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Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

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Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#181

I always recommend looking into having laptops covered through your insurance company. I have state farm, and my wife and I have our laptops under personal article policies. The coverage is better, broader, and cheaper that anything else I've seen. My wife recently got a surface pro 3 to use during her forest soils PhD, and I was adamant we get nice insurance if she was going to be using it in the field. Two years of…

Don't buy insurance for things that won't ruin you. The insurer will calculate the risk of whatever happening, and obviously charge more than likelihood * cost. So unless your risk is higher than average, you're losing money. And keep in mind that the average insurance taker probably has higher risk than the overall population.

Even if it won't ruin you, unexpectedly having to shell out over a thousand dollars for a new laptop might be so much of a hassle that it's worth "wasting" a few bucks each month to not have to worry about it.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#182
post #150

I've said it before and I'll say it again: while the "giant aluminum heatsink" idea generally works pretty well for the MacBooks and has for some time, it's not the same as if Apple were to really fix the thermal engineering in their machines: The machines could run downright cool if only Apple were to steal some ideas from Lenovo and Asus. As a side benefit, Apple could begin referring to the machines as "laptops" a…

To your second point, I doubt anyone will call anything a laptop ever again unless it runs at or below room temperature. There is a volume of evidence[0] that hot objects placed on the male genitals for an extended period of time can have a negative impact on fertility (and who knows what else, e.g. birth defects? Since it is likely damaging the semen). The liability issues are just too great. We're talking class act…

I use my thinkpad on my lap all the time. Since I installed the ssd, I can't even remember the last time I heard the fan run.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#183

I'll never understand those that insist on doing real work, or gaming, with a laptop. When dealing with a GPU, and especially one made by nvidia, you're battling with the laws of physics. Super hot things make other, nearby things, super hot. Even with proper cooling, nvidia chips overheat and die. Anyone that has had nvidia already knows this. They have a lifetime of a year or two, max. Get a desktop already. At lea…

For a lot of us, a desktop is just too big and too much work. A laptop is easy, it's everything right in front of you, it's fast enough, it's cheap enough, and it's portable. Aside from serious business use (trading, rendering, etc), gamers, programmers and data hoarders, there's not really a great reason for the average person to have a desktop anymore.

Laptops that were built with thermals in mind actually do quite well at full load. I used to play a decent amount of games on my Lenovo Y500 when it was new and it could do full load for hours and hours without getting hot. It was still less noisy than my Macbook. The secret is to build a high diameter fan and a wide fan vent. Unfortunately Apple seems to think that being thin is more important. It's certainly easier to market.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your second point, I doubt anyone will call anything a laptop ever again unless it runs at or below room temperature. There is a volume of evidence[0] that hot objects placed on the male genitals for an extended period of time can have a negative impact on fertility (and who knows what else, e.g. birth defects? Since it is likely damaging the semen). The liability issues are just too great. We're talking class act…

> ever again I don't understand this claim. They are still calling hot devices laptops today . Do you mean that at some point in the future they will stop, and then they will never again call these devices laptops?

I don't think Apple ever calls any of their machines 'laptops' – that's the point.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#185
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your second point, I doubt anyone will call anything a laptop ever again unless it runs at or below room temperature. There is a volume of evidence[0] that hot objects placed on the male genitals for an extended period of time can have a negative impact on fertility (and who knows what else, e.g. birth defects? Since it is likely damaging the semen). The liability issues are just too great. We're talking class act…

I use my thinkpad on my lap all the time. Since I installed the ssd, I can't even remember the last time I heard the fan run.

Try Minecraft with a render distance of sixteen chunks.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this recent idea that a laptop needs to be as thin and light as an envelope to be "mobile". I have as much "mobility" with this Thinkpad as someone with a Macbook air. Next you'll be telling me I'm sacrificing mobility with my phone because it's twice as thick as an iPhone 6. This argument seems like it would only come from somebody who has sacrificed usability for thinness and needs to come up with a way…

Taking your point to the next logical conclusion you would be okay taking a desktop computer with twin monitors instead of s MacBook Air. I mean be serious. Thinness and weight are critical to a non insignificant group of people. They could be people like myself who have to take his laptop to/fro work slongside gym wear and s number of books. I couldn't physically csrry s heavier laptop.

