If you have any of the Air models which lack fans, there's a common hack of putting thermal pads between the CPU heatspreader and case, effectively turning the bottom case into a large heatsink, and giving your system a longer maximum performance before throttling.
The downsides is that this makes the bottom of the case quite hot on a place you can touch, but putting a plastic hardshell over the entire laptop deals with that, and also gives protection.
It's pulling the heat away from a concentrated region into a larger region.
Performance numbers reflect the optimization. I personally haven't done it for fear of affecting the battery lifespan (and possibly other components' lifespans.)
Really hard to resist due to its simplicity and noticeable improvements.
As implying that the purpose is to increase the thermal mass, not necessarily the dissipation. It should still be able to reach maximum performance for longer, it will then just also take longer to settle back down again.
This is the correct interpretation - you get a bit longer max clockspeed due to the thermal mass (and thus more heat overall).
Is the added plastic shell case a "bandaid on a bandaid" sort of solution to deal with that heat? Absolutely. But you might want that case anyway - I've had several laptops that would have had broken screens or were yanked off a desk by an attached cable and survived by the sacrificial plastic shell taking the impact.
Reminds me of the advice given for outdoor electronics: make sure your enclosure is absolutely watertight, and then drill a hole in the bottom to drain any residual buildup from humidity.
Thanks for that info. I've been interested in this hack and use plastic hard shells, but have been concerned that the plastic covering might prevent proper heat dissipation. It sounds like the tradeoff is worth it.
I hope apple engineers see this and cringe as hard as I do each time people have to come to such hacks to work around their infamous thermal design...
Take the product expected to have top-notch design with best in its class UX and discover you need to open it up and make a hardware modification and then cover its metal body with a cheap-looking plastic case...
If you run Asahi on it as well, at this point why even bother with Apple...
I had to do this to my 2012 MBP (along with fixing the gpu solder problem) and I found it wasn't that hard to disassemble / reassemble. Also replacing the battery, upgrading the ram/storage was very easy to do. Contrast this to my 2017 MBP which has to score on the top 10 list of worst apple products of all time as far as quality and ease of repair go.
Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in? The OP with their M1 mentioned tearing overly thin ribbon cables.
> Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in?
No.
They're not as bad as the touchbar era (which was truly awful) but they're still a lot worse than the unibodies: ifixit scored the unibodies at 7/10, the apple silicon generation get 4/10 (although the criteria have changed a bit so the comparison is not quite 1:1 this matches my impression: while I've not yet had to dive into my M1P's guts what I've seen of it don't seem easy, while I was able to easily dive in and out of my 2010 and replaced the ram, the battery, the drive (twice), the superdrive (by an HDD tray, then put the superdrive back a few years later), the fans, ...
And the Unibody was a step down from my previous polycarbonate macbook in terms of accessibility (the battery could just be popped out, and let you access the RAM and HDD without even having to unscrew the case).
I fixed the eGPU disconnecting issue on my 2012 MacBook Pro by placing the entire motherboard inside an oven for 10 minutes (a rather unconventional solution for reballing). So, yes, MacBooks from that era were not as fragile as they are now. By the way, that laptop still works.
I cut my Apple-repairing teeth on an iBook G3 that would lose its BGA-soldered GPU if it overheated. The "fix" was to use a heat gun, propane torch (my choice), or even burning alcohol to gently reflow the solder:
I was tempted to do that with my first-gen Intel MacBook because it just wouldn't run quiet when idle, that is until I discovered by how much I could undervolt that chip with a random tool that I could just download. I believe I went from 1.26V to 1.03V, or at least these are the numbers still etched into my brain.
Ratio of the squares of those numbers is 2/3, and so the laptop was certainly quiet without having to open it up. But I was surprised at Intel's product back then.
I replaced battery and did repaste on Intel MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar). Quite tedious process. So many extremely tiny screws with different sizes and all those small connectors. Having been mostly opening ThinkPads before I wasn't really prepared for it. Also did the mistake of not reading the full instructions before starting. The process took way longer than I expected and with zillion teeny tiny half millimeter screws on table I was afraid to take a break.
>But where I also really notice it is in idling: just writing this blog post my CPU was right at 46°C the whole time, where previously my computer idled right aroud 60°C. The whole computer just feels a bit healthier.
I get this same feeling whenever I change the fluids on my cars. I know from a practical perspective, it's very little changed, but I can't help feeling like the car just feels like it's in a better place. Which I guess it is? But I know it's entirely mental.
The author should benchmark a few months afterwards. A common problem with using "PC" thermal pastes (for lack of a better word) is that they experience more pump out than whatever they use for laptops, so a few months later the performance might end up worse than before he changed the paste.
I'm not the person you asked but I got all of my PTM7950 from moddiy[0]. I've put it in my laptop, desktop, and steam deck. Benchmarked my desktop and laptop before putting it in and both of them saw improved performance and lower temperatures.
Kind of a thing that isn't uniquely difficult if you've ever worked in a laptop before, hard if you've never done it.
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The ZIF connectors for those fans aren't different or much more fragile than the ones in most other laptops.
The adhesives on certain cables tend to trip people up a bit with causing them to pull more than they should and damage things.
Gently working under and releasing the adhesives on those fan cables with the spudger (or a fingernail) before you even start trying to move/unplug them will work a lot better for not tearing things than grabbing them with tweezers will.
The TouchID cable is fragile. Still shouldn't be any serious risk of breaking if you know to treat it with caution, but that would always be the one to take the most care with and watch the most closely while you're working around it.
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The secondary challenge is pretty much just making sure you have all the cables out of the way when you're putting the board back in, because you've got a dozen or more that you need to watch the positioning of and/or tape out of the way.
I changed/replaced a bunch of things in my ThinkPad T14 without any issues, it's very easy, it is clearly made to open up and update. I wouldn't dare to do that with my MacBook Pro.
