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Putting a MacBook Pro In the Oven To Fix It
An anonymous reader writes: A post at iFixit explains how one user with a failing MacBook Pro fixed it by baking it in the oven. The device had overheating issues for months, reaching temperatures over 100 C. When it finally died, some research suggested the extreme heat caused the logic board to flex and break the solder connections. The solution was to simply reflow the solder, but that's hard to do with a MBP. "Instead, I cracked open the back of my laptop, disconnected all eleven connectors and three heat sinks from the logic board, and turned the oven up to 340 F. I put my $900 part on a cookie sheet and baked it for seven nerve-wracking minutes. After it cooled, I reapplied thermal paste, put it all back together, and cheered when it booted. It ran great for the next eight months." The laptop failed again, and another brief vacation into the oven got it running once more.
I dont think telling people you can fix a mac book by baking it will end well. So perhaps a disclaimer saying NOT to do this would be in order?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Hipster "invents" the reflow oven and blogs about the "invention" in amazement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
...Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time....
But... but... but... but... I thought Apple's build quality was the best there can be?!?!?
Is it news because it was a MacBook?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Use a fucking heat gun. Don't back your shit. Jesus, what kind of fucking rookies live in this world?
I used to do this to a bunch of HP printer boards at one time and it worked nicely.
This has been a problem for a long time on not just the Macbook Pro, but plenty of other laptops that used a few specific CPU/GPU sockets in their designs along with in-adequate heatsinks/fans for the thermal load. Those sockets should never have been used for those designs due to the temperature points of molten solder on a part that is specifically designed to be mobile (and thus subject to falls, movement, and other torques when the system may still be hot, especially moments after a shutdown or sleep when they are closed up and placed in a bag/backpack and slung over the shoulder).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
You obviously haven't figured out how Apple works...
...Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time....
But... but... but... but... I thought Apple's build quality was the best there can be?!?!?
The product only has to last until the next incremental improvement is available.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sorry.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Fixed a MBP's bad nVidia chip using a heat gun, an infrared thermometer, and a shield made of aluminum foil. I wouldn't recommend the oven approach unless you're desperate, since many parts are really not meant to go past 100C, much less the ~250C required for proper reflow.
Oh, and whatever you do, be sure to remove any plastic/rubber chips or standoffs first as they will most certainly melt, and reapply thermal paste afterwards (Apple and many OEMs are infamously bad with thermal paste, so this is a good idea whenever you crack open a laptop).
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
generally as close to the middle of the oven as possible. Don't bother if you have a gas oven though as they have inadequate temperature control.
There were some other heat related problems with Mac laptops around that time, as well.
Not that I'm trying to slam Apple. They were actually really good about replacing a board in a 13" PowerPC Macbook Pro I'd purchased with their extended warranty plan some years later after I'd handed the machine down to my room mate. She'd started having problems with the screen going off and took it in to the local Apple store. They checked their computer and said the machine had the extended warranty plan (I'd forgotten I'd even purchased with it) and did the repair for free. We were both ready to write the machine off but she got another couple of years of use out of it. I'm still using a 17" Macbook pro from 2006 on a regular basis, too. it still works great for what it needs to do and nothing I could upgrade it to really seems as nice as that machine is.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I wouldn't put this laptop on my lap after lithium batteries have been abused to such degree.
You can quickly charge your iPhone 6 by putting it in the microwave on high for 3 minutes. Try it, it works great!!!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
340 degrees fahrenheit isn't hot enough to reflow solder. The best I think that would do would to cause warpage of the board in the other direction. The fact that it failed again later, and then worked for a while after 'baking' it again, supports this.
Would not recommend, if for no other reason than the average person would either wreck something trying to get it apart, or not be able to get it all back together again afterwards.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Eutetic solder (the old non-RoHS stuff with lead in it) melts at 361 F, everything else in common use melts at a higher temperature.
Bruce Perens.
Unfortunately the defects were in the chips they sourced from nVidia and to a lesser extent ATI/AMD, and there's little computer manufacturers could do to avoid it. It's true that Apple runs components fairly hot to reduce fan noise and that accelerated some failures, but the real culprit was the early attempts at lead-free solder companies were using to meet new RoHS standards.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Drilling holes in a multi-layer board is liable to nail a trace you can't see. If you are lucky you can shine a really bright light through it and see all of the traces. If you can't, don't try drilling.
Bruce Perens.
A heat gun requires you to know where to heat. An oven does not.
Not only will the microwave fixe it but it will charge the battery too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Or twist (or Drop) an Atari ST. The Atari Drop was actually mentioned in tech support calls back then... I wouldn't recommend doing the atari drop on a macbook pro though...
Is it news because it was a MacBook?
