You'd think after 10 years having model after model of aluminium built laptops, Apple would have found a way to solve the heat issues they always have... but nope, they still think it's a good idea to put the heat exhaust vent right up against the bottom lip of the screen where it is still blocked when the machine is in use.
Where else can one put air vents on a laptop? The sides are taken up by expansion ports and speakers. The front is blocked by the battery. The bottom is often obstructed by blankets, clothing, etc. The top is for the keyboard, trackpad, and palm rest.
Putting vents at the hinge actually makes the most sense. It guarantees ventilation ports won't be fully obstructed. The vents face away from the user, reducing fan noise. Air ducts are short, since that area is close to the CPU/GPU.
It's hard to cool a laptop that can generate 85 watts of heat. Moreso if one cares about it looking nice and being thin. You may not like the trade-offs Apple chooses, but they put a lot of thought into their industrial design.
I hate laptops with vents on the bottom. I can't put it on my lap without constantly thinking did my leg obstructed the hole, I can't put it on the bed because the vents will be clogged. The only place where laptops with vents on the bottom works well is the desk.
Sorry, people keep replying and I can't help but tease the reality distortion field.
Why do you care so much? It's just a laptop, who cares what a bunch of us neckbeards laugh at? Nothing should be beyond reproach here. This is hacker news not daring fireball.
Is that "reality distortion field" jab pointed at me? The best laptop in my life is/was my trusty Thinkpad w520. No vents at the bottom, no overheating problems (two previous laptops were HP EliteBooks - a toy computers compared to Lenovo). Now I'm working on MacBook Pro, and yes, it's slicker than w520, but it have problems with heat.
That laptop is twice as thick as a rMBP and puts out less than half as much heat. Even if Apple put vents in those places, it wouldn't cool adequately; the vent area would be half that of the Dell. To get the same temperatures, airflow would have to be 4x faster than in the Dell. And as I said before, vents on the bottom increase the risk of overheating when used on a bed or carpet.
Critics hold Apple to a higher standard than other companies, and the media reports Apple's failings more than other companies. There are tons of examples: iPhone 6 bending (it's just as sturdy as other phones), solder separation issues (rare; limited to a few first-gen models), overheating (again, rare and usually first-gen models). Other manufacturers have similar issues, but you never hear about them because they don't get eyeballs. Few care if some model of HP laptop overheats.
In general, Apple makes quality hardware. If it were otherwise, they wouldn't be able to charge so much.
Edit: I have no idea why this comment has been downvoted. Anyone want to clue me in?
"In general, Apple makes quality hardware. If it were otherwise, they wouldn't be able to charge so much."
My experience of Apple hardware, from owning it myself and from seeing how it fares for those around me who also use it, is that it's pretty, but poorly designed, lacking in features, and very unreliable.
They are able to charge so much because they market it well. Also, OSX is a decent OS in comparison to Windows, for those who can't be bothered to learn Linux.
I don't really think that "learning Linux" makes it a better OS. Investing your time into Linux, maybe, but some of us want our OS to be time savers, not a time sinks.
I administer about 40 servers under linux (well mostly with Chef and docker), I used to use linux on my main computer for 6 years (debian, gentoo and ubuntu). I have a freebsd server at home that I use for fun. And yet despite all that, my main computer for work nowadays is a mbp retina because I like OS X as an OS and as a GUI (despite some of it's bugs and annoyances). So I don't really agree with you.
In term of hardware, I've had a few lemons and I've complained loudly but under Applecare, Apple replaced the mbp retina I had that failed 3 times with a new model (which runs perfectly fin) so I can't really complain.
I've also had very long lived devices from Apple, my first ibook lasted 4-5 years until my parents sat on it, my wife's old powerbook lasted 6 years until it was stolen, my first generation iphone still works perfectly fine...
One thing I did learn though is never to buy a first generation model from Apple, they tend to be unreliable (at least in my anecdotical experience)
My Thinkpad has air vents on the left hand side, and also on the back. Except, the ones on the back aren't blocked like they are on Macbooks, because the Thinkpads design is based on what is sensible rather than on what will make the thinnest possible computer.
My x220 has air vents at the back, on the left side and several at the bottom of its base. Even when it heats up the temperature stays very much controlled.
"Thick and bulky, with a keyboard studded with enough auxiliary buttons to look like a space shuttle control panel, the T420 is as old-school as a laptop can be."
I mean, it's all a matter of trade-offs, as the parent says. Personally I have been using my Macbook mostly as a desktop replacement, so in hindsight I would probably trade the small form factor for better cooling and more sustained performance, for people using a laptop more "dynamically" (carrying it around daily), I can see mobility to come first.
EDIT: Have you ever owned an ultrabook or a netbook ? I went from a T61p to a Macbook Air the the increase in mobility was significant. I used it on bed, on the couch, on the train, with no discomfort at all even after hours on end, unlike the bulkier laptops I owned before.
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 to justify it. Does a Macbook have "increased mobility" over thicker laptops? I severely doubt it.
The Thinkpad may have more buttons than a Macbook, but I've never seen this as a disadvantage... The Thinkpad keyboard is much nicer to use than the Macbook keyboard. I've owned both. I'll admit that the Macbook keyboard looks nicer though. But that's the point isn't it. Macs are for people who care what their computers look like more than how useful they are.
>I don't get this recent idea that a laptop needs to be as thin and light as an envelope to be "mobile".
Weight is hardly a big differentiator for MacBook Pros, as I understand it. The difference in weight between the ThinkPad T420, which the grandparent mentions, and the latest 15" MacBook Pro isn't that great: they weigh 4.9 lb (2.24 kg) and 4.5 pounds (2.06 kg) respectively according to the official specs. I suppose the ThinkPad will have a slightly heavier power adapter as well.
Exactly, this idea that Apple have sacrificed things like useful ports and useful heat vents, for mobility, it's just flat out wrong. They have sacrificed those things yes, but not for mobility, for looking pretty.
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.
As someone who's gone from boxy laptops to an Air... yes, there is a difference in "mobility". I take my Air out to a cafe or a park or whatever to get work done a LOT more than I took my old Powerbooks.
Heavier computers are something I had to make a decision to go out with. I knew I would be lugging it around on my shoulder and feeling grumpy. But the Air? It, plus a Wacom tablet next to it, takes up less room than the hardback sketchbooks I used to haul around as a matter of course. And I can sit out under a tree on a nice day and do finished, full-color art with a lot less mass than hauling a paint box around. (The fact that a full charge lasts most of a day helps a lot, too. I only take the power brick when I'm going out of town.)
Now, I will admit that I do also care about how stuff looks. I'm an artist; it's my job. But my experience is that there is something really, really different about having a laptop that does everything you need, and weighs less than a hardbound book.
I haven't had any of the ultra thin ultrabooks. I do have a netbook (slightly older Acer model), but the screen was too limiting on it. So now I use a Thinkpad X230. The differences between the X230 and my work laptop (HP Elitebook 8470) is night and day -- I have no problem carying the X230, but wouldn't dream of lugging around the 8470.
How did you get your T420 to have no heating issues? What processor/GPU combo do you have?
I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games. I've tried everything: thinkpad fan control that turns the fan up to 7000RPM, clearing everything out with compressed air, replacing the thermal paste..
After a few years of observations, I think the problem may lie in software.. It seems like when I'm playing games and what not my CPU gets turboboosted, which stays there until it reaches about 90C, when it gets severely throttled, killing framerate and all. I use linux, so right now I have several scripts that goes and disables turbo boost. However, even at that point, it still will boost the CPU when running certain GL applications... Not sure why.
In fact, I've noticed this issue on all Sandybridge laptops I own/have encountered: the 2011 MBP, a dell inspiron... Ivy bridge computers seems to have no issue with this (W530, 2012 MBP).
> I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games.
In my experience, almost no consumer laptop is designed with a gaming thermal load in mind (aka heavy cpu + max gpu for extended periods of time). I'm not even sure it's possible in a conventional laptop case.
... I know this is completely useless advice, but don't do heavy gaming on a laptop without expecting problems. There are other form factors much better thermally suited.
tl;dr: mobility/thermal-tolerance/performance, pick two
One thing is that the T420 is not sold as a consumer laptop. Under Windows, running AutoCAD/SolidWorks will drive temperature of 90+ degrees. This laptop is suppose to be for those kind of work. Furthermore, I'm not even running heavy games. I'm running things like FTL, or older 3D games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, or even sometimes just watching YouTube videos at 1080p.
