“My MacBook Pro and I had a wild weekend: I reflowed the solder on its logic board three times in one day, then drilled 60 holes in its bottom case,” Sterling writes for iFixit. “Why? I first started noticing heat issues about a year ago. My model of MacBook Pro is notorious for running too hot. And I run mine pretty hard: I’m a programmer for iFixit, and in my spare time, I game and make electronic music. On an average day, my laptop hovered between 80º and 90º C. One time I saw it climb as high as 102º C—hot enough to boil water.”
“So I tried some simple fixes. I blew out the inside of my laptop with compressed air. I bought a laptop stand and stopped using it on my lap. I enabled smcFanControl, a program that lets me run my fans at the max speed of 6200 rpm all the time,” Sterling writes. “But it still ran hot. And one day in March, it died. I was working on it when the screen suddenly went black… The likely fix? Reflow it: Heat it up until the balls of solder melt back into their assigned spots.”
“I cracked open the back of my laptop, disconnected all eleven connectors and three heat sinks from the logic board, and turned the oven up to 340º F. I put my $900 part on a cookie sheet and baked it for seven nerve-racking minutes,” Sterling writes. “After it cooled, I reapplied thermal paste, put it all back together, and cheered when it booted. It ran great for the next eight months. Temperatures averaged in the 60s and 70s C — although recently, they began creeping up again… Finally, we sent it back into the oven—for seven and a half minutes, in case getting it a little hotter made a difference. And while it baked, we decided it was time to break out the bigger guns. That is, we pulled out a drill.”
Read the whole sordid story here.
Related article:
Apple hit with class action lawsuit over 2011 MacBook Pro defect – October 28, 2014
Sheesh. If you’re gonna drill holes in your Mac, at least try to do a neat job. WTF!
Sounds like a marketing opportunity for someone to sell MacBook Pro cases with holes pre-drilled by a CNC machine.
Holes are good and bad. Most cheap PC laptops are full of holes in the bottom. Good for allowing cooling air. Bad for allowing liquids directly to your pc board and parts.
I recently had to open a new MacBook Pro and found it had cooling slots in the side of it. What a great idea to allow more air flow to the cooling fan. However, one of their kids spilled some tea and you know where it went…. along the table right up and into the cooling slots.
I would like to see Apple spend a little more time working on the cooling efforts and decreasing the temperature of the cpu units. They can run hot.
I can’t stand iFixIt. They are living in the early stages of semiconductors and think that every product must have every transistor mounted on a socket and every pixel be repairable. If they had their way, we would all be using 19″ racks and mother/daughter cards with ZIF sockets. There would be no iPhones, iPads or any MacBook Airs.
iFixIt is run by dinosaurs and dodo birds.
Boloney. Phones and iPads entire function revolves around being slim and its understandable if they can’t have user replaceable parts.
But that doesn’t hold true for the machines that don’t have to light and thin as sheet of foil. If any common sense ever leaks back into the engineering department of Apple, it would be nice to be able to replace hard drives in an iMac, upgrade the RAM in a Mac Mini and replace the battery in a MacBook Pro.
I agree. I greatly admire Apple’s design and engineering abilities, but the focus on thin and light can be taken to an extreme. I understand the integrated design approach for iPods, iPhones, and iPads. But surely Apple engineers can maintain most of their computer design aesthetics while still supporting basic upgrades/replacements, such as RAM, HDD, and batteries.
Light news day – but this wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t printed on. Nobody can or will use this information for anything.
Nobody, except the thousands of people with an affected MBP 2011, which Apple refuses to acknowledge.
And you stopped by MDN today just because you thought it would make a huge difference in your life?
Or as an actually famous actor once recited — “Why…so…serious!?!”
Damn, that might be just crazy enough to actually work really well. Maybe all Apple repair technicians should start drilling “speed holes” in the 2011 Macbook Pros they keep getting for repairs.
Pretty cool.
But it is so thin. Jony is obsessed with form and not function, which is why your iMac/Mac mini/iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch is sealed up.
Just what we need, a bunch of people reading this article and baking their MacBook Pros, iPads, etc. Then all the complaints will be about how Apple doesn’t build its products to withstand the rigors of a GE oven.
Ovengate.
Perish forbid, that such an inspired coinage should take hold of trollish imagination and spawn a thousand hit pieces.
He didn’t just stick a fully functional Macbook Pro into an oven. He stick one that was so broken it could not turn on, due to a known defect in the 2011 model’s running temperature and soldering.
If he can inspire others to turn their thousand dollar paperweight into a functioning Macbook Pro, more power to him.
Or, he could have simply uninstalled Flash to fix the overheating issue.
