My Macbook Air has a publicly reported hinge defect, and Apple will not repair it under the warranty.

In November 2008, my macbook air's hinge that connects the screen to the rest of the machine made a click sound. After that, the screen became looser than it was before. The same day, as I closed the screen, I noticed that the backside of the gray plastic connection in between the two hinges had just slightly stretched out of its place.

The situation became worse by the day until I decided to repair it under the warranty to stop the hinge from deteriorating even more.

As soon as he saw the defect, Daniel at the repair department at inLife (authorized apple reseller in Stockholm, Sweden) told me that they had had just fixed & handed back another macbook air with the same problem to the owner the day before and that Apple fixed it under the 1 year warranty program. He asked me to leave the computer and told me to expect a response in 2 days.

After more than 10 days and a lot of calls, I was told that the Apple will not fix the hinge because it's resulting from a misshandling on my behalf. When I asked what I could do about the hinge, I was told that the hinge itself cannot be fixed and that I would have to replace the whole screen at a cost of 7000 sek (about 900 USD)

I handle my laptop with care. In fact most of my work on it happens through an external keyboard and mouse. Most of the day my macbook air sits on an elevator device.

Below is a blog post with various sightings of the same problem. Some of them have had their macbook air fixed while others were not so lucky:

http://www.crashzone.com.au/2009/02/0...
http://mindspacemind.blogspot.com/200...

I am looking forward to have Apple replace my screen under the warranty and take a more responsible role in following up on the sturdiness and performance of their new products