Putting a MacBook Pro In the Oven To Fix It 304
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.
May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense. Think of how quickly you can get rid of excess apps and unwanted background processes: just stick it in the oven and select "CLEAN." Viola!
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd recommend a [cel]low shelf, near the bass of the oven. And don't fiddle with it till it cools down.
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
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Any more comments like that will incite violins.
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
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use the microwave. (Score:5, Funny)
Not only will the microwave fixe it but it will charge the battery too.
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
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?
It's a mac. Worst case... well there isn't one. Please put your apple products in the oven, even if they are currently working... you will be better off in the end. You should have a fire extinguisher nearby just in case Steve Jobs escapes hell via your device and attempts to exert his "Paranormal patent clause" which states specifically that ovens are not not an authorized repair tool like the "pentalobe screwdriver"
If Jobs does escape your oven he will consume your residence and all adjacent residences with his firey wrath. Also he will park his car in the closest handicapped spot to your house for weeks on end. Woe unto thee who attempts to repair Apple products without proper authorization and/or exorcism rights.
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Actually, worst case scenario, you bake it too long, and you'll end up with an Apple Pi.
Just as low powered as the Raspberry Pi, but much more fashionable.
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Here is a simplified guide for those wanting to try this.
Step 1: place macbook pro in oven at 340 degrees
Step 2: Remove (with mitts!).
Now for decision tree:
Option A: your mac is fixed! the apple logo has melted off and it boots Ubuntu just fine.
Option B: your macbook has melted shut - if you've been using Mac products long enough you are used to all kinds of restrictions on hardware and software that you thought you "owned" so this probably doesn't even bother you.
Optio
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Funny)
Group A: Followed the directions and inhaled dangerous volatile chemicals. User now has cancer.
Group B: "Was that 340 for 7 minutes or 7 (hundred) for 340 minutes?" Fire department on scene.
Group C: "Directions unclear; penis stuck in mac book." EMS on scene.
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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?
It's been done for years with HP notebooks that had the nVidia chip come unsoldered [computerrepairtips.net] People have even done this without removing any parts before baking it. However, it's so easy to remove the battery (both the main battery and the motherboard battery) and hard drive(s), so why take the chance with those parts?
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Why what is the worst that could happen to your out of warranty no functional part?
I suppose there is some risk to the cookie sheet!
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This is /.
I would hope such a disclaimer is just a waste of time...
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Aside from the fact that it's a pretty shitty design that the solder connections fail this way...
Remember the old Apple III computers you had to drop from about three feet to get the chips to reseat? Yea.... this is nothing new.
Re:May want a disclaimer here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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As I understand it, ROHS compliment solder introduces stress cracks (thus a broken circuit) from the constant thermal expansion and contraction from everyday use. With laptops, the delta changes from heating and cooling are huge.
This is one of the reasons that I generally don't power off any of my equipment. Pretty much the only time I ever see hardware failures is when trying to bring a system back online from a complete shutdown. Sleeping a laptop still results in cooling, but not quite as much as a full power-down.
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Yes, but how do you know for sure? A piece of electronics stops working; it gets tossed and no one really examines why it failed.
My experience with aging hardware is that the early 64-bit/DDR2 computers tend to be somewhat finicky and unreliable, often dying for no obvious reason - they just stop working and won't boot up any more. The older, last generation 32 bit machines seem to be a lot more stable and reliable, and when they fail, it's usually something obvious like bulging capacitors. I don't know
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You spend hours working with tweezers under a microscope, bake your PCB, and end up with a dead circuit board. Very frustrating.
But it's very satisfying to then say "fuck it," throw it in the garbage bin and go outside for a while.
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Many older notebook motherboards, and a lot of non-notebooks too, eventually develop problems that might be helped by reflowing. Notebooks are subject to a lot of vibration and circumstances unfavourable to efficient cooling. There are manufacturing issues that make it worse too, of course. nVidia has had problems with some of their stuff, and Microsoft with Xboxes. MacBooks made around the time Apple was switching to lead free solder, particularly ones with nVidia graphics chips, are known to be prone
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So you think the story today about one of the Mars rovers having trouble with it's flash memory means NASA should have gone with someone who has better manufacturing quality?
All electronics eventually fail. Most of these notebooks are a) fairly old for notebook computers and b) have a problem resulting from an industry wide switch to more environmentally friendly materials. Sure, you can go buy a new one that you don't have to bake a couple of times a year. For people who want to keep their old hardware
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Hipster "invents" the reflow oven and blogs about the "invention" in amazement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
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I don't know about reinventing... Doing it at home in a regular oven was kinda cool. In a previous job years ago, we did vapor phase reflow soldering on a lab bench with a hotplate, a big glass beaker, and a couple pints of fluorinert as a proof of concept.
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I'm for that.
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Intelligence has little correlation to your subjective opinion on the word 'hipster.'
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'Real human beings'? You mean the insufferable status-driven snobs who think they're more intelligent because they buy overpriced technology instead of clothing accessories to create meaningless social differentiation? Hipsters are as bad as the kids who insist you have the cool whatever to sit at their table, or the management types who think the same about shirts and ties. The only difference with hipsters is that they think they're 'alternative' or 'radical' for it, especially when it comes to politics.
This has been done numerous times already (Score:2)
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When you've been around you've been around.
