Chosen Solution
Hey all! My macbook pro 15 retina, mid 2012 suffered from the infamous staingate and since I was out of the free repair period I tried cleaning it myself. I used the mentioned w5 lidl wipes & a bit of listerine after. While most of the coating is gone I am now left with parts of my screen that look like smudges. The smudges reflect in light a brown/copper color. When not reflecting light they just look like smudges. Has anyone experienced the same? Does anybody know what this is? My guess is coating residue, but I can’t get it off. Not with rubbing alcohol, w5 wipes or listorine. Your help would be tremendously appreciated! David
Since you didn’t use anything harsh like Clorox wipes, you may be able to recover the screen so don’t screw up your last chance. What I would do is try denatured alcohol and see if that helps - it’s mildly harsh, but nowhere near as bad as things like bleach. Denatured alcohol is still strong stuff, so you still need to be somewhat careful - don’t go overboard and stop when you get rid of the coating. If you can’t get rid of it with denatured alcohol, it’s not going to go away without harsh chemicals - which may look worse in the long run and trash the entire screen beyond cleaning up the coating. At that point, it may be better to accept a 90% result.
