I took my MacBook Pro down to iLike Computing, who kindly arranged to have it sent off for warranty repair. After spending some time and being put through to many different people at Renaissance New Zealand I finally got a woman named Claire who basically said that because I had parallel imported it, they couldn’t do anything about it. I brought up the issue of the international warranty, and she said that yes if there was anything covered by warranty (the pixel was not) they would be obliged to repair it.

Anyway – it turns out that the whole screen did end up getting replaced (it mustn’t have been easy to replace just the bezel), and I got it back a day or two before I went on holiday. So now both the issue with the bright red pixel, and the buckled screen is fixed… But be warned! If the screen wasn’t buckled, they wouldn’t have touched the pixel and I would have had to send it back to Sparco to get a replacement – by that time it would be out of the 14 days you have to claim a replacement.

Now I just need to fund some portable external hard drives, and get my work flows converted to Mac!