& stop going to those sites with auto-run video/audio
Yup and stop watching PORN! lol
Never! 😉
You’re watching it wrong 😛
I guess he just had to vent his frustrations somehow.
Ok the thin design is a shroud for lowering manufacturing costs and defect rates off the line,.. It’s sold as design. The oldest trick in the book take a negative and sell it as a positive to the public. Apple needs to show max profit for their stock holders. Removing every socket on every machine reduces costs of parts, labor, design, at a multiple that’s worth the marketing efforts to sell it as thin and light. But we have seen how long term this isn’t good for the consumer in upgrades repairs and dependability. Solder also being nothing like it used to be. The new solder has forced manufacturers to use new formulas to be more earth friendly it has made these machines less reliable. So get used to it,
I’m no expert at reflowing solder. But sticking the computer into the oven is NOT the way to do it. Get a heat gun and do it right, Sheesh.
Yeah, Derek, I just plop my MBP onto my Weber Kettle and let it smoke for awhile. Works like a charm.
Kinda warped and short circuiting afterward. But it sure does melt that solder!
Bunsen burner
Propane torch
Short burst of a laser
Plasma cutter (held at the proper distance of course)
Maybe an Arc, MIG, or TIG welder
Just some tools one might find useful for the purpose.
IT’S ALIVE!!!
I had the same problem, sought of. I beat my meat on the toilet seat. It rose above above 98.6. Rebooted just fine until tomorrow I’ll have to go thru the process again. Wait, I know realize we’re talking about 2 different things.
My best guess is that Apple saw how many repairs they were having to make for customers who wrongly replaced RAM/batteries etcetera, or saw how many second hand machines had problems in these areas, and decided to lock everything in. It is, after all, a very Apple thing to do. (It just works.)
Quality of work goes a long way Sterling!
I can’t believe that he made the holes so unnecessarily close and unnecessarily in a thin line.
Looks like a structural integrity problem waiting to happen.
He probably is running the CPU at a higher clock rate (over clocking) trying to get more out of the design than is engineered into the product. Then goes on to blame Apples design.
This is a common trick to create negative press. It is akin to running a car engine in the red zone and then saying the car engine is defective. Or in the case of Tesla, not charging the car and running in circles then claiming that the car could not manage the range. Luckily for Tesla they could analyze the tricks the journalist had been upto and managed to reveal him for the troll he was. In this case access to his Mac Pro will reveal what he has been upto. But Iifixit is not likely to give that information up.
Dafuq makes you think he’s overclocking it?
Why would anyone overclock a computer with known defect that causes overheating?
You just heard him say he uses a bit of software to override the fan control. The bit of software that provides fan control usually comes with software that cranks up the clock. They go hand in hand.
Yeah…that is what dafuq makes me think he is over clocking the thing.
Also, when you say “known” heating problems. Do you mean heating problems only after a few years. Not out of the box…..right?
So if you live in a dust ridden pit in the basement, and don’t bother to keep the airflow CLEAN on a slim piece of HI TECH……….yeah, you gonna have heat issues.
Hers another tip. Don’t obstruct airflow.
Got news for you. These 2011 MBP models go belly up just playing solitaire. MAJOR design defect and rampant failures regardless of how you push them.
What’s that Solid? solid shit? Work it out man work it out.
When I want to run something that cranks up the heat like “Second Life” I just throw my old first gen ’06 Intel on top of a Zip Lock baggie of ice covered by a thin cloth. It runs OK for almost everything else. Does crank when it runs across the occasional Flash video. But, hey the thing is 8 years old, the old thing is allowed to get crank sometimes. Comes with age.
I don’t recommend anyone drill wholes in your bottom case or put your logic board in an oven. That’s just ludicrous.
If you have an issue with your computer take it to an Apple Store or call Applecare and send it in. Don’t try any of these things on your own unless you really want to buy a new computer sooner than later.
Do you even know what Applecare specialists do with 2011 Macbook Pros with this defect?
Under Apple’s instructions, they install a new Logic Board, which out-of-warrenty costs almost as much buying a new computer. Keep in mind it’s the exact same type of Logic Board with the exact same defect, so about 6-12 months later, the computer comes back into the shop, in need of a new Logic Board, yet again. Now THAT’S just ludicrous, imo.
Must be the notorious 2011 MacBook Pro. I have one of those BRICKS at home. C’mon Apple, man up and replace these lemons. This has got to be embarrassing for you, people are putting their computers in the oven just to get them to work.
Too late for me. I tried the same thing only I raised the oven temp to 400 thinking I would not have to leave it in very long.
When I pulled it out it had changed colors and thee was lots of solder on the cookie sheet. I installed it anyway as I did not want to give up. To my surprise, it booted up but it booted up with Windows 8 which I have never even seen before. Looks like kindergarten colors.