Black screen, but still lit

Question

I changed the battery thing a few times from "better performance" to "energy saver” about 4 times over a period of a few hours, it would act like it was switching from the regular screen to the screen saver, but the screen saver never came up. And sometimes this would happen while I was working, so it shouldn't be going to the screen saver at all. The screen would be black, but still lit up. I tried to press buttons to get it to the desktop, but it wouldn't do anything. It was in between asleep and awake. I had to restart it by holding down the power button.
The next day, I changed the battery setting again to try to fix it, but it did this same thing in a shorter amount of time (like 5 times in 5 minutes) The last time, it started "breathing" like it was turning on, but it never actually came on. I had to disconnect the battery to get it to stop.
Then, this morning, it worked fine for a few hours, but again while I was working, it did the same thing. I just restarted it again, but this time it didn't even come on. It went straight to the dark, lit screen. I turned it off and waited awhile. The next time I tried it, it went straight to the dark screen.
So, each time I would try it, it would boot less and less before finally dieing. The whole time the battery was fully charged. It would do it when it was plugged in and when it wasn't. I could hear the computer running.
Any comments? I just don't know what's wrong or what to do. From reading this, I think it would be the failed logic board problems with the battery problems, but like I said, the whole time the battery was fully charged.

Answer 1

I demonstrated this behavior at the Apple Store on 11/2/2013 on my machine and in their test environment. It is easy to reproduce and easy to avoid. I've provided details in this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475679.
When the display turns off, it goes through three stages: 1. the screen dims, 2. the screen goes black, 3. the keyboard backlight turns off. Tapping the spacebar or swiping the trackpad anytime during stage 1 will reset the timer. Tapping the keyboard or swiping the trackpad during stage 2 will freeze the black screen with the keyboard lit up. Waiting until stage three to tap the spacebar will wake up the display and everything is fine.
There is less than a one-second window between stages 2 and 3 while the screen is black but the keyboard is still fading that touching the input devices will hang the machine.
This can be reproduced on all mid-2013 MBA's, fresh out of the box, running Mountain Lion or Mavericks. Getting a new machine will not fix it, unless they do a hardware upgrade to fix it.