Regardless, thermal performance under heavy load in laptop should either be tolerated, or the manufacturers should disable higher clock speeds.
My W530 on the other hand has no issue with heat. Heavy gaming puts it to about 75-80C. It is also much bulkier in size.
Edit: my dedicated graphics is off most of the time. Even then, CPU alone can drive the temperature up through the roof.
My wife uses my older T420 with a dual core i7 and an nvidia workstation GPU of some sort as a Sims 3/4 machine with Windows 8 and never has heat issues. I'm currently using a W530 with Red Hat 6 for work and it gets hot occasionally but never enough to feel more than mildly uncomfortable to the touch and certainly never enough to cause any short term problems. Granted, I only ever use it for running a few VMs, not for any games.
I wonder how many of these Macbook issues stem from popularity. If you look at any vendor's forums, you will find a bunch of posts about issues that a lot of people are having. They never make news, though, because how many people own an HP 5370-2wt20 laptop? A lot of people own HP laptops, but they don't have one model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. Macs, on the other hand, have a single (ish) model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. If there is an issue that affects 1% of HP 8209-c50mg buyers versus 1% of Macbook Pro buyers, only the Macbook numbers will be large enough to make news.
I've wondered that too about other manufactures defects, that they probably suffer the same flaws with the bad ball solder on the GPUs but they didn't sell the same numbers as a MBP so it goes unnoticed.
Every heating issue I had with my T420 is solved by opening up the laptop and thoroughly cleaning with compressed air. It will stays good for a few years until the dust gathers up again.
Do you have numbers on what your computer's temperature is at when it's idling and when it's on full load (CPU maxed out)? At idle I'm coming in at around 52C with ambient temperature at around 20C. Full load I can go to 90C, when the computer will automatically downclock, which is something that's not desirable.
I have opened up my laptop more than once and cleaned all the areas i can, but I still can't seem to get the temperature to go down like others claim. At this point I'm considering replacing my fan assembly and see if I have better luck but haven't gotten around to do so.
I skipped the Nvidia option and use the onboard Intel graphics, because I don't play games on laptops. All laptops get hot when used for gaming. I have a separate desktop for gaming.
I believe it has an Nvidia card in it. While I did game on it awhile ago I haven't for several years now. Possibly I haven't pushed the hardware long enough to cause GPU thermal issues to arise.
Thanks for pointing this out; I used the original EeePC for a long time but could only remember that I had had a laptop where the heat exhausted through the keyboard, not which model. Interesting but once it really started to kick up, this may not actually be a good option.
I had not noticed that but it is true! Does anyone know if the case acts as a good heatsink? I always assumed that was why they went with aluminium, other than it looking great.
Most laptops have the batteries on the back, making the front available for connectors. Most laptops have ventilation on a side, and some complement it with bottom holes.
Also, Apple could place their CPU/GPU wherever they wanted.
The thinness is the critical problem, and to be honest with most consumer electronics (phones especially; please give me a larger, replaceable battery), I wish they would stop the race to the bottom and instead deliver more functional and longer-lasting productions.
I have an rMBP 15" and a 15" Lenovo Y500. The Y500 cost less than half of the rMBP for equivalent performance but the experience, battery, screen, trackpad, etc are of course much better on the Mac. But for intensive tasks, even with nearly identical internals and the same OS, the Y500 is far more pleasant to use. Say what you want about Lenovo and the terrible things they've done to their laptops in the last few years, but the Y500 is designed to expel heat in the least obtrusive manner possible and it does an amazing job.
At full bore, all cores, maybe a game, the Y500 happily pushes a lot of air out the side vent, and the keyboard, trackpad, bezels, etc., stay very cool.
With the same workload, the rMBP gets very, very hot and seems to blow a small amount of air out of the keyboard (?), occasionally burning my fingers, It's loud and very uncomfortable to use.
In a sense it definitely makes me feel like I overpaid for the extra speed, since I can't use it comfortably anyway.
I'm sure Apple has done some pretty exhaustive (no pun intended) thermodynamic analysis of the case design.
I have three macbooks, two airs and a 13" mpbr, and none have had any thermal issues at all, even in the heat of summer.
If you are using a laptop in a way that generates that much heat, you probably get about 1 hour of battery life, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place. A larger fan or heavier case material would also make the laptop less user-friendly for the vast majority of users.
Apple moved from PowerPC to Intel because the new generation of PowerPC chips wouldn't run cool enough to put in a laptop.
Intel had long been pushing for cooler chips and longer battery life. Beginning with its Centrino line and the Pentium M processor.
Apple hopped in right after the Core chips landed (dual core), and these chips were amazing for Apple. They could continue with the macbook pro design with a new and faster chip.
Then Intel went on a speed binge again and tried to yield the most bang for your buck, sacrificing thermals and battery life.
Now finally with the Haswell chips they took a step back and tried to improve battery and thermals. And hopefully Broadwell will be even better.
I don't think he got the retina MacBook. I got the retina macbook and have never had heat issues or noise issues, the fans are super quiet. That said, I'm on my second battery-upper shell combo, and my third screen-hinge combo, so take it for what it's worth.
>third screen-hinge combo
yeah, but in all fairness I haven't found a modern laptop that does that right outside of convertible tablets that are notoriously beefed up in that regard.
Were Ivy Bridge considered to be OK? I have a 2012 MBP with the top IvyBridge i7 and it gets warm if you play games (in Windows) but I hardly ever hear the fan any other time (I compile C++ on it all the time). I just thought I'd ask as the "dead MacBook" stories frighten me.
Obviously. But some less popular laptop vendors have this 'next business day' warranty where they send a technician to fix your laptop in your office or at home. Much better idea than a baking owen imho, however there is something in a scent of freshly baked mainboard ;)
It is member of EEA [1] though which means they "adopt almost all EU legislation related to the single market, except laws on agriculture and fisheries."
EU provides 6 years but not from the manufacturer - from the seller. I actually had a problem where Apple told me my manufacturer warranty was up and explained I still had 6 years from the seller (Vodafone) and to go to them. Vodafone pretended the law didn't exist. Eventually Apple were kind enough to replace the device even though they had no obligation to.
I wonder how that applies when you purchase something from an Apple Store, since that means they're both.
I remember seeing a page on the Apple website listing info for extended warranties in EU member countries, which I assume this specific defect in the 2011 Macbooks is covered by.
I've been with almost all UK phone companies (I used to buy a new iPhone each year for dev reasons but run simultaneous 2 year contracts meaning I had to be with two phone companies at a time) and they are all terrible.
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-less forced upgrades every 2ish years, but that cadence does seem to fit the timing of when I start to feel my phone is not up to par... 2 or 3 newer generations of devices have come out since my purchase, my battery is starting to lose life (usually never covered by any warranty as this is a standard "wear-n-tear" item like car tires). I'd think a 2 or 3 year warranty should suffice in most cases.
>> "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.
Strong consumer protection is one of the core goals of the EU. http://ec.europa.eu/justice/consumer-marketing/index_en.htm: "The Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European treaties since the Single European Act guarantee a high level of consumer protection in the EU. It is also a general objective defined in Article 12 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU."
It isn't 6 years throughout the EU and for every product, though. The EU directive (= the text the EU writes that tells member countries what to achieve through their laws) states (paraphrasing a lot) that consumers may expect a device they buy to be what is advertised and to last as long as a typical device of what is advertised lasts (Business-to-business is different; there, it is more 'buyer beware')
As is typical for EU directives, that isn't very specific (partly for the better, as being specific would mean that such directives need to be revised all the time) and only describes a goal, not how to reach it.
Individual countries will vary in how they translate that into law. Apparently, Norway went for a very strong consumer protection.
Checking the Apple legalese [1] [2] it seems that we can "choose" between Apple One Year Limited Warranty and consumer law [3] which happens to be 6 (England and Wales) or 5 (Scotland) years. Can anyone clarify that for me please? My screen is flickering on certain gradient backgrounds but my 1 year warranty was over before I noticed it.
Reading your first two links makes it seem like you get both, given that your statutory rights aren't affected by Apple's own warranty, so for the coverage for the first or 3 years you can get anything solved via AppleCare, and for the remaining 2 or 3 you'd be making the claim to Apple (if you bought it via their stores or their website) as part of your statutory rights.
In Australia a manufacturer's warranty cannot override your statutory rights. The warranty rights are useful if they are better than your statutory rights though.