That "made to open up and update" aspect is exactly why I switched when my 2013 (Retina) MBP crapped out. I had just spent $300 CAD to replace the battery, which involved the glued-together mess of battery, top case, keyboard and trackpad. So when the charging circuit died on motherboard right after, I was not keen to spend much more to just get back to baseline. They wouldn't even countenance the idea of my giving them more money, so that I could get a board with more soldered-on RAM.
Switched to a P50 with twice as much RAM, and that's just one socket of four. Since upgraded to the max, with bigger SSD, it's still a beast.
Compare with Apple's use of glue and special screws, when Lenovo provides detailed service manuals on its web site.
A disk broke in my thinkpad under warranty. I told them I preferred to change it myself because I needed the computer. They just sent the new disk and I did it by myself.
I've opened up my MSI laptop a bunch of times - upgrading RAM, SSD, repasting, cleaning the fans. Maybe six or seven times over four years. Repasting in particular involves removing a lot of cables and screws, then lifting of the large heatsink.
I've never had any feeling that anything is going to break. Certainly not any of the cables or connectors.
I had worked on desktop computers before, but never done anything more complex than changing RAM on a laptop.
Honestly I think this is overstating things, most connectors on most laptops and phones are surprisingly robust. I've opened god knows how many laptops and phones, including some iPhones, and really those tiny ribbon cables have surprised me. Funny enough the one time I did break a ribbon cable it was actually the right joycon rail on a Nintendo Switch and it was quite an unreasonable amount of force I applied (by accident, of course...) I always smile a little seeing people on YouTube with super fine pliars carefully and tenderly taking off connectors, I usually use a butter knife or something like that to get them off and then replace them just using my finger. I actually worry more about carelessly creasing them too much rather than ripping them. Some of those things feel like they would require quite a lot of force to actually outright rip.
The actual issue I have with phones isn't that the connectors/cables break apart if you look at them funny, it's actually the god damn screens are insane to deal with and replace, with all of that adhesive crap.
This all to say, I think Apple is doing poorly here, their ribbon cables should probably be more robust on these often quite expensive devices. I know they can do it because I've experienced Apple devices with pretty robust internals... (and also similarly, have seen and heard of Apple devices where they've mysteriously cheaped out on components like voltage regulators and made their devices totally unnecessarily worse and more failure prone.)
Unfortunately, not everyone has the same amount of hand sensitivity and force(/pain) perception. What may feel like an unreasonable amount of force to you may be barely noticeable and effortless to someone who normally works with things requiring much higher forces.
I literally can't be as gentle as professionals are for this exact reason. That's why I'm glad most of these things are pretty robust.
I have had trouble in the past because of this, usually not with small electronics. I busted a 4-pin Molex in a computer trying to plug it in with the pins not lined up quite right. It does require a decent bit of force, but accidentally breaking things is not uncommon for me because I just can't tell when I'm going too far. Same with screws, I pretty much always overtorque screws if I do it by hand.
Or the new laptops ;) They're no longer Intel Macbooks, and compared to laptops from other brands, the new Apple hardware seems way harder (although I'd confess to not having the experience of picking any of the M* models apart personally). https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
Didn't the latest iPhones have some sort of "repairability" push or something? Don't remember exactly, but seems to have given me the idea that Apple is moving towards making it easier to repair the iPhones specifically.
Yes, they moved all their batteries away from glued adhesives to "Command Strips" pull-tab style adhesive pads. Same pads have been on the laptops for a bit as well. The latest iPhone also rotated the guts to where the battery is easier to get to and does not require removal of the logic board.
I’m something like 3 for 20 lifetime in getting those CommandStrip style adhesives to release completely, no matter how
many videos I watch for technique.
Yeah at this point I don't even bother, just heat up the phone with a hair dryer until it's hot to touch and then rip out the battery, never got one out in anything else but a horribly bent condition. Pro tip: discharge the device to 0% before, so that if it's accidentally pierced during that delicate process it won't set everything on fire.
If I ever need to do the same thing with a laptop, I'll try to get my hands on a barrel of sand just in case..
I'm actually very surprised this happened. I've dis- and reassembled dozens of iPhones (from the iPhone 4 all the way up to the iPhone 16) and I've never torn a single flex cable.
You just have to be careful not to pull on the flex, but the connector instead. This logic applies as much to pulling a plug out of a wall socket as it does a thin flex with a board-to-board connector.
That said, would I characterize disassembling any Apple product as "quite friendly"? No. Do not attempt unless you're either familiar with how things go together or you're willing to spend the money to replace the parts you broke. If those aren't options, find a local repair shop.
Maybe I'm not adventurous enough, but I would never open an Apple product without a teardown video/instructions at hand. iFixit is a fantastic resource if they have covered your device previously.
I remember doing it on a thinkpad. I didn't break any cables, I didn't need a guide, and it got significantly quieter afterwards. Macbooks are pretty, they've got a great CPU, but the repairability is just rubbish
I wonder if something will change for the better in the future, given that the EU will force (from 18th February 2027) every computer sold in the EU to have removable and replaceable batteries.
Same with most dell laptops I've owned. Pop off the back panel and everything is there, easily accessible, standard screws. Just did this on an Inspiron I have, just about 8 screws, pop the heat sync off, repaste, reassemble and done. Took like 15 minutes. Plus the RAM and SSD are also easily accessible and replaceable, as is the battery in a matter of minutes.
The part I have a hard time with as a corporate purchaser is that the failure/repair/replacement rate on our small number of Dell machines is upwards of 50%. We've only got about a dozen in use, and less then half of them have just worked reliably. At a certain point I don't really care how repairable the Macbooks we buy for almost everyone else are/aren't because the failure rate on those is so low by comparison.
I'm glad the Dell repair guy who gets sent out has a pleasant experience when he replaces the guts of a machine but my team still has to spend time and money shipping around replacements and dealing with warranty repair at a rate we just don't see with the Apple gear.
Once upon a time our entire corporate fleet was all Macbooks but the only thing we had worse luck with than these Dells was training nontechnical users on how to get to their Excel or specialized actuarial/compliance software through virtualization
No argument there. Where I work (I'm in infrastructure, not a dev) we've switched almost entirely to MacBooks and experienced the same when were a Dell shop. Horrible reliability. We've been on Macs since ~2023 and I've yet to need to send one off for repair or RMA.