Weight may be, but thinness isn't. My X230 thinkpad is the same weight as a macbook air, but thicker. More ports, better cooling, and infinitely easier to do replace/alter anything to do with the machine.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#187
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't buy insurance for things that won't ruin you. The insurer will calculate the risk of whatever happening, and obviously charge more than likelihood * cost. So unless your risk is higher than average, you're losing money. And keep in mind that the average insurance taker probably has higher risk than the overall population.

Even if it won't ruin you, unexpectedly having to shell out over a thousand dollars for a new laptop might be so much of a hassle that it's worth "wasting" a few bucks each month to not have to worry about it.

Put those few bucks each month into some interest bearing account and then it can be used for many purposes instead of just a new laptop?

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#188

I always recommend looking into having laptops covered through your insurance company. I have state farm, and my wife and I have our laptops under personal article policies. The coverage is better, broader, and cheaper that anything else I've seen. My wife recently got a surface pro 3 to use during her forest soils PhD, and I was adamant we get nice insurance if she was going to be using it in the field. Two years of…

Don't buy insurance for things that won't ruin you. The insurer will calculate the risk of whatever happening, and obviously charge more than likelihood * cost. So unless your risk is higher than average, you're losing money. And keep in mind that the average insurance taker probably has higher risk than the overall population.

This is awful advice!

Losing a smartphone isn't going to ruin me, but it sure would piss me off to have to fork out £500 or whatever because it gets jacked. Similarly, someone could break into my house and clean it out. Not going to ruin me, but I'd rather not have to replace everything.

The whole point of insurance is collective risk-spreading. Yes, this means that the majority (by value) of people with insurance will have 'wasted' money, in the sense that they purchase insurance without claiming. But that's not what they're purchasing – they're trading off a small, certain cost for the elimination of a large, uncertain cost. That's a purchase of 'certainty' or 'stability' – and it's what they get.

In other words, since you have no reliable way to understand risk and likelihood of a particular event happening, it's not possible to decide if you are at a higher risk than average.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#189
post #79

My early 2011 MBP has had one logic board replaced so far at my own expense a short while after AppleCare expired. This site has been compiling relevant information to those experiencing the same problem, and the #mbp2011 hashtag on Twitter is also a good resource for those affected: http://mbp2011.org/ https://twitter.com/search?q=%23mbp2011

tbh if this is the GPU, then this is prob an AMD and nVidia problem with using cheap solder on their daughterboards. I remember a rash of manufacturers, sony, asus, etc having this sort of issue. I'm kind of leery of discrete gpu's in laptops these days, esp when the Haswell on-board one is good enough for most of what I do.

Re: Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Oven

#190
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 years seems great an all as the consumer, but I'd imagine the retailers/manufacturers are not just taking this extra burden all on themselves, but likely passing it down the chain to the consumer via higher purchase price, higher contract price, decreased service quality, fewer staffers, or... etc... Needless to say, I sure wouldn't even want a smart phone from 6 years ago. People get upset at the USA's more-or-les…

>> "Needless to say, I sure wouldn't even want a smart phone from 6 years ago." It covers all items though, not just smartphones. If I buy a fridge or an oven I expect it last 6 years minimum. Also, I'm regularly surprised by people using very old smartphones (4-5 years).

At this point there's little reason a smartphone couldn't last 6 years. My current device (a Sony Xperia Z3) has a quad-core 2.3GHz processor and 3GB of RAM, my desktop computer 6 years ago was less powerful than the device sitting in my pocket!

Sure, I wouldn't expect to play all the fancy high-end mobile games (like I ever play mobile games...) that come out 6 years from now, but I see absolutely no reason I couldn't continue to use the phone for email, web browsing, facebook, etc.

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