Apple can't deny consumer law, so no. In countries like Norway (5 years "right of complaint" for electronics where the manufacturer is obligated to either repair or provide an equivalent product, new or refurbished), Apple has to oblige the consumer, by law.
Can I just send my MBP Late 2011 to you so that you can send it to Apple to be replaced? The #mbp2011 group should really just set up a bunch of people there so that we can send it to Apple Norway to be replaced since MBP's warranties are worldwide anyway.
Well, as a consumer rather than a phone manufacturer, I certainly appreciate living in the EU. For a several-hundred-€ phone to not be expected to last two years is a pretty depressing position.
What are you talking about? I can get a €20 Samsung in any place that still sells dumbphones. I got a €30 Nokia 5 years ago and it still works splendid.
This is what drives me insane about the state of modern electronic device quality. It seems the less you pay, the longer it lasts. This is completely the opposite of how it is with traditional goods like furniture, utensils, tools, and so on. Maybe it's over-engineering, maybe it's forced obsolescence, maybe it's something beyond my comprehension. But it stinks.
Well, a more expensive phone has way more (hardware) features, and thus way more points of failure. Makes perfect sense to me, though I do understand your position.
Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing. I wish releases such as this were more common both in soft- and in hardware.
> Well, a more expensive phone has way more (hardware) features, and thus way more points of failure.
That's an excellent point. Nokia of old was often associated with build quality, but the more advanced you got, the more stuff would break. Their cheaper Symbian phones tended to last forever, but the N-series, especially the N900, had more hardware issues than their cheaper brethren. Given that the N900 was basically a full fledged computer in a phone form factor there were a lot of potential points of failure, the biggest of which was the faulty USB port.
> Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing.
That's the last version of OS X I have used on a daily basis, and from what I've heard I missed out on a ton of new bugs introduced in Lion and up. Of course my aging Mac mini CoreDuo, even with a Core2Duo upgrade, is no longer fast enough for daily use and won't take a newer OS anyway. I'm not buying another Mac for a long time (if ever) as I can't justify the expense, but given what I've heard about Yosemite's stability maybe that's a good thing. OpenBSD runs great on my current self-built system so I don't really have a need for OS X anymore.
I really enjoyed using Snow Leopard, skipped the Lion and Moutain Goat upgrades but did go with Mavericks, had no problems whatsoever, plus Yosemite has been fine for me, if not a teeny bit sluggish for me. But what widespread stability issues have you heard of? I haven't had any problems.
I am still on Mavericks at work, thank goodness for the fix for multiple screens as Mountain Lion would be useless!
I think that's partly because by the time those components get to the cheap product they've been out in the wild for several years and improved substantially over time. The same thing happens with cars. Today, buying the top of the line BMW or Mercedes almost guarantees you more electrical/functional issues than a mid or entry level model where the technology is flowing down but been in the market for 3 - 7 + years and significantly improved.
Maybe cheap phones last longer because you use them less. In my experience is is usually the moving parts that break (switches and sockets). I want a device designed to work without any physical switches.
OK, sorry. My broader point, though, is that cell phones are in most cases priced in a dishonest way by hiding the cost of the phone in different places and saying the phone is only however much money.
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.
One time I saw it climb as high as 102º C—hot enough to boil water.
If doing anything slightly intensive, my 15" MBPR is the same; I've had it hover at 100-105C for periods. Why not scale down the CPU at crazy temperatures? Intel CPUs have a cutout, but the entire machine needs a more gradual solution. Running at 90C+ is not viable long term.
Now it's over 2 years old, I might just buy a entry level MBP instead rather than maxing out as I usually do. They seem fast enough now and what's the point if I can't even use the full power?
Same here. I bought the version with dedicated graphics for some light gaming, but the GPU throttles almost immediately, I doubt I'm getting better performance than I wold have with just Intel integrated graphics.
I have reapplied thermal paste (which improved things a little bit), used a cooling laptop stand (useless), fiddled with smcfancontrol and other applications, to no avail.
But I'm not drilling holes on the case, as someone said it would be hard to explain when reselling it :).
My problem is more with the CPU than GPU. However, there's an app that lets you switch to using the integrated graphics only (which is fine for most situations, unless you plug in an external display) which is well worth trying.
Not to try to convince you to get something different, but FWIW there are more differences in the MBP and MBA lineup than just CPU and GPU. For me, the two major factors were RAM amount (couldn't get 16 GB's with anything but MBP 15" at the time), and ability to hook up multiple external displays. My current setup is the laptop screen + two external displays. At least as of a year ago MBA's and 13" MBP's could do this. At best, you could drive two external displays with a 13" MBP (but not its own screen). USB video cards are a solution, but consider that they drive CPU usage through the roof unless you are staring at a very static screen. I used to use one of these to display my terminal. Then one day I put the browser on this screen and was checking GMail when I heard my laptop basically lift off the desk from the heat and speed of the fans.
Actually it's my understanding that they are all essentially the same chip cut from the same dye. What differentiates the chips with the higher clock speed from hose with the lower speeds is that they heat up less quickly during testing and were therefore able to be clocked higher for sale.
>Why not scale down the CPU at crazy temperatures?.
Are you kidding me? What's the point of even buying the faster CPU then? You could just, you know, design the computer properly. You hive-minded Apple fans are so unaccustomed to critical thinking that you don't see Tim Cooks writing on the walls.
This story is awesome. It would be hilarious if the OP ever tried to sell his laptop. I can imagine him trying to explain to a layperson why all of the drilled holes in the bottom are actually a benefit and not a problem.
"I can imagine him trying to explain to a layperson"
Its a 2011. Trying to sell that in, lets say, 2019, it'll sound a lot like when I sold my 1997 Saturn in 2013 with a hole for a ham radio antenna, in other words it'll be so old no one will care. Also they were more interested in the cracked heater core, broken sunroof opener, leaking sunroof, worn out brakes, and high oil consumption, than being worried about a little hole.
If I were the OP i would sell his "speed enhanced" laptop right after this operation. He mentions having to heat mainboard in the oven. Actually this operation doesn't work for any long term period and during each heating session he risks frying some other components on the board.
Is it normal in the US to use Celsius for computer inside temperatures, and Fahrenheit for the oven? Aren't you converting back and forth the whole time?
For temperatures near 100C the conversion is easy.
Ovens report temperatures in F, computers in C, shrug.
In general you use F for human temperatures (air temperature, fever, and cooking), and C for everything else. F has a better range for air and body temperature anyway.
Maybe Europeans will switch to F, and Americans will switch to Km :)
(In case you wonder why F is better: The coldest temperature normally experienced by people is 0F and the typical temperature is near 100F. Unlike C where you go negative, and the typical is 20.)
I've always hoped we'd move to a 0-100 scale where the scale is the temperatures people can relate to. 0 is cold, 100 is hot. How hot is 100? Same as 100 farenheit. We know that's hot. How cold is cold? Same as 0 celsius, we know that's cold.
Of course, for science and cooking we need more dynamic range, which F and C work well for, but just for our daily experience, we need something new.
> I've always hoped we'd move to a 0-100 scale where the scale is the temperatures people can relate to.
That's exactly what Celsius is, except it pegs 0 and 100 at non-arbitrary temperatures that are both scientifically precise and exceptionally relevant to everyday use.
100C is not important to everyday use. The fact that water boils when heated is important, but that could go anywhere from 70 to 200 and the change would barely get noticed.
I don't know about you, but I boil water several times every day. I don't go outside to freezing temperatures every day. So this is all relative.
In fact, the heater I have at work has a nice digital temperature display, and it works nicely as an indication how long to wait, a bit like a charging/loading indication...
You boil water but you don't directly experience the temperature. All you see is a number that starts near zero and counts to 100. If water boiled at twice the temperature and had half the specific heat you wouldn't notice it.
Ice temperature, room temperature, body temperature, these are things you can directly experience and use as a high quality reference point. For the average person the boiling point of water is just 'hot', with a rough idea of how long it takes their particular heater to get there.
Beyond a certain age everyone has had the experience of suffering thru having total weirdo coworkers (weird even by my standards) who seemingly randomly oscillate the office thermostat setting from 60 to 80 thru the day because they "feel cold" "feel hot" so they turned the thermostat all the way up or all the way down. Nutcases.
I'm just saying if you create a hot and cold human scale, it'll have to be personalized for each individual and seemingly randomly vary over time. May as well use a magic 8-ball.
I like my sauna around 90C/195F. I can relate to that temperature. The coldest weather I've been in is -17F/-27C. I can relate to that as well, though I much prefer not to.