I keep them for use at home as Linux machines because of the repairability and ease of upgrading, but my main machine is still a Mac.
I'd love MacBook level of hardware quality combined with easy access to repair and swap parts.
IBM saw their internal tech support requirement plummet when they switched to MacBooks.
I've never understood companies that cheap out on laptops. Even if you only pay someone minimum wage (€1800), a high end laptop is ~1 month wage, and you get a tax write-off on it too.
Even if that person only works there for 2 years, that's 4.2% of the cost of employing them.
Even worse is when management doles maxed out iPhones and MacBooks Pros out to themselves, but the main workforce has to make do with €650 craptops and cheap Samsung phones. For me that's always a double red flag because it tells me management is both inept and greedy.
I don't know, because right now I'm replying from my laptop while being on my balcony, which is open to the real world(tm) and thus has a lot more dust than the inside of my home.
I've used all my laptops like that and they're still silent [1].
[1] Silent, but the keyboard is broken on the old emoji keyboard macbook pro, may whoever designed it and stuck to it burn in whatever hell they believe in forever.
I wouldn’t trade a modern Macbook for an old one by any stretch, but man, you could really have some fun with those older models.
I gave my modded 17" 2009 "cafeteria tray" Macbook Pro to my father, and after using it for many more years, he brought it in for… something. I had replaced the internal optical drive with an SSD and reformatted it as a “Fusion Drive” (a kind of smart multi-drive partition that would put commonly-accessed things on an SSD and large rarely-used storage on an HD, identified as a single drive), apparently every Genius Bar employee crammed around the table because they had never seen any Apple computer like it :D
Fusion was so terrible and unreliable in my experience. they were still selling fusion iMacs till 2020, and it honestly seemed faster to just disable the fusion and let it be HDD only. I saw so many failures and data loss with that.
For some reason, the HN title has had that part removed. I think it used to contain it, so I guess the mods edited the title after the fact? Or maybe I'm misremembering.
I recently paid 60 euros to get my 14" m1 macbook cleaned, it was extremely dusty inside, so much so that the left fan started making strange squealing noises and then a pinging sonar-type sound every few seconds. Luckily with the combination of the fan control app and the built in apple diagnostic tool I managed to determine it was probably the fan and brought it to the local service shop to disassemble and clean. Now the only things left are to replace the original battery which is at 75% and replace the rustling speaker which was damaged by ants getting inside through the vents and chewing on it.
Several years ago I replaced the thermal paste in my MacBook Pro and I did it in two steps: first to high-end paste; and second to liquid metal.
The results were impressive, and I think it’s a bit veiled how paste degradation over time impacts perceived laptop speeds. I’ve been tempted to replace the paste on new devices but haven’t taken that plunge.
I wonder if Apple itself offers repasting services via AppleCare. For someone like me, with little experience in handling electronics, it might be better than trying to fiddle with the MacBook’s internals.
A nice and unexpected thing about the current MBPs is they usually have their fan completely turned off. There was barely any dust in my M1 Max MBP when I looked.
It was a joke...also the Author is a bit of a software legend - he is the dev behind Apollo for Reddit, the app that reddit killed that caused the whole revolt. A one man show that made an app so much better than a multi-billion dollar company that people literally would prefer to quit the site than switch.
"Software legend" might be stretching it. His app was popular, and when Reddit pulled the plug there was discontent, but nothing was really ever resolved. It's more of a software parable against being overly reliant on a single centralized company that can kick your revenue out from underneath you at the drop of a hat. *glares at Tim Cook*
They say you either learn history or are doomed to repeat it.
He could've easily taken down Reddit if he wanted. He just needed to port Apollo to Lemmy and get people to migrate. I personally offered him help to set up as many servers needed to get the migration going.
But not only he refused, he went on to mock the other developers who were implementing an Apollo-like client for Lemmy (Voyager) and went on to work on a YouTube viewer for the Vision Pro.
It seems like some people just enjoy being put in a cage and get constantly abused.
Yeah, I am familiar with Chris. He is the one that developed a popular application for someone else's platform (Reddit) and was rewarded by it by getting the CEO accusing him of extortion attempts.
Then, after realizing that Reddit's management was just using him as a scapegoat and to justify the API closing off, what does he do? He could've used his influence to get people out of Reddit and porting Apollo to some other alternative, he went on to spend a good part of an year working on, you guessed it, an YouTube client for Apple's Vision Pro.
Sorry, but a sibling comment has it right: Chris does not suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. It's full-on Battered Wife Syndrome.
It is a particular and well documented event, which happened in physical reality on this planet. You can easily find all the evidence you could ever ask for.
Did you actually read about it? Because the entire story is more a warning for malpractice of the psychiatrist in question than an actual effect.
The government told the woman to find solace in dying on the job. The woman was critical of this so the psychiatrist claimed she had sexual attraction to the hostage taker
Stockholm syndrome in everyday speech means that victims many times take the side of their abusers and defend them and their actions when a third party wants to help them. And this is extremely prevalent, most people have seen this behaviour many times in real life.
In the case of the Stockholm hostage situation, it's not just a situation where a hostage is doing what she's told to in order to survive. Anybody who is interested can find tons of footage, documentaries, interviews.
While I can appreciate the intent of this blog post.. I don't see how the title should be "repaste your Macbook" when touch ID breaks and the button stops working.
Doesn't Apple offer this service if you have AppleCare+? or even if you dont? that way its on them?
I think if you use your laptop beyond three years, you might want to worry about shit like that. But you really should consider getting something decent instead.
I use leased laptops for work and I generally replace them after three years with whatever is new and shiny. I recently upgraded from the M1 macbook pro to a shiny new M4 Max. And damn this thing is fast. My build speeds massively improved. This is cutting hours of time in a week. Which is an unbelievable upgrade of my quality of life. And it also means I run tests more often and pro-actively instead of going "I could do it but it's going to take five minutes". My build speeds are now routinely below 1 minute. Ram throughput and having more CPUs are making the difference here. I was expecting my builds to be faster with a new laptop. But not by 4-5x. So, I don't think I'll ever be faffing about with thermal paste. Because that would mean I'm penny pinching instead of getting a massively faster laptop.
