uneven bright cones along the bottom edge mean a worn display cable, and it ends with the backlight failing entirely.
Dead versus stuck
A dead pixel is a black dot on the white field. A stuck subpixel is a bright red, green or blue dot on the black field. Stuck pixels sometimes recover; dead ones never do.
What did the panel look like?
Worth buying alongside it
The bits and pieces most second-hand Macs turn up without
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