On the other hand, I grew up in Miami. In college in northern Florida, those of us from the south stayed up late so we could actually see what it was like when it was freezing outside. We left water outside to see that it actually froze! Back then I couldn't relate to temperatures below 32F/0C.
In other words, "we" is a rather nebulous definition.
Unlikely. Celsius degrees provide quite practical numbers that are easy to relate to: 0 = freezing, 20 = room temperature, 16-25 = range of pleasant but not too hot outside temperatures (tastes will vary), 37 = body temperature, >40 = too hot, 100 = boiling water. Although my room thermostat allows itself to be set to half-degrees, not all thermostats do, and you don't really need those in practice. On the other hand, I see Fahrenheit numbers often being used like 60s, 70s or 80s, which seems to indicate that Fahrenheit has a bit too much detail.
>I had a hunch that the problem was related to the thermal paste: When I disassembled it the first time, I had to scrape some thermal pads from under the Thunderbolt controller and the system hub. This left a large gap between the heat spreader and the chip. I’d tried to fill the gap with an extra big gob of thermal paste, but I suspected that the paste hadn’t gotten a good seal.
Well yeah, that's a problem as thermal paste is only meant to fill in the microscopic irregularities of the contact surfaces and isn't some magical thermal bridge. Thermal paste has thermal properties on par with most condiments. Thermal pads are particularly bad. I would use a metal shim to bridge such a gap, not just more thermal paste.
I have question related to this issue. Which MacBook model, new, refurbished or used, should I buy if I want it to last as long as possible and be useful for doing OS X-specific programming tasks?
Girlfriend has a 2008 MB that I bought off Ebay, other than the hard drive dying (and giving me ample warning and time to replace first), it's had no problem. Since it's limited to 4GB RAM, it isn't really ideal for development, but she runs Photoshop and Illustrator on it (albeit, a bit slow for my taste).
I personally own a late 2011 MBP (same as the article, I believe) with 8GB RAM, also no problems, running a pretty standard development set up.
I have another 2012 MBP through work which is a bit beefed up, though still nothing fancy. Also no problems. Also manage a couple of 2010 Mac servers there which have been running steady since late 2010.
Oh, and none of these have SSDs. So, say what you will about non-SSD, they work well enough for development.
All in all, have to agree -- whatever fits your budget, at least in my personal experience, will work pretty well. I know that people do certainly have issues with them occasionally, but when I compare my luck with them to my luck with various other brands (Compaq, Dell, etc), they've lasted significantly longer with few or no problems.
If that's a 2008 MacBook that you have, it should be able to (unofficially) take at least 6GB RAM. I have a 2007 MacBook with 6GB RAM and I've never had any problems with the RAM upgrade (running Lion & Mountain Lion, at least). Try looking up your model number in the small print here:
I'd be interested in this as well - has Apple fixed this heat issue in the 2012 MacBook Pro (non-Retina) models that they still have on sale in the Apple Store?
Anecdotal, but I've bought refurbished stuff a couple times and had to repeatedly replace logic boards and other parts. I probably wouldn't do that again.
I'm going to say MacBook Air - it runs cool equipped with solid-state components and integrated graphics. Whichever one you choose, make sure you get the SSD storage option, as it will run much cooler and simply perform better.
It amazes me that Apple still ships computers with spinning hard drives in 2014, let alone a laptop.
I have hard drives fail on me and SSDs fail on me at work. It is far easier to get data from a hard disk in the case of failure, which is why I still use disks at the moment. Of course, backups are a necessity in all occasions but I would rather trust a spinning platter than can be taken out of a defective hard disk (with a bust circuit board) and put in another disk than a bunch of chips on a board.
2010 MBP were very good, 2011 MBP had the issues highlighted in the article, 2012 MBP seem to be ok.
2012 Retina MBP are generally good but have some known issues (eg LG display losing pixels). Mine's currently getting a bunch of things fixed which will probably end up being a new keyboard, logic board, and another LCD.
2013-2014 rMBP seem to have the 2012 issues fixed.
Airs are ok so long as you don't intend on flogging them. They can have overheating issues too.
I have a 2012 MBP (non retina). Never ever had any problems with it at all, runs cool and I compile all day long (C++). Not much gaming going on, but when I do (under Windows on it) it goes mental with the fans. It is the top i7 one with the dedicated nVidia GPU in it, but I have no complaints about it (so far).
EDIT: I must also state that it has a plethora of ports on it that are lacking on the retina models. Gigabit ethernet (with AVB for audio, hurray), Thunderbolt (or Mini DisplayPort for driving a screen/TV with audio over it for HDMI too) FireWire (for audio interfaces), two USB3 ports, SD slot, mic input, audio out (headphone or optical S/PDIF), button to indicate amount of battery remaining (so you don't have to turn it on to find out) and a DVDR/CD drive. Can't beat them in my opinion.
I chuckled observing the MacBook Air user with his bag of appendages for ethernet and powering a display. Sort of defeated having the super slim device!
I own the same laptop, I have it for about 2.5 years now and never experienced such temperatures. During a normal workday, (programming, compiling, git etc) I never once heard the fans spin up.
I have a BookArc[1] laptop stand, which is about the worst possible way to keep a running MBP (lid closed, fan slots pointing down) and even with lots of gaming, I have never experienced any problems.
Yes, I do clean the fans once a year, but all laptops need that. It goes to show that thermal wise the MBP is actually very well engineered.
I just use them on my lap and have never had heat problems with any of my macbooks.
Before I bought my first macbook air I wrote a program on the console that slammed the CPU and left it running at the apple store. When I came back a few hours later the program was still running (100% CPU on all cores) and the machine was still cool to the touch. I then purchased the laptop.
> I just use them on my lap and have never had heat problems with any of my macbooks.
Yes, but have you ever specifically had a 2011 MBP like in the article? It's a very specific set of models that have the heat issue.
Mine could easily hit 90C under load (it just bricked itself last week). Which mean it was quite hot to the touch. After I changed the thermal compound, it would hit the low 80s (C) at peak, but even then, it was quite hot.
I haven't had that model. Apple has clearly had some thermal design problems in the past, but my sense is that they have been resolved in newer models.
Right...except for the tens of thousands of people with the 2011 machine experiencing heat related damage to the GPU.
Your study size of one doesn't 'go to show' anything at all regarding the MacBooks thermal performance. It shows that you yourself haven't experienced any issues but that's where it ends.
I for instance have a 2010 i7 MacBook Pro and it will spin up and get ridiculously hot (too hot to touch) simply watching a 1080p flash video on YouTube. Not the greatest thermal design there with my study size of one :-)
What I will say though is that Apple seems to use the Aluminium case as a heat transfer device, so it purposefully gets hot to disapate heat. That's great until there is a fault with the solder being too thin to withstand the planned temperatures like is happening to the 2011 MacBooks with the discrete GPU.
I had the same problem with a HP laptop a few years ago. HP
denied their was a problem. Long story short; I will never
give that company any more money. As to reballing a graphics chip, I would buy a kit off ebay, if made, and do
it right. You are still taking a chance because you most
likely don't have a proper heating station? I really like the additional holes. I would like to know exactly where
my fans are and make a proper template. I would then use a
very small gauge drill, and put in hundreds of holes. I would try to make it look like it came from Apple that way?
I use "I would" too much. I probally won't likely do anything
until mine goes dark? (I think the correct way of drilling
holes is dismantling the MacBook Pro, which has always scared me.)
i wonder why author choose to drill holes.. i'd think a cutting disk + slots would be better for airflow, and could be made to look a little better aesthetically
I have a mid 2009, 13" macbook pro, and when I use it in my bed, I make sure to put it on something that doesnt bend, like a slim large book with a hard cover, or a plastic tray.
I don't really know why it gets hotter over the year. I guess fine dust end up clogging it, and since laptops are very slim, everything is packed, so it might be pretty hard to remove that dust. Some dust can stick to some surfaces, but I'm not sure.
One thing for sure is that I wont use it for gaming or anything that might get it hot.
What a fantastic way to deal with the problem. Whereas most people would have gone and paid money to some repair place, you took matters into your own hands. I love the iFixit approach to problems. (although I do understand why many people may find this a bit too much). What else can you hack?
I think the picture in the header says it all, on one side I can see very dirty fans and on the other side the improved design.
