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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

#291

Post by emidln »

snuxoll wrote: post #273
WalterBright wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd buy a cheaper computer before one so expensive it would be a fiscal catastrophe if I lost it. Buying a computer on credit is just as bad, might as well just set fire to money. In fact, my laptop is a $500 one I bought 2 years ago for travel use and didn't want to be too upset if it was lost/broken/stolen. My previous one was 10 years old and was a bit heavy :-)

A $500 laptop is garbage and hardly adequate for the use of most of the people that frequent HN. I mean, what does $500 buy you? A shitty TN panel with a subpar resolution, color reproduction and viewing angle, often shoddy build quality, tons of bulk and probably a spinning drive (I wouldn't buy a laptop without a SSD today). Not everybody on the planet needs something svelte and sexy, but for those of us who work o…

I did work on an Acer C7 ($200 with about $200 worth of SSD+Memory and a $100 23" LCD when I was home, total cost $500) with Ubuntu for about half a year. I initially bought the machine to travel with, and it became a workstation when another machine malfunctioned. I do a mixture of C, Python, Javascript, and Clojure development. It was absolutely fine. Clojure needed a settings tweak to bootstrap the repl properly (it was slow at over a minute), but I never left the repl, so it was a one time cost. C/Python/JS have compilers that were fast even on a dual-core Celeron. tmux/bash/vim were fast (as always).

I did everything on that machine up to and including playing TFC via Steam. It ran an IRC client, Chrome, Firefox, VirtualBox for Windows, and my xterm w/tmux. I don't know that I'd give up my rMBP for it, but I did a lot of work on the chromebook.

As far as a developer machine goes, a $300 special 14-15" screen plus $200 of RAM+SSD would probably be fine for 99% of what I do. This likely doesn't work for those who need Photoshop, do video editing, or need to rebuild their OS (rebuilding world in FreeBSD on the thing would have been a bit much). If you're slinging JS, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Clojure, Java or something similar and you can't get by on 16GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, something is atypical.

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

#292

Post by [deleted] »

psykovsky wrote: post #263
chrisan wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that what you gave is awful advice, to anyone who cares about their money! Go talk to an _honest_ insurance broker (not some State Farm or other company you see on TV commercials) or better yet a financial adviser. You should reserve an insurance claim for catastrophic issues only. You should also have max deductibles. Forking over 500 for a lost iPhone is a MUCH cheaper deal than paying insurance premiums for th…

Why not put the money in the bank only and skip the insurance then, if you're not going to use it anyway? Don't be a sucker.

[deleted]

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

#293

Post by sfeng »

dghughes wrote: post #237

I wonder if it's worth the effort sure it may reflow solder if it's hot enough but the high temp lead-free solder or whatever Apple uses may require very high temperatures to get it to melt even a bit. I've changed enough capacitors on power supplies to know the damn things have solder that's practically indestructible, our old Pace solder station iron cranked to something like 850F and still I'm sitting there 5 or 1…

Often the issue is the component is sinking most of the heat away from the joint. If the giant chunk of metal your heating can dissipate the power of your soldering iron, you're not gonna heat much up.

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

#294

Post by mgkimsal »

snowwrestler wrote: post #257
spost wrote: post #254

Just a note to anyone here who may be having this problem: I had an early 2011 MBP, the GPU died three times in three months. Apple charged me $300 to fix it the first time, did it for free the second time because it was still under repair warranty, and then replaced the machine entirely with a brand new 15" MBPr the third time. Obviously, the fact that it failed three times in as many months is unacceptable (and pro…

I was sitting in an Apple store getting the battery replaced on my MacBook Air. It only lasted 300 cycles instead of the 1,000 it is supposed to. My battery replacement was free despite being outside the 1 year warranty. Next to me a woman had brought in her laptop because of problems (did not overhear what), and they replaced it for free despite it being 3 years old. I definitely agree that the first step with Apple…

If you go to the store, you're missing it for days as well. I was told a repair would take 3-5 biz days after I dropped it off - drop off on Monday, Tuesday is first biz day, etc. So.. effectively up to 1 week no computer, out min $300, and no replacement in the meantime.