It's a judgment call of course and a bit personal. Not everyone needs a fast laptop. But I gladly spend a bit extra for this stuff. On the current contract, my new laptop is costing 100 euro per month. That include apple care coverage. And it's a 48GB M4 Max. Worth every penny. I'm not going to worry about thermal paste because I'll upgrade before that becomes an issue.
I don't think creating more e-waste is the answer, especially for things that still work properly with marginal improvement over time. Neither it is the option for most of the population. Use it as long as you can and squeeze the most of the things you already have.
Same. One difference might be how much stress we put on the machine. I believe thermal paste does degrade faster with more heat and Christian says that he throws a lot at it: video editing, code compiling, CAD models.
It might make a difference how much usage is being put on the machine leading to degradation of the original thermal paste faster or slower.
someone made a youtube video not too long ago (i think was that guy who made the 3rd party ssd upgrade kits?) he said that apple uses a special type of thermal paste... not that its some super awesome unique product, it's just that its not a paste in the typical sense, like you'd use on a GPU or CPU. It's more like a "putty".
I got the first intel Mac Mini (Core Solo), and it only survived a year or two before something on the logic board literally burned up. Not a good first impression on the switchover to the new architecture :(
> My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021.
I had that same "wow, no fan" when I got my M1 Mac (still have my 2014 Intel MBP and the fans come on almost immediately)
> this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it.
Unfortunately, this year I started playing with stable diffusion stuff, while it might be possible to optimize, what I have (automatic1111 and comfyui), is slow and my fans come on. Slow = 6x to 12x slower than friends with gaming PCs.
Electromigration is a real problem. "Barely enough" is not a synonym for "correctly sized".
I might not hit problems within the lifetime of the device, but it's a pretty tight margin of error. If I can roughly roughly cut aging in half by dropping 10C, then I want to do that 2-4 times.
I used to keep laptops 5+ years, but recently I've realised that as a software engineer, this may be a bit of a false economy. It's my primary tool - if I can buy a ~20% performance bump sooner than that, it's absolutely worth it (and a deductible business expense into the bargain)
I keep macbooks longer, but PC laptops I've had would often start breaking in ways that were too expensive to be worth repairing around that time. I had a Dell XPS whose screen had issues and replacing it (some custom touch screen that didn't have many options aside from dell's official replacements) was something like €600 (conveniently this happened shortly after the extended warranty expired), which at that point in the laptop's life was not worth the expense.
A software engineer costs more than a laptop per month, and it's insane that companies have devs waiting on builds a single second longer than necessary. The faster the edit-compile-test cycle, the more value you get for the massive investment of engineer salary.
If you have any of the Air models which lack fans, there's a common hack of putting thermal pads between the CPU heatspreader and case, effectively turning the bottom case into a large heatsink, and giving your system a longer maximum performance before throttling.
The downsides is that this makes the bottom of the case quite hot on a place you can touch, but putting a plastic hardshell over the entire laptop deals with that, and also gives protection.
Making the bottom case a heatsink and then putting a plastic insulator around it seems to defeat the purpose of the whole attempt?
It's pulling the heat away from a concentrated region into a larger region.
Performance numbers reflect the optimization. I personally haven't done it for fear of affecting the battery lifespan (and possibly other components' lifespans.)
Really hard to resist due to its simplicity and noticeable improvements.
I take him saying:
> a longer maximum performance before throttling.
As implying that the purpose is to increase the thermal mass, not necessarily the dissipation. It should still be able to reach maximum performance for longer, it will then just also take longer to settle back down again.
This is the correct interpretation - you get a bit longer max clockspeed due to the thermal mass (and thus more heat overall).
Is the added plastic shell case a "bandaid on a bandaid" sort of solution to deal with that heat? Absolutely. But you might want that case anyway - I've had several laptops that would have had broken screens or were yanked off a desk by an attached cable and survived by the sacrificial plastic shell taking the impact.
Like all things, it's a tradeoff to consider.
Makes sense.
Reminds me of the advice given for outdoor electronics: make sure your enclosure is absolutely watertight, and then drill a hole in the bottom to drain any residual buildup from humidity.
The air box in your car has holes to drain any water that finds its way in there…, not great for deep water crossings
Not to mention paying premium for an extra-thin computer and then making it thicker with a plastic hardshell.
How is buying the cheapest Mac laptop paying a premium?
Thanks for that info. I've been interested in this hack and use plastic hard shells, but have been concerned that the plastic covering might prevent proper heat dissipation. It sounds like the tradeoff is worth it.
I hope apple engineers see this and cringe as hard as I do each time people have to come to such hacks to work around their infamous thermal design...
Take the product expected to have top-notch design with best in its class UX and discover you need to open it up and make a hardware modification and then cover its metal body with a cheap-looking plastic case...
If you run Asahi on it as well, at this point why even bother with Apple...
Price discrimination, MacBooks aren’t their top of the line product so it’s intentionally less powerful than it could be.
There's nothing nefarious about this. The whole point is to not make the bottom too hot when you rest your super thin laptop on top of your lap.
I had to do this to my 2012 MBP (along with fixing the gpu solder problem) and I found it wasn't that hard to disassemble / reassemble. Also replacing the battery, upgrading the ram/storage was very easy to do. Contrast this to my 2017 MBP which has to score on the top 10 list of worst apple products of all time as far as quality and ease of repair go.
Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in? The OP with their M1 mentioned tearing overly thin ribbon cables.
> Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in?
No.
They're not as bad as the touchbar era (which was truly awful) but they're still a lot worse than the unibodies: ifixit scored the unibodies at 7/10, the apple silicon generation get 4/10 (although the criteria have changed a bit so the comparison is not quite 1:1 this matches my impression: while I've not yet had to dive into my M1P's guts what I've seen of it don't seem easy, while I was able to easily dive in and out of my 2010 and replaced the ram, the battery, the drive (twice), the superdrive (by an HDD tray, then put the superdrive back a few years later), the fans, ...