Would you be jumping to the conclusion that this was a conspiracy to promote Dell products if this had been a Dell laptop? It's an article about a guy who did something nerdy in his kitchen to fix a broken laptop motherboard... end of story. This may not be news to you but it is to me and a number of other people who don't spend our spare time repairing broken motherboards so stop complaining and go find your tinfoil hat... you need it.
But... but... but... but... I thought Apple's build quality was the best there can be?!?!?
It was, from the Mac Plus up to the Mac II era. But the Quadra and Performa lines (mostly the same thing) proved that Apple could build shit and also that people would still buy it, and the precedent was set. Now pretty much all of their stuff is made by Foxconn, who are well-known to make mediocre hardware.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry but you missed the point. The issues is that hot chips are causing local expansion on the board which causes warping and is breaking the solder connections. By putting the board in an oven you get even heating which does not warp the board and allows the older to re-flow. Disconnecting heat sinks would just make matters worse.
I did a similar thing with a heat gun and a non-functional PS3. I ran the heat gun over the CPU and it bought me another month of life on the unit. After 3 times of doing this and getting less and less life out of it each time, I purchased a new PS3. To my delight, the new one has been working ever since.
I've done this with Xbox 360s, PS3s, HP DV9000s and various MBPs for money. This "fix" never lasts more than 6 months. The CPU/GPU has been overheating for some time if the machine gets to this point and caused damage. This is not a magic bullet, and I'm not sure why this is "news".
It's a bit more interesting that they're claiming a 10-20 degree C drop in temperatures from drilling a few holes in the case around the fans.
Drilling holes in a multi-layer board is liable to nail a trace you can't see.
And TFA:
My MacBook Pro and I had a wild weekend: I reflowed the solder on its logic board three times in one day, then drilled 60 holes in its bottom case. Why?
Your advice is accurate, but irrelevant. But hey, that's improvement!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tried "reflowing" an old IBM Thinkpad with failing GPU socket once.
Tried to be careful and do it right placing aluminum foil around everything that wasn't GPU... used a heat gun and IR thermometer along with ...u... umm... ah... instructions pulled off the.....um... Internet.
End result was a number of surface mount chips on the opposite side of the board had melted off of their pads and dropped clear off ... mainboard basically a total loss.
Trying was better than nothing as computer was not worth cost of repairing and any replacement board you could source on ebay would have come with same defective design/soldering job.
What utter nonsense. Miracle cures are just artifacts of long tail effects.
All this "fix" probably does is heat and cool the board evenly to cause it to flatten out.
Breaking Bad except it's a desktop administrator and he can't make millions with baking MacBooks either so he dies in the 1st episode.
.
Or better yet apply enough solder correctly the first time.
This is because of the move to lead-free solder. It has nothing to do with not using enough solder,
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I revived a non-booting MacBook Pro doing this, although I did follow the directions here
http://russell.heistuman.com/2...
and I have a feeling that what really fixed it was re-applying the thermal paste.
Success without humility is an indulgence in arrogance
I still do this from time to time, only without the extreme overkill of using an oven.
As the lucky owner of one of these fine computers which were outfitted with overperforming nVidia GPUs, every few months I run into similar problems. While I could go a little over the top in addressing the issue, all I really need to do is turn the thing upside down, remove the bottom cover, loosen the heat sink covering the GPU and then turn the poor thing on and let it run for up to half an hour. Since the GPU runs hot enough to loosen its own solder, it also runs hot enough to put it back.
Eventually entropy will catch up with me and the poor thing will die of some other cause, and I will have to let it go. But until then, a little heat-related abuse can be a good thing.
This was a common trick back with the early Xbox 360 and the Red Ring of Death plague. The version I most frequently heard involved wrapping it in towels as well, to insulate other components from the heat.
Gamers have gone a step further with broken PlayStation and various Xbox'es by completely reballing BGA chips. Though, it is much more tricky, it is not *new* per-se.
Or kick the mechanical flight computer on Vietnam era A7's.
That was a comforting thought.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Apple did replace or repair a lot of MacBooks with the nVidia solder issues out of warranty. These computers are all four to six years old.
If you find yourself resorting to baking your motherboard in the oven to fix it, this is an act of desperation. Yeah the guy managed to get some more life out of the motherboard but this isn't a fix, this is a temporary hack.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I drilled a hole in my ST to adjust the voltage while it was running. When it first powered up, had to crank the voltage up to avoid crashing, then after it was on a while, crank it back down because it would start leaving mouse trails everywhere. I ended up dumping it in a Tupperware bin, and then jamming the keyboard in an IBM mushmaster keyboard case (I didn't defile a Model M for this or anything). I miss that thing sometimes. Emulation just isn't the same, because with emulation your primary job is "play a game", not "keep the machine running while trying to play the game".
I like music
Google.