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What possible subject have we not gone through in the past 5-6 years? We've covered pretty much everything tech, certainly anything to do with Apple, Android and Google. We've even talked about My Little Pony, Sarah Palin and makeup here.
Calm down. Relax and Enjoy.
The real fix... a recall of the socket (Score:3)
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Actually it wasn't due to inadequate cooling, it was due to manufacturing defects in Nvidia parts. Nvidia eventually reached a settlement with some manufacturers to carry half the cost of warranty repairs due to the defects.
Basically they designed the parts for a certain thermal envelope and told manufacturers to design their laptops around round. Then they tried to reduce costs by re-engineering part of the manufacturing process, and in doing so made the parts dissipate heat less evenly than they were orig
You were supposed to buy another one! (Score:5, Funny)
You obviously haven't figured out how Apple works...
Did this myself, sort of... (Score:3)
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).
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sorry, clips not chips (autocorrect strikes again)
Macs Don't Seem To Handle Heat Well (Score:2)
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Hold on to your family jewels! (Score:2)
I wouldn't put this laptop on my lap after lithium batteries have been abused to such degree.
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If you didn't think to take the battery out before putting it in the oven, then perhaps evolution would prefer that you not pass on any of your genes this time around.
But taking the battery out is... easy... Oh, sorry, forgot we were talking about a Macbook. Never mind.
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Pops right out actually. I've replaced mine twice. The "hard to replace" description of Apple batteries refers to needing to know how to use a screwdriver. Righty tighty and all that.
Although by the time you take the keyboard, screen, fans, plastic spacers and other heat sensitive bits off, you might as well just take the motherboard out and leave the battery in.
Charge your iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
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You can quickly charge your iPhone 6 by putting it in the microwave on high for 3 minutes. Try it, it works great!!!
I've wondered if Apple started this rumor in order to sell more iphones.
'Reflow' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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That was my first thought, but It's close though, they didn't have an IR thermometer and ovens aren't very precise.
If they didn't preheat, the oven would have run hotter until the temperature sensor triggered. It's quite possible the heat on the board from radiation was much hotter until the air reached 340F.
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These are old notebooks well out of warranty that are broken anyway. The choice is to throw it in the oven for a few minutes or throw it away. Sure, if your computer is under warranty and you do this you're an idiot.
Not hot enough to reflow (Score:4, Informative)
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Of course I do. It was .. um...autocorrect which changed it all.
If your kitchen has an oven which can do 400C then I don't want to know what kind of cookies you are making.
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Most of the self cleaning ovens will easily get that hot. I think my mother's gets to 1000 F, or a bit over 500 C.
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Similar Experience (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Tried it once ... ended in disaster. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Gives hot fix a whole new meaning (Score:2)
I smell a new TV series (spoiler alert) (Score:2)
This has worked for me (Score:2)
I revived a non-booting MacBook Pro doing this, although I did follow the directions here
http://russell.heistuman.com/2... [heistuman.com]
and I have a feeling that what really fixed it was re-applying the thermal paste.
Look, I have a T-shirt! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [canadiannv...lement.com] which were outfitted with overperforming nVidia GPUs, every few months I run into similar problems. While I could go a little over the top [youtube.com] 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.
Common trick (Score:3)
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.
Gaming console fixes (Score:2)
This is an act of desperation... (Score:2)
Flux? (Score:2)
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?
+1 for initiative, -1 for poor troubleshooting (Score:3)
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.
Also an old-timey fix for hard drive failures. (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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All this "fix" probably does is heat and cool the board evenly to cause it to flatten out.
Re:Could build in an auto-fix setting (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't this method melt (and thus remove) tin whiskers, since they are so incredibly thin? Perhaps -that- was his problem, not broken joints.
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.
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,
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Re:Could build in an auto-fix setting (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
Re:Could build in an auto-fix setting (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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Sorry.
Baked apples! (Score:5, Funny)
Try baking him in the oven for 7 minutes at 340 F.
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Google.
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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!
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Requires that you know what you are doing (Score:5, Insightful)
A heat gun requires you to know where to heat. An oven does not.
Re:Requires that you know what you are doing (Score:5, Insightful)
A heat gun also requires you to have a heat gun. An oven requires you to have a kitchen.
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But I'm a nerd. The only oven I have in my kitchen is a microwave oven.
Eh, I'm sure that's close enough, what's the worst that couL!JGFnasdj23NT #TR@dna5 m5wv sa3nt34246jnahe5t63qj
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Depends on your goal. If you need something up to 140F, yeah, hair dryers will work fine. Heat guns go to 1,000F. Given laptop innards get hot, I'm pretty sure 140F isn't adequate to resolder the board.
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Use a heat gun to warp the board, melt the solder and pop the chips right off. An oven gives even heat which will not warp the board.
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Use a fucking heat gun. Don't back your shit. Jesus, what kind of fucking rookies live in this world?
From TFA, he did use a heat gun when it failed again. That did not work. Then he used the oven again and drill some holes for air flow. That worked.
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However, the safest method for repairing this requires an x-ray machine, as there is no other way to safely check the solder joints.
So there is some use for the TSA after all?
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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...
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Or kick the mechanical flight computer on Vietnam era A7's.
That was a comforting thought.
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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.