And the Unibody was a step down from my previous polycarbonate macbook in terms of accessibility (the battery could just be popped out, and let you access the RAM and HDD without even having to unscrew the case).
I fixed the eGPU disconnecting issue on my 2012 MacBook Pro by placing the entire motherboard inside an oven for 10 minutes (a rather unconventional solution for reballing). So, yes, MacBooks from that era were not as fragile as they are now. By the way, that laptop still works.
I cut my Apple-repairing teeth on an iBook G3 that would lose its BGA-soldered GPU if it overheated. The "fix" was to use a heat gun, propane torch (my choice), or even burning alcohol to gently reflow the solder:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/repairing-ibook-g3-grap...
I did it at least three times before that laptop died. Fun times.
I was tempted to do that with my first-gen Intel MacBook because it just wouldn't run quiet when idle, that is until I discovered by how much I could undervolt that chip with a random tool that I could just download. I believe I went from 1.26V to 1.03V, or at least these are the numbers still etched into my brain.
Ratio of the squares of those numbers is 2/3, and so the laptop was certainly quiet without having to open it up. But I was surprised at Intel's product back then.
I replaced battery and did repaste on Intel MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar). Quite tedious process. So many extremely tiny screws with different sizes and all those small connectors. Having been mostly opening ThinkPads before I wasn't really prepared for it. Also did the mistake of not reading the full instructions before starting. The process took way longer than I expected and with zillion teeny tiny half millimeter screws on table I was afraid to take a break.
>But where I also really notice it is in idling: just writing this blog post my CPU was right at 46°C the whole time, where previously my computer idled right aroud 60°C. The whole computer just feels a bit healthier.
I get this same feeling whenever I change the fluids on my cars. I know from a practical perspective, it's very little changed, but I can't help feeling like the car just feels like it's in a better place. Which I guess it is? But I know it's entirely mental.
The author should benchmark a few months afterwards. A common problem with using "PC" thermal pastes (for lack of a better word) is that they experience more pump out than whatever they use for laptops, so a few months later the performance might end up worse than before he changed the paste.
Maybe thermal pads then? I use PTM7950 in my desktop.
That’s pcm. A thermal pad is a thicker thing.
I use the same one in my pc and it’s awesome.
Out of curiosity, where did you get your PTM7950? I bought from LTT but I'd be interested to know if there are other good sources.
I'm not the person you asked but I got all of my PTM7950 from moddiy[0]. I've put it in my laptop, desktop, and steam deck. Benchmarked my desktop and laptop before putting it in and both of them saw improved performance and lower temperatures.
[0] https://www.moddiy.com/products/Honeywell-PTM7950-SP-Super-H...
I love "the process was quite friendly" coupled with "two of the connectors broke when I looked at them and one costs hundreds of dollars to replace".
Kind of a thing that isn't uniquely difficult if you've ever worked in a laptop before, hard if you've never done it.
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The ZIF connectors for those fans aren't different or much more fragile than the ones in most other laptops.
The adhesives on certain cables tend to trip people up a bit with causing them to pull more than they should and damage things.
Gently working under and releasing the adhesives on those fan cables with the spudger (or a fingernail) before you even start trying to move/unplug them will work a lot better for not tearing things than grabbing them with tweezers will.
The TouchID cable is fragile. Still shouldn't be any serious risk of breaking if you know to treat it with caution, but that would always be the one to take the most care with and watch the most closely while you're working around it.
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The secondary challenge is pretty much just making sure you have all the cables out of the way when you're putting the board back in, because you've got a dozen or more that you need to watch the positioning of and/or tape out of the way.
I changed/replaced a bunch of things in my ThinkPad T14 without any issues, it's very easy, it is clearly made to open up and update. I wouldn't dare to do that with my MacBook Pro.
That "made to open up and update" aspect is exactly why I switched when my 2013 (Retina) MBP crapped out. I had just spent $300 CAD to replace the battery, which involved the glued-together mess of battery, top case, keyboard and trackpad. So when the charging circuit died on motherboard right after, I was not keen to spend much more to just get back to baseline. They wouldn't even countenance the idea of my giving them more money, so that I could get a board with more soldered-on RAM.
Switched to a P50 with twice as much RAM, and that's just one socket of four. Since upgraded to the max, with bigger SSD, it's still a beast.
Compare with Apple's use of glue and special screws, when Lenovo provides detailed service manuals on its web site.
A disk broke in my thinkpad under warranty. I told them I preferred to change it myself because I needed the computer. They just sent the new disk and I did it by myself.
Right? That’s awesome. With a spare bay, I got an adapter for my Mac-specific SSD, so still have that working in a not-dead, fixable device.
I normally use an M3 MacBook Air, but I still have my T430 from college and I love how upgradable and hackable it is.
What I've done so far:
* Maxed out the RAM to 16GB (using lower voltage DIMMs to increase battery life)
* Swapped to a larger 9 cell battery
* Upgraded the CPU (and thermal paste) from a 2 core/4 thread i5 to a 4 core/8 thread i7
* Flashed a custom BIOS to remove the WiFi card whitelist and installed an Intel 7260 WiFi AC + Bluetooth card
* Replaced the stock 1600x900 TN panel with a 1920x1080 IPS display
* Replaced the barrel charging port with a USB-C connector (requires a 20v USB PD power supply, but those aren't super rare or expensive)
* Replaced the HDD with an SSD
* Replaced the optical drive and a 2.5" drive enclosure and installed a second SSD
Future projects:
* Flash Coreboot
* Upgrade to a faster i7
* Upgrade to a 1440p IPS panel
* Swap to a T420 keyboard
I've opened up my MSI laptop a bunch of times - upgrading RAM, SSD, repasting, cleaning the fans. Maybe six or seven times over four years. Repasting in particular involves removing a lot of cables and screws, then lifting of the large heatsink.
I've never had any feeling that anything is going to break. Certainly not any of the cables or connectors.