Poor intake is the cause for most poor laptop cooling. On my Thinkpad W510 (which is quite poorly designed thermally, it's the same cooling at the T510 but it has to handle a quad core and workstation graphics), lifting up the keyboard a little bit gives a 10-15C drop in temperatures simply due to the fact that the fan will actually have intake.
Wouldn't this method melt (and thus remove) tin whiskers, since they are so incredibly thin? Perhaps -that- was his problem, not broken joints.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Try baking him in the oven for 7 minutes at 340 F.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/... It's a problem for 10s of 1000s of MacBook Pro users who purchased in 2011
Televisions were a common candidate for percussive maintenance, but it could help computers too. My old BBC Micro often wouldn't power up without a good whack on the top left (PSU).
I miss thumpable electronics. "Try turning it off and on again" just isn't the same.
I was actually a little worried about this and tried a hair dryer on high heat for about 10 minutes over the GPU. It also worked like a charm. Make sure to let it cool down for at least 15-20 minutes after doing this. The one advantage of doing it this way over the oven is that you dont have to completely remove the motherboard from the case. Just remove the cover from the bottom and point the hair dryer directly at the GPU. Let it cool down. Put the cover back on. Start MBP back up.
Curious if adding a bit of no-wash flux to the problem area would yield a better reflowed joint and give a longer term fix?
And this almost always fails again soon. Besides that, there's a lot else that can go wrong. I tried it several times myself just to see if it was some kind of miracle fix, but they worked for half an hour then failed again right away. Get someone to change the GPU, there's plenty of great prices on eBay. It's a part that costs like $15, you just pay for the labor. I get very few returns from this repair, and almost all of them in the warranty period.
Yeah I can see why they wanted to remain anonymous...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This will prob be his next video. Sending computer in for repairs. Your doing it wrong.
But will it waffle?
The symptoms are, in a nutshell: fans running full-blast, yet the system still runs too hot. To me this screams that the heat pipes are faulty.
Yes, they sometimes are either faulty from the factory, or fail shortly after you start using the system. One failure mode is loss of coolant. Another one is through detachment and pooling of the wick material. All the ones I've seen failed still had coolant, but the wick material was loose inside of the pipe, instead of nicely attached to the entirety of the interior surface. A failed heat pipe can't but accelerate the stress fracturing of the solder balls on the chips it services, and the cyclic stress amplitudes will be larger due to larger temperature changes.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Or a piece of string. Or a paper clip.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Back in the day (80's, 90's) when hard drives would refuse to spin up, a similar technique often worked. Take the drive and pop it into a very warm (but too hot) oven, or leave it on a car's dashboard on a hot summer's day. When it's hot enough that it's very uncomfortable to hold, but not hot enough to burn you... quickly drop it back into the system and spin it up. Then.. back up your data.
This'll cure stiction or lubricant problems with the platters.
Get off my lawn.
Using a hair drier is a common technique to fix TVs and the like.
Not as hot as an oven, but easier to control.
Most products don't have such small traces and such small amounts of solder - they have much larger wires secured by larger blobs of solder. And other products in the same situation from nuclear power plants to satellites have problems with "cat's whiskers," which was why lead was added to solder in the first place..
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Now pretty much all of their stuff is made by Foxconn, who are well-known to make mediocre hardware.
My mid-2007 MacBook2,1 13" went back to Apple for repairs under APP no fewer than 5 times over the 3 years that it was covered. Amazingly, the thing has been completely reliable since APP expired in 2010. Go figure, but glad for that.
Bake it.
I have yet to see a windows based laptop with a useful lifespan anywhere close to one of my Macbooks.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Someone's earlier comment pointed out they don't go through the thermal cycles a laptop does. "My router has probably seen three." or such.
Yep, had my 2007 MBP's logic board replaced (way) out of warranty, without even having a receipt.
Props to Apple for that!
This didn't happen.
Macbooks are RoHS and use silver solder. The softest silver solder flows at a minimum of 681 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kriston
I had a Trinitron monitor in the '90s that needed frequent percussive maintenance. A metal whisker has bridged heater to green electron gun inside the tube. The result was green running at maximum intensity all the time, even during horizontal and vertical blank. A good sharp whack would temporarily dislodge it.
Considering how paranoid everyone is about cancer causing substances it's not great advice really. Reflowing any electronics in an oven will cause a degree of gas-off and splatter of goodness knows what ( even RoHS compliant ), particularly if you're using flux to assist in the reflow. You should never do this sort of thing with items that'll be used for food later.
On the other hand, if you buy a pizza oven for $19.95 and use it for the reflow, and never use it again for food, then no worries ( still a cheap reflow ).
