Update:
Our daughter talked with the Genius Bar at the Apple Store for a repair estimate. The battery appears to have reset itself after a couple of 100% discharge cycles and is now behaving normally (although it's only good for 3-4 hours instead of 5-7). The magnetic clamshell switches are still bad, and the camera has stopped working. The Geniuses are quoting $350 and up for the clamshell and camera repairs, but they really don't know because they'll just ship it back to an Apple refurb site and replace it with a refurbed model. However despite these flaws, her Macbook still plays a movie and that's "good enough" for her.
She likes using her iPad on campus (along with a Logitech Bluetooth clamshell keyboard), so she might not bother trying to fix the Macbook if she can just use it at her off-campus apartment and not schlep it around the campus. She can see that the Navy uses more PC-friendly equipment on ships & subs, so her Macbook won't have much use outside of her living room. Even when the Navy has gone Mac, they tend to just buy iPads in bulk.
Maybe someday the Macbook will piss her off again, and I'll get to tinker with clamshell magnets plus a new camera. Or not. Maybe she'll sell it to one of her fellow college students who's willing to do the hardware work.
Last year when I discovered used iPad2s and Logitech Bluetooth keyboards, she scarfed up my first set as soon as she saw it. It's the new cool campus tool. I went back to Craigslist and Amazon.com and did it all again for a second iPad2/keyboard combo under $300, and I haven't used my three-year-old i3 14" ThinkPad Edge in over six months. I gave that laptop to her, and it works with all her special-purpose civil engineering software & websites. To avoid campus backpack hard-drive abuse, we refitted it with a six-cell battery ($21) and a Samsung model 840 500GB SSD ($335)-- and now it's a screamin' machine. It boots in 15 seconds. Its battery also lasts for over four hours because it's only operating a cooling fan (not so much) and it no longer has to spin a hard drive.
Best of all, she did most of the work. She also backed up the Mac and her Thinkpad to her own external drive, so it's all "her" hardware. Now she has a Thinkpad, Macbook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and an iPod Nano.
I've been married for nearly 27 years, but I was still blindsided by the next event. When I bought my Thinkpad in 2010, my spouse liked it so much that a couple months later we bought one for her. (Works for me, too-- I like having only one model of laptop to maintain/troubleshoot.) Last month my spouse watched my daughter and I geeking out with all of our hardware and tools, and of course we proudly showed her how much faster the laptop booted with the SSD. "Unfortunately" I didn't appreciate how my spouse would feel about her own personal Thinkpad Edge with its legacy spinning-platter hard drive. I know, this is extremely clear in hindsight, but I was too focused on helping our daughter with her computer problems. Shortly after our daughter's computer problems were solved, I was ordering another SSD for my spouse's laptop.
So our daughter's laptop problems were solved for about the same price as the Genius Bar would have charged her, but it cost me an extra SSD for my spouse.
The unexpected side benefit of upgrading my spouse's laptop is that she no longer complains about the speed of our DSL modem or our wireless network. I no longer have to unplug/reboot them every week when I hear "Dear, my Hotmail & MS Office aren't responding fast enough so your Internet must be broken". I was even able to get her to switch from Firefox to Chrome, so my spouse tech-support calls are way down.
I've been running the same model of SSD in our desktop PC for over six months, and it's been flawless. I can't hear the desktop's CPU cooling fan or its case ventilation fan unless I have the cupboard door open, and that cupboard is at least 15 degrees cooler without a spinning hard drive whining away in there. I sure hope these SSDs last for a few years, because they've been the most significant quality-of-life upgrade around here since we bought a Prius.