I had worked on desktop computers before, but never done anything more complex than changing RAM on a laptop.
Honestly I think this is overstating things, most connectors on most laptops and phones are surprisingly robust. I've opened god knows how many laptops and phones, including some iPhones, and really those tiny ribbon cables have surprised me. Funny enough the one time I did break a ribbon cable it was actually the right joycon rail on a Nintendo Switch and it was quite an unreasonable amount of force I applied (by accident, of course...) I always smile a little seeing people on YouTube with super fine pliars carefully and tenderly taking off connectors, I usually use a butter knife or something like that to get them off and then replace them just using my finger. I actually worry more about carelessly creasing them too much rather than ripping them. Some of those things feel like they would require quite a lot of force to actually outright rip.
The actual issue I have with phones isn't that the connectors/cables break apart if you look at them funny, it's actually the god damn screens are insane to deal with and replace, with all of that adhesive crap.
This all to say, I think Apple is doing poorly here, their ribbon cables should probably be more robust on these often quite expensive devices. I know they can do it because I've experienced Apple devices with pretty robust internals... (and also similarly, have seen and heard of Apple devices where they've mysteriously cheaped out on components like voltage regulators and made their devices totally unnecessarily worse and more failure prone.)
Unfortunately, not everyone has the same amount of hand sensitivity and force(/pain) perception. What may feel like an unreasonable amount of force to you may be barely noticeable and effortless to someone who normally works with things requiring much higher forces.
I literally can't be as gentle as professionals are for this exact reason. That's why I'm glad most of these things are pretty robust.
I have had trouble in the past because of this, usually not with small electronics. I busted a 4-pin Molex in a computer trying to plug it in with the pins not lined up quite right. It does require a decent bit of force, but accidentally breaking things is not uncommon for me because I just can't tell when I'm going too far. Same with screws, I pretty much always overtorque screws if I do it by hand.
To be fair, compared to the typical Apple experience of modifying stuff, that is quite friendly.
Although author seems to have broken the TouchID sensor and button in the process, which is less neat and maybe not so friendly even for Apple.
> that is quite friendly
Maybe if you're referring to iPhones and iPads.
The Intel Macbooks were always super easy to open for cleanup or replacing parts. I did it for years and never broke anything.
> Maybe if you're referring to iPhones and iPads.
Or the new laptops ;) They're no longer Intel Macbooks, and compared to laptops from other brands, the new Apple hardware seems way harder (although I'd confess to not having the experience of picking any of the M* models apart personally). https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
Didn't the latest iPhones have some sort of "repairability" push or something? Don't remember exactly, but seems to have given me the idea that Apple is moving towards making it easier to repair the iPhones specifically.
Yes, they moved all their batteries away from glued adhesives to "Command Strips" pull-tab style adhesive pads. Same pads have been on the laptops for a bit as well. The latest iPhone also rotated the guts to where the battery is easier to get to and does not require removal of the logic board.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/100693/more-modular-than-ever-be...
I’m something like 3 for 20 lifetime in getting those CommandStrip style adhesives to release completely, no matter how many videos I watch for technique.
Yeah at this point I don't even bother, just heat up the phone with a hair dryer until it's hot to touch and then rip out the battery, never got one out in anything else but a horribly bent condition. Pro tip: discharge the device to 0% before, so that if it's accidentally pierced during that delicate process it won't set everything on fire. If I ever need to do the same thing with a laptop, I'll try to get my hands on a barrel of sand just in case..
> Or the new laptops ;)
Yeah that was obvious from the OP :)
I'm actually very surprised this happened. I've dis- and reassembled dozens of iPhones (from the iPhone 4 all the way up to the iPhone 16) and I've never torn a single flex cable.
You just have to be careful not to pull on the flex, but the connector instead. This logic applies as much to pulling a plug out of a wall socket as it does a thin flex with a board-to-board connector.
That said, would I characterize disassembling any Apple product as "quite friendly"? No. Do not attempt unless you're either familiar with how things go together or you're willing to spend the money to replace the parts you broke. If those aren't options, find a local repair shop.
I tried to repair a macbook air, and did manage to tear the microphone cable, because I didn't notice the connector :|
Like you said, you need to be careful, but you better be prepared to pay dearly (or manage without) for your mistakes...
Maybe I'm not adventurous enough, but I would never open an Apple product without a teardown video/instructions at hand. iFixit is a fantastic resource if they have covered your device previously.
Don't use regular thermal paste or pads in a Mac. They're not suitable for non-pressure mounted applications.
You can buy TCRS Carbon Black if you really need to repaste a Mac part instead of swapping a new part that was pasted at the factory.
I remember doing it on a thinkpad. I didn't break any cables, I didn't need a guide, and it got significantly quieter afterwards. Macbooks are pretty, they've got a great CPU, but the repairability is just rubbish
> repairability is just rubbish
I wonder if something will change for the better in the future, given that the EU will force (from 18th February 2027) every computer sold in the EU to have removable and replaceable batteries.
Waiting for that day to come before even considering buying my own macbook. Let's see.
Same with most dell laptops I've owned. Pop off the back panel and everything is there, easily accessible, standard screws. Just did this on an Inspiron I have, just about 8 screws, pop the heat sync off, repaste, reassemble and done. Took like 15 minutes. Plus the RAM and SSD are also easily accessible and replaceable, as is the battery in a matter of minutes.
The part I have a hard time with as a corporate purchaser is that the failure/repair/replacement rate on our small number of Dell machines is upwards of 50%. We've only got about a dozen in use, and less then half of them have just worked reliably. At a certain point I don't really care how repairable the Macbooks we buy for almost everyone else are/aren't because the failure rate on those is so low by comparison.
I'm glad the Dell repair guy who gets sent out has a pleasant experience when he replaces the guts of a machine but my team still has to spend time and money shipping around replacements and dealing with warranty repair at a rate we just don't see with the Apple gear.