The first thing I would have tried is to replace the fans. I had to do this with other laptops I have had in the past (HP mostly) but never with the two models of MBP (and I run pretty hard too), so I guess it has to do with the model as he mentioned.
While I sympathise with the idea of improving the design of a product massively consumed, I first try to think that the engineers did a well design and try to look for the malfunctioning component to replace.
I've got an early 2011 MBP which has exactly the same issue - I'm on the third logic board (GPU and a chipset both went on separate occasions within 3-year warranty) and second battery (battery wasn't due to heat though, just capacity), I use it heavily for programming (compiling) and rendering, so CPUs are often maxed out.
I try and make sure it's ventilated properly (when I use it on my lap I often hold it in the air when the CPUs are busy and the temp is rising), but I'm not convinced the design is good for cooling in general.
Do not replace the logic board a 4th time. Any Apple store manager is authorized to replace with a brand new 2014 model after three repairs especially for 2011 model owners. I just got my brand new replacement last month.
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:
Had two 2007 MacBook Pro's break down that way. Local Apple Care Service providers didn't want to apply Apple-mandated extended warranty. I was pretty disappointed to find out that later models exhibited similar flaws, because the soldering issue of 2007 models was blamed on nVidia.
When a friend was buying her mother a christmas present iPad, I went with her to examine which models handle the tablet workload better. We ended up picking an older generation, non-retina model. A few previous generation retina models, presumably running latest iOS updates, had ridiculously high temperatures just idling on the shelf.
Nvidia made a run of defective GPUs somewhere around 2007-2008. Tom's Hardware claims[0] that all G84 and G86 GPUs other than warranty replacements produced in late 20008 are defective.
It's not a BGA solder issue like we've seen on numerous laptop GPUs over the years, but a problem with the internal interconnects. Heating it, as if to reflow a BGA does temporarily solve the problem, but in my experience, the period of time it keeps working after heating gets shorter each time.
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.
The issue isn't that EU-mandated tin-alloy solders are cheap, it's that the solder balls aren't solid and non-lead solders are brittle. For components that don't undergo constant radical thermal shifts, this is a nonissue. For the only ball grid array-mounted component on the board (the GPU), this is a recipe for eventual failure.
If the balls were factory tested for solidity this would become far less of an issue. Industry papers on the manufacture of solder balls indicate they are not; when those balls were lead, it didn't matter because lead's not thermally brittle.
ah thanks. hard to me to find laymen articles on this (interest prompted on an ATI daughter card failure on an '09 iMac), so always interesting to find out more.
I had one logic board replaced under AppleCare in 2013. It only took a few months before the new logic board exhibited the same GPU/heat problems.
Finally, just a few days ago -- right before Christmas -- it just up and died. Seeing how I didn't want to pay for a new logic board with the same design defect, I just ended up buying a new laptop (and no, it is not a Mac).
My early 2011 MBP was probably the most expensive laptop I've bought in a long time (the most expensive was the Powerbook 170 - oh how I loved the trackball on that thing), and I loved the form factor and expandability. It really bugs me that it died while it was still more than usable in terms of performance.
I had my "2011 MBP - refurbished" covered under Applecare so I got to at least get it covered as these issues were cropping up. They replaced both the logicboard and the harddrive.
I ended up selling it for whatever I could get for it a month ago and just cutting my losses before the Applecare ran out.
Here in Europe Apple is replacing affected logics for free with consumer law claims. The are only two conditions: 1. you need to have the original receipt 2. it must be a non business purchase (so you must be a consumer)
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 screen glowed. The fans blew." doesn't make sense to me. The extra holes may help and may even fix his problem, but I find it hard to believe that successful booting shows that. Yes, it is a 'little' early for a final verdict.
Why do you doubt the temperature did not reflow the board?
When I solder electronics, I'm usually somewhere between 500F to 650F, but that's so things get hot enough quickly enough to not burn. I don't doubt a slow bake at 340F would do the same thing... some online googling shows people doing reflows with toaster ovens in the same temperature range (340F-450F).
It's likely the solder joints were not completely disconnected, but rather simply cracked. So heating them a bit would allow the crack to reconnect, at least for a short while (seems to explain his symptoms of repeated failures after extreme system temperatures during operation).
Is it not true that baking it makes any "cracking" in the soldering smooth out since this is similar to what is done to boards at the factory during construction?
Right. And the reason why it keeps breaking? Well, the solder on the board might not have any flux left, so it might have trouble flowing properly. There could be a cold joint, etc.
If it fails again, one possible next step would be to grab a multimeter and test the resistance across each component on the board. If the resistance is infinite, that might be your problem component.
Don't you have to isolate components from the circuit to check resistance? Otherwise, you're looking also the other components look like the other arm(s) of a parallel circuit.
You know what, you're right. I saw a video of someone testing that a chip had been soldered on correctly with a multimeter, but he was testing for the lack of a connection. Testing for a connection would not be done this way.My bad.
There's more than resistors on logic board. Also, by even touching component leads with multimeter probes is sometimes enough to connect the joint back thus fooling you to think connection was ok.
Also, the problem might as well be one of the numerous chips in BGA packages whose connection points you can't even see, let alone- probe.
Got a source for that? According to Wikipedia, 340F is not far from the melting point for solder. Depending on the solder used, it may have melted, or just gotten soft enough to heal any gaps or cracks.
The link you attached lists a few different lead-free solder alloys with the lowest melting at 412F(211C) well above 340F(171C). Eutectic tin/lead solder has a melting point of 361F(183C), also above 340F.
I'm not sure whether or not cracks can heal at temperatures below the melting point, but I would be surprised if that were possible.
So it turns out that home oven manufacturers don't care too much about precision when it comes to oven temperature (and it doesn't matter usually).
A high end home oven will easily swing between +- 25 degrees of the temperature that you have dialed in, and that's if it's well calibrated.
If he didn't dial in "340" quite right, and his oven was average, I can easily see it hitting temperatures of 412+, and that could also account for his varied results.
It's possible that he did reflow the board. Consumer ovens usually reach 250C, slightly more when in autoclean mode. Lead-free reflow happens above 250C (normally 255-275C).
The whole procedure is wild, though, and I wouldn't recommend trying it out. He was lucky that the board didn't get destroyed. Most SMD components can withstand temperatures above 250C for tens of seconds, not necessarily for nine minutes.
I'm guessing he put the board in and then started the oven which took a while to preheat. Industrial reflow heats up the board gradually based on the solder paste manufacturer's suggested heat profile or experimentation/trial and error (e.g. when dealing with small pitch BGAs). 250C for even a few minutes would do quite some damage even to the fire retardant laminate and smell horrible.
But he writes "and turned the oven up to 340 F". That's about 170 Celsius. The oven probably isn't very precise, but I doubt that's in the 250 Celsius range.
He stated he was using a temperature of 340F, which is roughly 170C. Would that temperature also be harmful to SMD components when exposed for several minutes?
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.
I had the same thought after I reflowed the GPU from my iMac. It didn't work before, and it did work after, but it may simply be that dismounting and remounting the heat sink put enough pressure on the cracked solder ball to make it work again. I will never know, short of xray inspection, but it's been working fine for half a year now.
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.
Most of the actual logic board is sealed. So unless you spill something corrosive that goes through that seal and damages the logic board liquid can only get to and damage[0] actual connectors between components and physically moving entities. In case of MBP physically moving entities are mostly fans and keyboard.
My guess would be that grape juice shorted some of those connectors. After few months it dried sufficiently, such that when you reseated them short went away.
[0] And by damage I mean mostly short and/or corrode the metal.
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.
How about attempting to fix the issue instead of confirming what I already knew and telling me to buy a new computer? That's what technicians are supposed to do.
They did the same to me, when I dropped my first iPad and cracked the screen. They looked at it, and said "We'll sell you a new one at half price". Oh thanks, not even going to pretend to try to fix it?
But I did buy the new one and let them have the cracked one.
Sounds pretty great, actually. On these modern devices where the LCD is bonded to the glass screen, replacing the screen can cost as much as the device itself.
Again, this was likely due to the minerals in the water causing a short, and after a long period of time, the mineral "bridges" broke/wore-away, resolving the short, and allowing your macbook to boot.
Regarding the "Apple Geniuses", I doubt there would of been anything they could do for you, other than sit there with a cuetip and attempt to wipe down your entire mainboard after a full disassembly. Not to mention water damage probably isn't covered...