While Apple are known for custom cooling designs they are also known for building their notebooks very close to the limit when it comes to dissipating heat. So when nVidia twists the truth about the operating temperature of a prospective GPU for their macbook it can have bad consequences. This combined with the well known faults caused by the bad solder bumps on nVidia GPU die has caused the relatively large proportion of early GPU failure rates in various macbook models. Apple and nVidia have tried to mitigate this by effectively under clocking various models through a firmware update to delay the inevitable failure.
Being an owner of such a model I can tell you it's pretty easy to get the fans whiring when using the more powerful GPU and that's even after the under clocking firmware update. Considering how common this is, i'd say it's likely that the heat pipe is fine, the failure rate is accelerated enough with the other two problems..
Here's a guide to how this is done professionally.
Cut apple in half inch slices and dip into pancake batter, then deep fry till they have a nice color. Add powdered sugar as desired. Yum. My condolences on the dog.
Lead was actually added to solder to lower the melting point. If you read the Wikipedia article you linked to you can see that lead whiskers also occur.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Are a fairly common problem in all the Chinese made stuff. And Apple exacerbates it be eschewing fans in their computer. So no surprise you have to reflow the board every now and then.
No, here's the first paragraph:
Metal whiskering is a phenomenon which occurs in electrical devices. Tin whiskers were noticed and documented in the vacuum tube era of electronics early in the 20th century, in equipment which used pure, or almost pure, tin solder in their production. It was noticed that small metal hairs or tendrils grew between metal solder pads causing short circuits. Metal whiskers form in the presence of compressive stress. Zinc, cadmium, and even lead whiskers have been documented. Many techniques are used to mitigate the problem including changes to the annealing process (heating and cooling), addition of elements like copper and nickel, and the inclusion of conformational coatings.[2] Traditionally, lead is added to slow down whisker growth.
Slow down means just that. Lead grows whiskers at a much slower rate than tin, and lead was added to slow down whisker growth, not to reduce the melting point. Lead-free solders melt at 5 to 20 degrees Celsius more than lead solders - an insignificant difference - which is why the same soldering gun works with both.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
the problem is the solder balls on bga chips break and the oven reflows them, this has been a problem with many laptop motherboards that use those types of chips. Most notably the hp dv6000 from 2006ish.
https://www.google.com/search?...
lose != loose
In Texas we use a barbecue, like God intended.
If you have the skill set to take your MBP apart and remove the logic board this might be worth a try. If it fails you are no worse off than before, since you were going to have to replace the logic board anyway.
For anybody thinking of trying this at home: it's important to note that it is only the logic board that is going in the oven. Putting the case or the LCD in the oven would be very very bad. And that is pretty much how the logic board got soldered in the first place. They have a fancier oven with digital temperature control, but the principle is still that you heat the board up just past the melting point of solder, keep it there for a short time while the solder flows, and then cool it down.
If they were military grade, they wouldn't care about being super sleek or quiet and actually stuff some fans in there to cool the things properly. Apple's laptops may be built pretty solid, but their cooling is inadequate and their long-term reliability suffers because of it. As regular laptops go, Thinkpads are still probably the best though they're definitely not what they used to be. Or you could buy a Toughbook.
those maker movement type magazines periodically have instructions for putting a better thermostat into an old toaster oven so you can use it to solder boards full of surface mount parts.
it's amazing how heat proof solid state has become. when i started in this biz, with germanium transistors, I built a little light flasher, and decided to pot it in epoxy. the heat of the epoxy setting was enough to fry the transistors. the icing on the cake was that I couldn't salvage any of the other components, as they had been potted in epoxy.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
or apply large voltages across the brains of people with depression.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I think the difference is, there isn't a tremendous amount of marketing pressure to replace your i3646 for an i3647 the moment it comes out. Nobody ever stood in the rain waiting for a Dell store to open.
I've got a work-issued Dell also, and it's failed a few times. I fixed it once, and the desktop group fixed it the other two times. Shrug.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Televisions were a common candidate for percussive maintenance, but it could help computers too. My old BBC Micro often wouldn't power up without a good whack on the top left (PSU).
I miss thumpable electronics. "Try turning it off and on again" just isn't the same.
This actually did work, as long as you didn't get "over enthusiastic".
Sockets, connectors and inter-board connections can build up microscopic layers of corrosion, if they do not have sufficient pressure between the contacts. Or even with pressure, if they are dis-similar metals. It is so thin that it is not usually visible, but it is enough to stop low-voltage current flow. However, it is also thin enough that shock or vibration can move the contacts and wipe them clean.
Automobiles are designed assuming the connectors will be vibrated this way, that is why storing your car for a while can cause lots of electrical problems. They go away when the car is driven. Or sometimes just when it is towed, which can be confusing.
It can still work, if that is the problem. In particular, moving cable connectors just a little can restore operation. But connectors are better now, so it is not as common. 8-)