Once upon a time our entire corporate fleet was all Macbooks but the only thing we had worse luck with than these Dells was training nontechnical users on how to get to their Excel or specialized actuarial/compliance software through virtualization
No argument there. Where I work (I'm in infrastructure, not a dev) we've switched almost entirely to MacBooks and experienced the same when were a Dell shop. Horrible reliability. We've been on Macs since ~2023 and I've yet to need to send one off for repair or RMA.
I keep them for use at home as Linux machines because of the repairability and ease of upgrading, but my main machine is still a Mac.
I'd love MacBook level of hardware quality combined with easy access to repair and swap parts.
IBM saw their internal tech support requirement plummet when they switched to MacBooks.
I've never understood companies that cheap out on laptops. Even if you only pay someone minimum wage (€1800), a high end laptop is ~1 month wage, and you get a tax write-off on it too.
Even if that person only works there for 2 years, that's 4.2% of the cost of employing them.
Even worse is when management doles maxed out iPhones and MacBooks Pros out to themselves, but the main workforce has to make do with €650 craptops and cheap Samsung phones. For me that's always a double red flag because it tells me management is both inept and greedy.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I use a laptop for real work as little as possible.
Long term high CPU usage goes on a properly silent and easy to repaste (and LARGE ofc) desktop.
As a consequence, the oldest laptop I have around (a 2009 macbook white) is just fine(tm) noise wise.
Maybe a dumb question then, but is dust buildup just as much a function of work/use as of time? I guess that is reasonable.
I don't know, because right now I'm replying from my laptop while being on my balcony, which is open to the real world(tm) and thus has a lot more dust than the inside of my home.
I've used all my laptops like that and they're still silent [1].
[1] Silent, but the keyboard is broken on the old emoji keyboard macbook pro, may whoever designed it and stuck to it burn in whatever hell they believe in forever.
> The fan was incredibly easy to swap out (hats off there, Apple!)
After reading this, an Apple middle manager is gathering an emergency meeting to figure out who fucked up
I wouldn’t trade a modern Macbook for an old one by any stretch, but man, you could really have some fun with those older models.
I gave my modded 17" 2009 "cafeteria tray" Macbook Pro to my father, and after using it for many more years, he brought it in for… something. I had replaced the internal optical drive with an SSD and reformatted it as a “Fusion Drive” (a kind of smart multi-drive partition that would put commonly-accessed things on an SSD and large rarely-used storage on an HD, identified as a single drive), apparently every Genius Bar employee crammed around the table because they had never seen any Apple computer like it :D
Fusion was so terrible and unreliable in my experience. they were still selling fusion iMacs till 2020, and it honestly seemed faster to just disable the fusion and let it be HDD only. I saw so many failures and data loss with that.
this read more like "Do Not Repaste Your MacBook". There's no way this was worth 5 degrees and 100 points in cinbench (sic)
I mean, even the title very clearly says "(but don't)".
For some reason, the HN title has had that part removed. I think it used to contain it, so I guess the mods edited the title after the fact? Or maybe I'm misremembering.
I recently paid 60 euros to get my 14" m1 macbook cleaned, it was extremely dusty inside, so much so that the left fan started making strange squealing noises and then a pinging sonar-type sound every few seconds. Luckily with the combination of the fan control app and the built in apple diagnostic tool I managed to determine it was probably the fan and brought it to the local service shop to disassemble and clean. Now the only things left are to replace the original battery which is at 75% and replace the rustling speaker which was damaged by ants getting inside through the vents and chewing on it.
Several years ago I replaced the thermal paste in my MacBook Pro and I did it in two steps: first to high-end paste; and second to liquid metal.
The results were impressive, and I think it’s a bit veiled how paste degradation over time impacts perceived laptop speeds. I’ve been tempted to replace the paste on new devices but haven’t taken that plunge.
https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2019/04/13/increasing-thermal-h...
have you tried PTM7950? I'm not even sure what is it just saw many swear by it
I wonder if Apple itself offers repasting services via AppleCare. For someone like me, with little experience in handling electronics, it might be better than trying to fiddle with the MacBook’s internals.
Offering such a service would be an admission by Apple that their products are not God-tier.
A nice and unexpected thing about the current MBPs is they usually have their fan completely turned off. There was barely any dust in my M1 Max MBP when I looked.
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It was a joke...also the Author is a bit of a software legend - he is the dev behind Apollo for Reddit, the app that reddit killed that caused the whole revolt. A one man show that made an app so much better than a multi-billion dollar company that people literally would prefer to quit the site than switch.
"Software legend" might be stretching it. His app was popular, and when Reddit pulled the plug there was discontent, but nothing was really ever resolved. It's more of a software parable against being overly reliant on a single centralized company that can kick your revenue out from underneath you at the drop of a hat. *glares at Tim Cook*
They say you either learn history or are doomed to repeat it.
Yeah, with due respect, calling a popular app developer a "software legend" is a disservice to the likes of Fabrice Bellard (FFmpeg, QEMU, QuickJS).
He could've easily taken down Reddit if he wanted. He just needed to port Apollo to Lemmy and get people to migrate. I personally offered him help to set up as many servers needed to get the migration going.
But not only he refused, he went on to mock the other developers who were implementing an Apollo-like client for Lemmy (Voyager) and went on to work on a YouTube viewer for the Vision Pro.
It seems like some people just enjoy being put in a cage and get constantly abused.
Yeah, I am familiar with Chris. He is the one that developed a popular application for someone else's platform (Reddit) and was rewarded by it by getting the CEO accusing him of extortion attempts.
Then, after realizing that Reddit's management was just using him as a scapegoat and to justify the API closing off, what does he do? He could've used his influence to get people out of Reddit and porting Apollo to some other alternative, he went on to spend a good part of an year working on, you guessed it, an YouTube client for Apple's Vision Pro.
Sorry, but a sibling comment has it right: Chris does not suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. It's full-on Battered Wife Syndrome.
craziest part of this is i completely forgot about the vision pro
Wow that’s like a poster child for how non free software hurts developers
Also, the sarcasm.
By the way, the Stockholm syndrome isn’t scientifically a thing.
Still drive across a point.
What makes something “scientifically” a thing?