That sounds plausible, though I thought any power running through it would've caused it to burn out. I was actually going to do a full disassembly with a mate of mine who was an EE, but never got round to it. We attempted to do it with my iPhone (which was dunked into a toilet in an unrelated incident), but even cleaning everything with isopropyl alcohol it wouldn't work. I didn't hold high hopes for the MacBook.
And no, water damage wasn't covered by warranty, but it was out of warranty anyhow. I just didn't want to pay another $2K for a MacBook Air (maxed out specs at the time).
One weird trick I remember from alt.hackers was using WD-40 to remove the water from soaked electronics, and then using high-purity isopropyl(?) alcohol to clean off the WD-40. (You'd want to remove the WD-40 since it would attract dust.)
That's interesting, I'd think you'd just use rubbing alcohol (isopropyl) of >95%, since it will evaporate very rapidly by itself, taking any moisture with it. It also has great cleaning properties by itself (often used to eat the thermal paste gunk off heatsinks). Isopropyl alcohol is what "Swimmers Ear Drops" are mostly made of (for when you get water stuck in your ear).
I did an oven reflow on an RRoD Xbox motherboard years ago. Worked like a charm. I was a little worried about bursting the caps, but a little insulation and aluminum foil protection apparently kept them cool enough. Lasted for about a year.
Looks like the real issue is lack of cleaning the dust once a year.
Apple normally 'does not mind' if you open the case. Obviously you have to know what you are doing, hence the special screws. If you know what you are doing, you'll find where to spend $1 to get the correct screw driver.
Engineer: "We can get the computer to half heat if we add a few more intake holes..."
ArtsySalesDouche: "Nein! Nein! Nein! I don't want that! I know nobody sees the bottom, but I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it!"
i had to replace logic board on my mid 2010 mbp 15" after applecare expired.
i also noticed my mbp also runs very hot even when i am not doing anything fancy. the most i have is 15 chrome tabs open. i know chrome is a hog but hey ... its a powerful system, should be able to handle it without heating my like an oven ready to bake chicken.
compressed air many times .. no use
i had to run smcfan but still its pretty hot.
389 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadPutting vents at the hinge actually makes the most sense. It guarantees ventilation ports won't be fully obstructed. The vents face away from the user, reducing fan noise. Air ducts are short, since that area is close to the CPU/GPU.
It's hard to cool a laptop that can generate 85 watts of heat. Moreso if one cares about it looking nice and being thin. You may not like the trade-offs Apple chooses, but they put a lot of thought into their industrial design.
This is the reality distortion field.
Why do you care so much? It's just a laptop, who cares what a bunch of us neckbeards laugh at? Nothing should be beyond reproach here. This is hacker news not daring fireball.
Here posts are supposed to add something to the discussion, not to "tease" or provoke a response.
His previous posts do not confirm the identity, but it does correlate with Paul Graham.
Critics hold Apple to a higher standard than other companies, and the media reports Apple's failings more than other companies. There are tons of examples: iPhone 6 bending (it's just as sturdy as other phones), solder separation issues (rare; limited to a few first-gen models), overheating (again, rare and usually first-gen models). Other manufacturers have similar issues, but you never hear about them because they don't get eyeballs. Few care if some model of HP laptop overheats.
In general, Apple makes quality hardware. If it were otherwise, they wouldn't be able to charge so much.
Edit: I have no idea why this comment has been downvoted. Anyone want to clue me in?
Oh, so you have never heard of the power of Marketing and branding ?
My experience of Apple hardware, from owning it myself and from seeing how it fares for those around me who also use it, is that it's pretty, but poorly designed, lacking in features, and very unreliable.
They are able to charge so much because they market it well. Also, OSX is a decent OS in comparison to Windows, for those who can't be bothered to learn Linux.
In term of hardware, I've had a few lemons and I've complained loudly but under Applecare, Apple replaced the mbp retina I had that failed 3 times with a new model (which runs perfectly fin) so I can't really complain.
I've also had very long lived devices from Apple, my first ibook lasted 4-5 years until my parents sat on it, my wife's old powerbook lasted 6 years until it was stolen, my first generation iphone still works perfectly fine...
One thing I did learn though is never to buy a first generation model from Apple, they tend to be unreliable (at least in my anecdotical experience)
How's that Kool Aid taste?
[edit] Not a great image but you can see where the vents are on the back and the left hand side on this image:
https://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSpIDoMt_OkYzjIF9E6...
Doesn't matter how far I fold the screen back, the vents aren't blocked by it.
"Thick and bulky, with a keyboard studded with enough auxiliary buttons to look like a space shuttle control panel, the T420 is as old-school as a laptop can be."
I mean, it's all a matter of trade-offs, as the parent says. Personally I have been using my Macbook mostly as a desktop replacement, so in hindsight I would probably trade the small form factor for better cooling and more sustained performance, for people using a laptop more "dynamically" (carrying it around daily), I can see mobility to come first.
EDIT: Have you ever owned an ultrabook or a netbook ? I went from a T61p to a Macbook Air the the increase in mobility was significant. I used it on bed, on the couch, on the train, with no discomfort at all even after hours on end, unlike the bulkier laptops I owned before.
The Thinkpad may have more buttons than a Macbook, but I've never seen this as a disadvantage... The Thinkpad keyboard is much nicer to use than the Macbook keyboard. I've owned both. I'll admit that the Macbook keyboard looks nicer though. But that's the point isn't it. Macs are for people who care what their computers look like more than how useful they are.
Weight is hardly a big differentiator for MacBook Pros, as I understand it. The difference in weight between the ThinkPad T420, which the grandparent mentions, and the latest 15" MacBook Pro isn't that great: they weigh 4.9 lb (2.24 kg) and 4.5 pounds (2.06 kg) respectively according to the official specs. I suppose the ThinkPad will have a slightly heavier power adapter as well.
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.
Heavier computers are something I had to make a decision to go out with. I knew I would be lugging it around on my shoulder and feeling grumpy. But the Air? It, plus a Wacom tablet next to it, takes up less room than the hardback sketchbooks I used to haul around as a matter of course. And I can sit out under a tree on a nice day and do finished, full-color art with a lot less mass than hauling a paint box around. (The fact that a full charge lasts most of a day helps a lot, too. I only take the power brick when I'm going out of town.)
Now, I will admit that I do also care about how stuff looks. I'm an artist; it's my job. But my experience is that there is something really, really different about having a laptop that does everything you need, and weighs less than a hardbound book.
I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games. I've tried everything: thinkpad fan control that turns the fan up to 7000RPM, clearing everything out with compressed air, replacing the thermal paste..
After a few years of observations, I think the problem may lie in software.. It seems like when I'm playing games and what not my CPU gets turboboosted, which stays there until it reaches about 90C, when it gets severely throttled, killing framerate and all. I use linux, so right now I have several scripts that goes and disables turbo boost. However, even at that point, it still will boost the CPU when running certain GL applications... Not sure why.
In fact, I've noticed this issue on all Sandybridge laptops I own/have encountered: the 2011 MBP, a dell inspiron... Ivy bridge computers seems to have no issue with this (W530, 2012 MBP).
In my experience, almost no consumer laptop is designed with a gaming thermal load in mind (aka heavy cpu + max gpu for extended periods of time). I'm not even sure it's possible in a conventional laptop case.
... I know this is completely useless advice, but don't do heavy gaming on a laptop without expecting problems. There are other form factors much better thermally suited.
tl;dr: mobility/thermal-tolerance/performance, pick two
Regardless, thermal performance under heavy load in laptop should either be tolerated, or the manufacturers should disable higher clock speeds.
My W530 on the other hand has no issue with heat. Heavy gaming puts it to about 75-80C. It is also much bulkier in size.
Edit: my dedicated graphics is off most of the time. Even then, CPU alone can drive the temperature up through the roof.
Apparently at one point (1983) someone thought it was possible: http://papers.sae.org/831101/
I wonder how many of these Macbook issues stem from popularity. If you look at any vendor's forums, you will find a bunch of posts about issues that a lot of people are having. They never make news, though, because how many people own an HP 5370-2wt20 laptop? A lot of people own HP laptops, but they don't have one model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. Macs, on the other hand, have a single (ish) model that makes up a large percentage of the laptop market. If there is an issue that affects 1% of HP 8209-c50mg buyers versus 1% of Macbook Pro buyers, only the Macbook numbers will be large enough to make news.
Do you mean RHEL 6? :-)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release 6.5 (Santiago).
I have opened up my laptop more than once and cleaned all the areas i can, but I still can't seem to get the temperature to go down like others claim. At this point I'm considering replacing my fan assembly and see if I have better luck but haven't gotten around to do so.
