I just got this Mac from my grandma because she said it wasn’t working. It boots and lets me go into recovery mode but crashes in a similar way whenever a loading bar starts. I’ve tried booting every different way and cleared nvram. I didn’t see any clearly visible damage on the logic board, and I’m willing to try any ideas as long as I can keep the price of fixing this under $100.
13 points
This is either a bug with the graphics driver (easy to fix) or a hardware fault with the graphics chip (new laptop time).
Check to see if the graphical corruption only happens in macOS using something like a Linux live USB. If it’s still there, it’s a hardware problem.
If it goes away, back up her information using Time Machine and reinstall macOS.
2 points