It is a particular and well documented event, which happened in physical reality on this planet. You can easily find all the evidence you could ever ask for.
Did you actually read about it? Because the entire story is more a warning for malpractice of the psychiatrist in question than an actual effect.
The government told the woman to find solace in dying on the job. The woman was critical of this so the psychiatrist claimed she had sexual attraction to the hostage taker
Stockholm syndrome in everyday speech means that victims many times take the side of their abusers and defend them and their actions when a third party wants to help them. And this is extremely prevalent, most people have seen this behaviour many times in real life.
In the case of the Stockholm hostage situation, it's not just a situation where a hostage is doing what she's told to in order to survive. Anybody who is interested can find tons of footage, documentaries, interviews.
I think not wanting to die killed by police doesn't automatically mean you're in love with your captors.
how does he turn it on without a power button?
That was my question too! This? https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Turn+on+a+MacBook+Air+Wi...
Just never let it get too low?
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While I can appreciate the intent of this blog post.. I don't see how the title should be "repaste your Macbook" when touch ID breaks and the button stops working.
Doesn't Apple offer this service if you have AppleCare+? or even if you dont? that way its on them?
I think if you use your laptop beyond three years, you might want to worry about shit like that. But you really should consider getting something decent instead.
I use leased laptops for work and I generally replace them after three years with whatever is new and shiny. I recently upgraded from the M1 macbook pro to a shiny new M4 Max. And damn this thing is fast. My build speeds massively improved. This is cutting hours of time in a week. Which is an unbelievable upgrade of my quality of life. And it also means I run tests more often and pro-actively instead of going "I could do it but it's going to take five minutes". My build speeds are now routinely below 1 minute. Ram throughput and having more CPUs are making the difference here. I was expecting my builds to be faster with a new laptop. But not by 4-5x. So, I don't think I'll ever be faffing about with thermal paste. Because that would mean I'm penny pinching instead of getting a massively faster laptop.
It's a judgment call of course and a bit personal. Not everyone needs a fast laptop. But I gladly spend a bit extra for this stuff. On the current contract, my new laptop is costing 100 euro per month. That include apple care coverage. And it's a 48GB M4 Max. Worth every penny. I'm not going to worry about thermal paste because I'll upgrade before that becomes an issue.
I don't think creating more e-waste is the answer, especially for things that still work properly with marginal improvement over time. Neither it is the option for most of the population. Use it as long as you can and squeeze the most of the things you already have.
I have a 2021 M1 Pro MacBook Pro that I use every day, and I don't hear the fans...at least not yet.
I wonder how my situation differs from Christian's.
Same. One difference might be how much stress we put on the machine. I believe thermal paste does degrade faster with more heat and Christian says that he throws a lot at it: video editing, code compiling, CAD models.
It might make a difference how much usage is being put on the machine leading to degradation of the original thermal paste faster or slower.
Weirdest disconnect of content to headline. In short: If your M1 is still working fine, don't do what I did.
someone made a youtube video not too long ago (i think was that guy who made the 3rd party ssd upgrade kits?) he said that apple uses a special type of thermal paste... not that its some super awesome unique product, it's just that its not a paste in the typical sense, like you'd use on a GPU or CPU. It's more like a "putty".
I remember having to do this with the 2006 MBP, the first Intel books, when they were new.
I got the first intel Mac Mini (Core Solo), and it only survived a year or two before something on the logic board literally burned up. Not a good first impression on the switchover to the new architecture :(
I use my M1 Max every day and still have only heard the fans once when it kernel panicked.
Is it possible to clean the dust out of the M1+ models without cracking them open?
> My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021.
I had that same "wow, no fan" when I got my M1 Mac (still have my 2014 Intel MBP and the fans come on almost immediately)
> this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it.
Unfortunately, this year I started playing with stable diffusion stuff, while it might be possible to optimize, what I have (automatic1111 and comfyui), is slow and my fans come on. Slow = 6x to 12x slower than friends with gaming PCs.
Oooorrr…
Next time buy a Framework 13.
Need to repaste and replace pads on my 3090 (appears to be overheating) and dreading the process, especially the pads.
>[After] Max CPU temperature: 96°C
What? Is that normal for macs?
Vaguely unrelated I'm only buying thermal grizzly paste in future...that factory tour they did was super impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsIk_mMrt2w
It’s normal for any CPU under load with correctly sized cooling to be just under its maximum temperature, which is often 100.
Electromigration is a real problem. "Barely enough" is not a synonym for "correctly sized".
I might not hit problems within the lifetime of the device, but it's a pretty tight margin of error. If I can roughly roughly cut aging in half by dropping 10C, then I want to do that 2-4 times.
GPUs are quite easy to repaste. Just order the correct replacement thermal pads in advance and the whole thing is easy.
Yeah I'm optimistic. Just anxious cause paying for a new 24gb nvidia card is something I could do without in this GPU market
Found a yt that for my precise card being repadded though so should be ok
> Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop
Is this normal? Changing laptops every 2 or 3 years seems absolutely bonkers to me
I used to keep laptops 5+ years, but recently I've realised that as a software engineer, this may be a bit of a false economy. It's my primary tool - if I can buy a ~20% performance bump sooner than that, it's absolutely worth it (and a deductible business expense into the bargain)
I keep macbooks longer, but PC laptops I've had would often start breaking in ways that were too expensive to be worth repairing around that time. I had a Dell XPS whose screen had issues and replacing it (some custom touch screen that didn't have many options aside from dell's official replacements) was something like €600 (conveniently this happened shortly after the extended warranty expired), which at that point in the laptop's life was not worth the expense.
If you hire Wayne Gretzky, don't skimp on skates.
A software engineer costs more than a laptop per month, and it's insane that companies have devs waiting on builds a single second longer than necessary. The faster the edit-compile-test cycle, the more value you get for the massive investment of engineer salary.
@dang Can you remove the editorialization of the title? The original title is “You should repaste your MacBook (but don't)”
That original title is a little on the baity side ("You should ..." is classic title bait), and I've softened it even further now.