To me the issue was present mostly when gaming, not really during normal use (with the Macbook is the same).
It failed me after a few years and sold it for spares.
So, when it's on my lap it doesn't get enough airflow and burns my leg.
So much for 'sensible' design.
Also, Apple could place their CPU/GPU wherever they wanted.
I have an rMBP 15" and a 15" Lenovo Y500. The Y500 cost less than half of the rMBP for equivalent performance but the experience, battery, screen, trackpad, etc are of course much better on the Mac. But for intensive tasks, even with nearly identical internals and the same OS, the Y500 is far more pleasant to use. Say what you want about Lenovo and the terrible things they've done to their laptops in the last few years, but the Y500 is designed to expel heat in the least obtrusive manner possible and it does an amazing job.
At full bore, all cores, maybe a game, the Y500 happily pushes a lot of air out the side vent, and the keyboard, trackpad, bezels, etc., stay very cool.
With the same workload, the rMBP gets very, very hot and seems to blow a small amount of air out of the keyboard (?), occasionally burning my fingers, It's loud and very uncomfortable to use.
In a sense it definitely makes me feel like I overpaid for the extra speed, since I can't use it comfortably anyway.
All they do is "cooling" the aluminum bottom case, which has no contact (or though holes) with the inside parts of the laptop generating heath.
I have three macbooks, two airs and a 13" mpbr, and none have had any thermal issues at all, even in the heat of summer.
If you are using a laptop in a way that generates that much heat, you probably get about 1 hour of battery life, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place. A larger fan or heavier case material would also make the laptop less user-friendly for the vast majority of users.
Intel had long been pushing for cooler chips and longer battery life. Beginning with its Centrino line and the Pentium M processor.
Apple hopped in right after the Core chips landed (dual core), and these chips were amazing for Apple. They could continue with the macbook pro design with a new and faster chip.
Then Intel went on a speed binge again and tried to yield the most bang for your buck, sacrificing thermals and battery life.
Now finally with the Haswell chips they took a step back and tried to improve battery and thermals. And hopefully Broadwell will be even better.
even Lenovo hinges suck now.
But it sounds like his warranty has expired, hence the oven.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
I remember seeing a page on the Apple website listing info for extended warranties in EU member countries, which I assume this specific defect in the 2011 Macbooks is covered by.
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-less forced upgrades every 2ish years, but that cadence does seem to fit the timing of when I start to feel my phone is not up to par... 2 or 3 newer generations of devices have come out since my purchase, my battery is starting to lose life (usually never covered by any warranty as this is a standard "wear-n-tear" item like car tires). I'd think a 2 or 3 year warranty should suffice in most cases.
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).
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.
It isn't 6 years throughout the EU and for every product, though. The EU directive (= the text the EU writes that tells member countries what to achieve through their laws) states (paraphrasing a lot) that consumers may expect a device they buy to be what is advertised and to last as long as a typical device of what is advertised lasts (Business-to-business is different; there, it is more 'buyer beware')
As is typical for EU directives, that isn't very specific (partly for the better, as being specific would mean that such directives need to be revised all the time) and only describes a goal, not how to reach it.
Individual countries will vary in how they translate that into law. Apparently, Norway went for a very strong consumer protection.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/
[2] https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/statutoryrights.html
[3] https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/products/uk-ireland-uni...
Apple has previously been in trouble for trying to avoid their statutory requirements here, eg http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/apple-f...
Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing. I wish releases such as this were more common both in soft- and in hardware.
That's an excellent point. Nokia of old was often associated with build quality, but the more advanced you got, the more stuff would break. Their cheaper Symbian phones tended to last forever, but the N-series, especially the N900, had more hardware issues than their cheaper brethren. Given that the N900 was basically a full fledged computer in a phone form factor there were a lot of potential points of failure, the biggest of which was the faulty USB port.
> Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing.
That's the last version of OS X I have used on a daily basis, and from what I've heard I missed out on a ton of new bugs introduced in Lion and up. Of course my aging Mac mini CoreDuo, even with a Core2Duo upgrade, is no longer fast enough for daily use and won't take a newer OS anyway. I'm not buying another Mac for a long time (if ever) as I can't justify the expense, but given what I've heard about Yosemite's stability maybe that's a good thing. OpenBSD runs great on my current self-built system so I don't really have a need for OS X anymore.
I am still on Mavericks at work, thank goodness for the fix for multiple screens as Mountain Lion would be useless!
Thinner phones are also significantly weaker, can flex more, can get cracked circuit boards, cracked solder joints, etc.
The biggest feature of many phones decreases reliability.
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.
If doing anything slightly intensive, my 15" MBPR is the same; I've had it hover at 100-105C for periods. Why not scale down the CPU at crazy temperatures? Intel CPUs have a cutout, but the entire machine needs a more gradual solution. Running at 90C+ is not viable long term.
Now it's over 2 years old, I might just buy a entry level MBP instead rather than maxing out as I usually do. They seem fast enough now and what's the point if I can't even use the full power?
I have reapplied thermal paste (which improved things a little bit), used a cooling laptop stand (useless), fiddled with smcfancontrol and other applications, to no avail.
But I'm not drilling holes on the case, as someone said it would be hard to explain when reselling it :).
Are you kidding me? What's the point of even buying the faster CPU then? You could just, you know, design the computer properly. You hive-minded Apple fans are so unaccustomed to critical thinking that you don't see Tim Cooks writing on the walls.
It's not that hard to understand.
Its a 2011. Trying to sell that in, lets say, 2019, it'll sound a lot like when I sold my 1997 Saturn in 2013 with a hole for a ham radio antenna, in other words it'll be so old no one will care. Also they were more interested in the cracked heater core, broken sunroof opener, leaking sunroof, worn out brakes, and high oil consumption, than being worried about a little hole.
For temperatures near 100C the conversion is easy.
Ovens report temperatures in F, computers in C, shrug.
In general you use F for human temperatures (air temperature, fever, and cooking), and C for everything else. F has a better range for air and body temperature anyway.
Maybe Europeans will switch to F, and Americans will switch to Km :)
(In case you wonder why F is better: The coldest temperature normally experienced by people is 0F and the typical temperature is near 100F. Unlike C where you go negative, and the typical is 20.)
Of course, for science and cooking we need more dynamic range, which F and C work well for, but just for our daily experience, we need something new.
That's exactly what Celsius is, except it pegs 0 and 100 at non-arbitrary temperatures that are both scientifically precise and exceptionally relevant to everyday use.
Only 0C is relatable.
In fact, the heater I have at work has a nice digital temperature display, and it works nicely as an indication how long to wait, a bit like a charging/loading indication...
Ice temperature, room temperature, body temperature, these are things you can directly experience and use as a high quality reference point. For the average person the boiling point of water is just 'hot', with a rough idea of how long it takes their particular heater to get there.
Beyond a certain age everyone has had the experience of suffering thru having total weirdo coworkers (weird even by my standards) who seemingly randomly oscillate the office thermostat setting from 60 to 80 thru the day because they "feel cold" "feel hot" so they turned the thermostat all the way up or all the way down. Nutcases.
I'm just saying if you create a hot and cold human scale, it'll have to be personalized for each individual and seemingly randomly vary over time. May as well use a magic 8-ball.
On the other hand, I grew up in Miami. In college in northern Florida, those of us from the south stayed up late so we could actually see what it was like when it was freezing outside. We left water outside to see that it actually froze! Back then I couldn't relate to temperatures below 32F/0C.
In other words, "we" is a rather nebulous definition.
It is really a matter of what you are used to.
Well yeah, that's a problem as thermal paste is only meant to fill in the microscopic irregularities of the contact surfaces and isn't some magical thermal bridge. Thermal paste has thermal properties on par with most condiments. Thermal pads are particularly bad. I would use a metal shim to bridge such a gap, not just more thermal paste.
I've been running on MBPs since 2008 and never had one give up. (My oldest one still is running as a test device).
I personally own a late 2011 MBP (same as the article, I believe) with 8GB RAM, also no problems, running a pretty standard development set up.
I have another 2012 MBP through work which is a bit beefed up, though still nothing fancy. Also no problems. Also manage a couple of 2010 Mac servers there which have been running steady since late 2010.
Oh, and none of these have SSDs. So, say what you will about non-SSD, they work well enough for development.
