Chosen Solution
Hi I have an A1708. It was presented for repair with a black screen, customer says it was dropped - no physical damage was observed to the display - it just didnt work at all - maybe a backlight but thats it. Booting in safe mode, the screen does not flicker and appears to work completely normally. I have flashed the SSD with a fresh OSX, still flickers when I move the mouse or type.
Screen flickering would seem to suggest an issue with the backlight. These machines have a notorious issue with the display cable which the internet has been calling “Flexgate.” See this article for more details. Note that this machine may be covered under Apple’s Repair Extension Program. My recommendation would be to contact them to see if the repair can be covered at no cost to your client (they probably shouldn’t mention it was dropped when talking to Apple). If the repair needs to be done outside of Apple, I would recommend testing with a known-good display. If the issue does not occur with a known-good display, you can be confident that a display replacement would resolve the issue. You may also be able to gain some confidence by verifying the issue does not occur on an external monitor. Hope this helps!
