GPUs Dropping Dead In 2011 MacBook Pro Models

New submitter blackwizard writes "MacRumors is reporting on pervasive GPU failures in 2011 MacBook Pro machines, leading both to intermittent video issues, corruption, crashing/freezing, and eventually even failure to boot. Luckily for Apple, the machines are now out of warranty (unless you bought AppleCare). The issues have been reported both on Apple's own forums and other blogs. Apple has so far failed to take action on the problem. Will they take ownership of the issue, or continue to ask customers to pay for an entire new logic board when just the GPU fails?"

Comments

Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[dmiller1984]

If it's truly faulty hardware Apple will typically own up to it and offer repairs free of charge. I have the 2008 MBP that had a logic board issue and Apple replaced it for free even though I was well past the warranty and didn't have AppleCare.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[ColdWetDog]

If it was faulty then it should have failed in the first days. That it happens three years later is a sign that the user is to blame.

For not buying a new machine after the warranty expires?

I am intrigued by your ideas and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, Apple will do no such thing unless they face severe penalties. Here in Denmark it took several court cases regarding faulty design on the MBP, which Apple lost all of them - even then did Apple not want to own up and repair the affected MBPs, it wasn't until they faced severe repercussions they started fixing them.

By the way, I'm a happy MBP owner and will probably keep being one, just saying, don't expect them to go out of the way to help you.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

A laptop built by my company has serious issues with GPUs dropping ead. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of laptops in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[chmodman]

I have this model MBP, and yes, it failed exactly as described. I think the problem is made worse when paired with the thunderbolt screen, which forces the dedicated GPU to be used instead of the Intel GPU. It runs super HOT all the time, even when simply web browsing. Many have found a utility called smcFanControl to force the fan to run at full speed at all times in an attempt to compensate for a bad design. There are numerous YouTube video's of how to "cook" the logic board in an oven for 3 min @ 375 deg to reflow the solder and I found this does fix it temporarily, so its definitely a solder ball issue. Ultimately, I found a repair service on e-bay that for $150, replaces the solder balls on the BGA with lead balls (supposedly) and this is a more permanent fix. According to him (and he seems legit) the lead-free BGA balls suck, and over time fail with extended heat / use. I hope there is a class action on this one, because I paid almost $3k for this laptop and it only lasted 2 years!

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[amiga3D]

It's all the rage in appliances. Try buying a new major appliance without buying a warranty. When, not if, they fail you can count on a repair bill of 200 to 1000 dollars nowadays. If it's over three years old and you have no warranty then you might just as well buy a new one for what it'll cost unless you can repair it yourself. I fixed my refrigerator and while sitting at the appliance parts supply place waiting to pay 22 dollars for a part the guy next to me looked at it and laughed. I replace 7 or 8 of those a week he laughed. I asked what he charged and he told me 165 dollars. That was 8 years ago and I've replaced that same fucking part 3 times since then. I hate working on appliances but I hate taking it up the ass even more.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[TheRaven64]

I've seen the opposite. In the UK, if you quote the Sale of Goods Act when you call them up, they'll quickly replace faulty parts 4 years after the original purchase. In the US, as soon as the warranty expires, you're fucked if anything goes wrong.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[Just Some Guy]

That's not true. I bought a used, out-of-warranty iMac which developed bad capacitors (swollen and leaking) on the graphics card a year later. I called Apple and they replaced everything inside it without charging me a penny. I never heard of that being a big scandal, and in the US I doubt they had any legal obligations to fix my 3.5 year old used Mac.

I think a more accurate version is that sometimes Apple fixes things for free because they want to, and other times because they're forced to. There's no obvious way of knowing in advance which way an "event" will go.

Re: Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[DigiShaman]

This is an industry wide issue thanks to RoHS. This isn't just Apple, this effects Dell and HP laptops that have high temp GPUs. The XBox 360 is another perfect example. The problem is caused from the constant thermal cycling causing expansion and contraction as it cools. Like bending a paper clip, over time metal fatigue sets in and cracks the solder.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[dgatwood]

That's not really a surprise. A few years ago, while trying to decide between two products made by a major electronics company, I asked one of their engineers for advice (having repeatedly repaired the previous product before giving up on it), and he suggested that if lifespan was a major concern, I should buy the cheaper model. Why? Because it was built in such volume that even a 1% failure rate would be catastrophic to the company's bottom line, whereas a much higher failure rate in the expensive product would still be a small enough number of total units that it could be absorbed.

Re: Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[v1]

In the case of the 2008 and the 2.2/2.4 mbp's, the problem was actually Nvidia, fault, not Apple.. Apple pushes the design limits of their components pretty close to the edge to keep their designs small, light, and enduring. The frame and cooling was designed to only slightly exceed required cooling for nvidia's GPU, according to their provided specifications.

