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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

"Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great"

You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.

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Hasn't happened to me. If it did, I might have switched completely already :-)

In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04 (which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was like kthxbai.

This sort of thing is why I've resigned to just use WSL (after switching from Mac). Works well enough.

The NVIDIA problems hit laptops from many manufacturers. I remember buying an HP TX 1000 with a faulty NVIDIA chip to try and reseat the GPU via heat (it didn't work but it was a cheap experiment)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ1i78kmb0M

I'm still using my MacBook Pro from 2010, and I'm working on ways to mitigate the NVidia card rebooting at its worse it was 120 times a month, but I've managed to get it down to about 10 times a month.

Although IDEs seem to cause frequent reboots, but using Jupyter is far more stable.

I found this[0] fix when I last researched this problem for a client. It seemed to substantially reduce the problem. The only drawback is the need to re-run it after MacOS updates, but I don't think this functionality has been the target of any updates from Apple for some time anyway.

[0] https://github.com/julian-poidevin/MBPMid2010_GPUFix

If that's the same issue I had, it was a defective nvidia chip. I went through 2 logicboards and I know several of my friends who had 2012 MBPs went through a few too.

We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.

...or troubles with SATA cables seemingly designed to break in the most subtle ways.

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