The ever-cromulent Jason D. O’Grady has brought up an issue being experienced by several MacBook owners: cracking cases, particularly in the lower right corner of the palm rest area.

We’ve been holding back for a few days on the story to get more accounts of the problem and see if anything else developed. A Flickr group has been started for people to contribute photos of their cracked MacBooks, and there have been several discussions by MacBook owners facing this problem.

As tends to be the case with these sorts of things, it’s very hard to determine how widespread these problems are. Apple has sold a whole lot of MacBooks in their brief lifetime, and without wanting to diminish the veracity of the claims, it’s hard to make generalizations about product defects based on a handful of anecdotal reports. The hundreds of thousands of people with no cracking issues aren’t exactly starting threads on discussion sites saying I love my MacBook, it doesn’t have any cracks or anything!.

Our suspicion is that in some of these cases, we have people who are being rougher on their MacBooks than they think (we all have that ham-handed friend or two who doesn’t realize how hard he is on his electronics, right?), and then some random cases or a limited run of MacBooks with issues. Without knowing the serial numbers of the affected units, it’s hard to know this for sure.

One way or another, it appears that Apple isn’t asking too many questions about case issues and is replacing them hassle-free. If you need your case replaced, just ask your local Apple Store about it or call Apple support.

Filed under: News and Notes