All in all, have to agree -- whatever fits your budget, at least in my personal experience, will work pretty well. I know that people do certainly have issues with them occasionally, but when I compare my luck with them to my luck with various other brands (Compaq, Dell, etc), they've lasted significantly longer with few or no problems.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/MacBook/DDR2/
It amazes me that Apple still ships computers with spinning hard drives in 2014, let alone a laptop.
2012 Retina MBP are generally good but have some known issues (eg LG display losing pixels). Mine's currently getting a bunch of things fixed which will probably end up being a new keyboard, logic board, and another LCD.
2013-2014 rMBP seem to have the 2012 issues fixed.
Airs are ok so long as you don't intend on flogging them. They can have overheating issues too.
EDIT: I must also state that it has a plethora of ports on it that are lacking on the retina models. Gigabit ethernet (with AVB for audio, hurray), Thunderbolt (or Mini DisplayPort for driving a screen/TV with audio over it for HDMI too) FireWire (for audio interfaces), two USB3 ports, SD slot, mic input, audio out (headphone or optical S/PDIF), button to indicate amount of battery remaining (so you don't have to turn it on to find out) and a DVDR/CD drive. Can't beat them in my opinion.
I chuckled observing the MacBook Air user with his bag of appendages for ethernet and powering a display. Sort of defeated having the super slim device!
I have a BookArc[1] laptop stand, which is about the worst possible way to keep a running MBP (lid closed, fan slots pointing down) and even with lots of gaming, I have never experienced any problems.
Yes, I do clean the fans once a year, but all laptops need that. It goes to show that thermal wise the MBP is actually very well engineered.
[1] https://www.twelvesouth.com/product/bookarc-for-macbook-pro-...
Before I bought my first macbook air I wrote a program on the console that slammed the CPU and left it running at the apple store. When I came back a few hours later the program was still running (100% CPU on all cores) and the machine was still cool to the touch. I then purchased the laptop.
Yes, but have you ever specifically had a 2011 MBP like in the article? It's a very specific set of models that have the heat issue.
Mine could easily hit 90C under load (it just bricked itself last week). Which mean it was quite hot to the touch. After I changed the thermal compound, it would hit the low 80s (C) at peak, but even then, it was quite hot.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/30/apples-latest-mac-...
Your study size of one doesn't 'go to show' anything at all regarding the MacBooks thermal performance. It shows that you yourself haven't experienced any issues but that's where it ends.
I for instance have a 2010 i7 MacBook Pro and it will spin up and get ridiculously hot (too hot to touch) simply watching a 1080p flash video on YouTube. Not the greatest thermal design there with my study size of one :-)
What I will say though is that Apple seems to use the Aluminium case as a heat transfer device, so it purposefully gets hot to disapate heat. That's great until there is a fault with the solder being too thin to withstand the planned temperatures like is happening to the 2011 MacBooks with the discrete GPU.
Also, I didn't notice the MBP in the article is a 2011 model, mine is mid-2012, so I guess I can't compare those.
I don't really know why it gets hotter over the year. I guess fine dust end up clogging it, and since laptops are very slim, everything is packed, so it might be pretty hard to remove that dust. Some dust can stick to some surfaces, but I'm not sure.
One thing for sure is that I wont use it for gaming or anything that might get it hot.
The first thing I would have tried is to replace the fans. I had to do this with other laptops I have had in the past (HP mostly) but never with the two models of MBP (and I run pretty hard too), so I guess it has to do with the model as he mentioned.
While I sympathise with the idea of improving the design of a product massively consumed, I first try to think that the engineers did a well design and try to look for the malfunctioning component to replace.
I try and make sure it's ventilated properly (when I use it on my lap I often hold it in the air when the CPUs are busy and the temp is rising), but I'm not convinced the design is good for cooling in general.
http://mbp2011.org/
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23mbp2011
https://www.change.org/p/timothy-d-cook-replace-or-fix-all-2...
It's ludicrous that to attempt to fix this problem, you would have to go so far as to bake your laptop.
It cost me over $US 500 to get this fixed at an Apple Store.
When a friend was buying her mother a christmas present iPad, I went with her to examine which models handle the tablet workload better. We ended up picking an older generation, non-retina model. A few previous generation retina models, presumably running latest iOS updates, had ridiculously high temperatures just idling on the shelf.
It's not a BGA solder issue like we've seen on numerous laptop GPUs over the years, but a problem with the internal interconnects. Heating it, as if to reflow a BGA does temporarily solve the problem, but in my experience, the period of time it keeps working after heating gets shorter each time.
[0] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-g84-g86-chips-overhe...
If the balls were factory tested for solidity this would become far less of an issue. Industry papers on the manufacture of solder balls indicate they are not; when those balls were lead, it didn't matter because lead's not thermally brittle.
Finally, just a few days ago -- right before Christmas -- it just up and died. Seeing how I didn't want to pay for a new logic board with the same design defect, I just ended up buying a new laptop (and no, it is not a Mac).
My early 2011 MBP was probably the most expensive laptop I've bought in a long time (the most expensive was the Powerbook 170 - oh how I loved the trackball on that thing), and I loved the form factor and expandability. It really bugs me that it died while it was still more than usable in terms of performance.
I ended up selling it for whatever I could get for it a month ago and just cutting my losses before the Applecare ran out.
http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroa...
Also "The speed holes worked: The boot chime rang. The screen glowed. The fans blew." doesn't make sense to me. The extra holes may help and may even fix his problem, but I find it hard to believe that successful booting shows that. Yes, it is a 'little' early for a final verdict.
When I solder electronics, I'm usually somewhere between 500F to 650F, but that's so things get hot enough quickly enough to not burn. I don't doubt a slow bake at 340F would do the same thing... some online googling shows people doing reflows with toaster ovens in the same temperature range (340F-450F).
It's likely the solder joints were not completely disconnected, but rather simply cracked. So heating them a bit would allow the crack to reconnect, at least for a short while (seems to explain his symptoms of repeated failures after extreme system temperatures during operation).
If it fails again, one possible next step would be to grab a multimeter and test the resistance across each component on the board. If the resistance is infinite, that might be your problem component.
Also, the problem might as well be one of the numerous chips in BGA packages whose connection points you can't even see, let alone- probe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solder#Lead-free_solder
I'm not sure whether or not cracks can heal at temperatures below the melting point, but I would be surprised if that were possible.
A high end home oven will easily swing between +- 25 degrees of the temperature that you have dialed in, and that's if it's well calibrated.
If he didn't dial in "340" quite right, and his oven was average, I can easily see it hitting temperatures of 412+, and that could also account for his varied results.
If this were Mythbusters, we'd call it "Plausible".
The whole procedure is wild, though, and I wouldn't recommend trying it out. He was lucky that the board didn't get destroyed. Most SMD components can withstand temperatures above 250C for tens of seconds, not necessarily for nine minutes.
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.
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.
My guess would be that grape juice shorted some of those connectors. After few months it dried sufficiently, such that when you reseated them short went away.
[0] And by damage I mean mostly short and/or corrode the metal.
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.
But I did buy the new one and let them have the cracked one.
Regarding the "Apple Geniuses", I doubt there would of been anything they could do for you, other than sit there with a cuetip and attempt to wipe down your entire mainboard after a full disassembly. Not to mention water damage probably isn't covered...
And no, water damage wasn't covered by warranty, but it was out of warranty anyhow. I just didn't want to pay another $2K for a MacBook Air (maxed out specs at the time).
And that works :)
Use an actual dessicant. Which might also not work, but then your problem is less likely leftover wetness.
I baked a Nvidia GTX470 at 390f for 10 minutes and it eliminated the artifacts/crashing and has been working fine for months.
It probably won't work forever, but it is at least a temporary fix.
Apple normally 'does not mind' if you open the case. Obviously you have to know what you are doing, hence the special screws. If you know what you are doing, you'll find where to spend $1 to get the correct screw driver.
Alternate ending sentence: "So that's how I ruined my MBP with duct-tape-level thermal reengineering! Thermal resistance, wazzat?"
Engineer: "We can get the computer to half heat if we add a few more intake holes..."
ArtsySalesDouche: "Nein! Nein! Nein! I don't want that! I know nobody sees the bottom, but I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it!"
i also noticed my mbp also runs very hot even when i am not doing anything fancy. the most i have is 15 chrome tabs open. i know chrome is a hog but hey ... its a powerful system, should be able to handle it without heating my like an oven ready to bake chicken.
compressed air many times .. no use i had to run smcfan but still its pretty hot.