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

#295

Post by pm »

fein wrote: post #214
digitalsushi wrote: post #99

There is an alternate universe where every time he took his computer apart, he skipped the reflow heat stuff and just put it back together... and it worked identically for identical periods of time between failures. I'm not saying it's this universe, I'm just saying there is one out there.

Are you in my living room? A few months ago I disassembled and cleaned a grape juice damaged MBP. Tried it afterward and no dice. Tried it yesterday on a bored whim and I now have a working MBP with a sticky keyboard. Why? I have no idea.

Heh. I caught in the rain with my MacBook Air, and it worked fine for a day, but then wouldn't boot up at all and wouldn't hold charge. Three weeks later and rice and all that jazz and nothing. A couple months later, the charger showed a light, but it wouldn't boot and never lit up green.

Six months from the first incident, and I randomly plugged it in and it booted instantly - I was ecstatic. It lasted two weeks before it wouldn't boot up again. A week later, it booted up again, and has been fine ever since.

Beats me man. Apple "Geniuses" wouldn't touch it and wanted me to buy a new one.

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

#296

Post by ortusdux »

ics wrote: post #173
ortusdux wrote: post #162

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…

Surely you mean SquareTrade , right?

Man those squarespace ads on podcasts have done their job...

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

#297

Post by jnellis »

Someone wrote: post #121
digitalsushi wrote: post #99

There is an alternate universe where every time he took his computer apart, he skipped the reflow heat stuff and just put it back together... and it worked identically for identical periods of time between failures. I'm not saying it's this universe, I'm just saying there is one out there.

I wondered that, too. I wonder whether he actually reflowed solder in the oven. Wikipedia gives a sample profile that heats to over 200 degrees Celsius for a minute or so. This uses around 170 degrees Celsius, which is used for preheating in the Wikipedia example. Also, a Google image search gives me reflow heats above 200 degrees for the 5 images I checked. Also "The speed holes worked: The boot chime rang. The scre…

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=solder+aging

From what I know about heat treat ageing of metals something similar may be happening. Because he is pushing his system through above average temperature cycles, this causes microcrystalline changes in the solder. Ageing at even a temperature below reflow/melt temperatures can help restructure the grain.

If he didn't run his system at such a high temp and then eventually turn it off to cool so much then he might not have the problem to begin with. As a side note, personal experience building pcs for many years has shown me that pcs that sleep/get powered off don't last as long as ones that stay powered on 24/7.

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

#298

Post by dj-wonk »

biot wrote: post #154

Shame that the holes are drilled so haphazardly. If only for the aesthetics, print out a template with the holes drawn on a circle, evenly spaced. Then use that as a guide to drill. Or find a local hacker group with a CNC drilling machine which will drill the holes with perfect alignment. Done right, it may have looked little different than a case with holes machined that way by the manufacturer.

Agreed on the hole pattern.

Laser drilling is an option too:

https://www.ncms.org/wp-content/NCMS_files/CTMA/Symposium200...

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

#299

Post by vacri »

unvs wrote: post #10

I have the same laptop model and I'm on my 4th logic board. Luckily, we have 5 years of warranty for hardware failures by law where I live.

In Australia, there is a minimum 1-year warranty, which is extended 'a reasonable amount' if the product is sold as a quality item (ie: 'put your money where your mouth is').

It was funny watching Apple a while back market its products to consumers as a quality item, but tell the government that it was 'just another computer', because they didn't want to honour their warranties past 1 year.

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

#300

Post by slantyyz »

anigbrowl wrote: post #168

I'm all for the repair ethic of iFixIt, but I wonder about the economy of this - besides the huge amount of time and uncertainty (that wouldn't be a good trade-off for anyone who isn't a professional repairer), I'd rather not know what sort of fumes rise off a circuit board when broiling it with a heat gun or taking it out of a hot oven. Also, at what point is he willing to acknowledge that maybe this thing is not al…

>> Also, at what point is he willing to acknowledge that maybe this thing is not all that well designed, especially going by how widespread this problem seems to be?

Perhaps the bigger question is at what point will Apple acknowledge that it is a real problem?

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