Nvidia lied about the cooling requirements of their GPU, describing it as requiring less cooling than it actually did. (probably as a selling point to get Apple to use it) As a result, the machine didn't adequately cool it under very high stress. (playing WoW for an extended time was a known cause of failure) As a result, boards and GPUs flexed, ball solder joints failed, and gpus stopped functioning. (this is not a gpu defect or a ball problem, it's a mechanical problem, caused by thermal stress due to inadequate cooling)

After Apple had encountered a larger number of in-warranty failures than expected, they contacted Nvidia, who denied the problem. Bad logic boards continued to pour in and get repaired under the one year warranty, but replaced boards were frequently failing again, and users were sometimes seeing 2-4 replacements within the first year. A few customers got a new machine per Apple's policy on "three major repairs within warranty", some of which had gpu failures on their replacement machines as well. Apple put their own engineers to work testing new GPUs, and found that the cooling requirements were significantly above Nvidia's stated specs.

Although they were aware of this issue well before the first year, Apple's SOP on an issue like this is to stay quiet until the units start dropping out of their first year's warranty, and then issue a Repair Extension on them. (probably trying to mitigate a drop in sales on a "defective model") Coverage time for REPs vary, and only extend the warranty on the specific part, and only for the specific failure. REPs typically extend coverage to the 2, 3, or 4 year point after purchase. It does not stack with applecare extended warranty. This REP I believe went the maximum at four years from date of purchase.

Apple has issued a dozen or so REPs in the last ten years. Considering the units sold, the variety of models offered, and the cutting-edge technology they'r fond of using, this is actually a pretty low failure rate, as well as a very good manufacturer's response.

2011 is not a new computer, it's going on three years old. Referring to them as "dropping dead" makes it sound like it's a very early failure (first year or so) I think the article is being sensational and a bit deceptive to link-bait. Apple expects their products to last 3-5 years before they get replaced. Considering how fast tech advances, and that Apple users typically want new and cutting-edge tech, this isn't at all unreasonable. With as many models as they make, there are going to be those that fail sooner than others, and that you can expect to get less than 7-8 years out of. This may just be one of them. It happens. And it can suck to be the unlucky one that owns one. But "only" getting three years out of a laptop may not be desirable, but it's hardly a travesty. If Apple were to refuse to cover failures inside the one year warranty, or not extend coverage to units failing frequently in the 2-3 year area, that'd be newsworthy. This really isn't.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[viperidaenz]

A place I worked at lost a whole bunch of hard drives from HP laptops just after the warranty expired.
Turned out the HP sticker they put on the drives covered the ventilation hole that says "do not cover".

Re: Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[sjames]

3 years IS an early death. Even my ten year old white box specials still run just as well as they ever did. It's reasonable to expect more from a premium brand.

Re:Warranty Shouldn't Matter

[dreamchaser]

Because it's not Kosher if dairy and meat are prepared together, mostly.

I know people that this has happened to...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, I was there to tell them "I told you so."

Can doing a lot of Ruby on Rails cause this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, I'm getting really worried now. I've got a 2011 MacBook Pro and I do so much Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. I wake up at 4 am every day and then I put on my fedora, my anime t-shirt and I write Ruby on Rails and JavaScript libraries until 3 am the next day. Sometimes I don't even eat and urinate, but that's beside the point.

Could all my hardcore Rubying be causing my MacBook Pro to die? I do push it pretty hard. A lot of the coding I'm doing is webscale. I even use NoSQL I'm dealing with so much data. My web app's logging subsystem logs almost 2 GB of data a month. When you're dealing with a lot of data like that a superpowerful database like Mongo then I can understand my poor little MacBook having a hard time coping. Maybe I'm pushing her too hard?

I can't just ease up though. I've got so many Ruby on Rails web apps to write and so many JavaScript libraries to craft. This is a life or death situation for me. I don't want it to be a life or death situation for my MacBook either. We've been through so much! I remember writing my very first line of code ever on my laptop. It was a Ruby code and it made me feel really good. Now I'm an accomplished software architect with numerous Web 2.0 web sites under my belt like for the local veterinarian and the herbal store down the street.

Now I really don't know what to do. I'm so confused. I want my MacBook to live forever because it has become part of me. But I need to use her, too. I need her to do my Ruby on Rails coding and my JavaScript programming. I need to use my NoSQL DB but if it hurts my MacBook Pro, do I really want to use it? I just don't know any more.

Re:Score: -1, Flamebait

[ssimpson]

Mainstreaming reporting started in the last few days. The issue has been reported consistently for nearly a year. I and many other impact users have reported faults in stores, reported via Apple Product Feedback in forums and written to Tim Cook to complain. Not only do they ignore the issues reported on the forum but they also delete posts with links to online forums, news stories and petitions. Nice work Apple.....

Apple do little on the issue and offer you a (paid for) repair service to fix this systemic fault. The repair being a replacement board that many users report fails again anyway.

Re:History

[Mark4ST]

The problem is that Quanta (they build system boards for Apple's laptop division) has never been able to properly do a ball grid array. The problem is not the chips or cooling, it's the "good enough" techniques Quanta uses to attach them to to a system board. If a ball grid array is done properly, it can be quite robust-- Quanta doesn't seem to care about longevity of the product, and hasn't for a number of years.

Quanta's quality problems are even more dire when you see that they manufacture about one third of the world's laptop system boards.

Please see Quanta and ball grid array.