Repasting a MacBook
christianselig.com
christianselig.com
The downsides is that this makes the bottom of the case quite hot on a place you can touch, but putting a plastic hardshell over the entire laptop deals with that, and also gives protection.
Performance numbers reflect the optimization. I personally haven't done it for fear of affecting the battery lifespan (and possibly other components' lifespans.)
Really hard to resist due to its simplicity and noticeable improvements.
I still have pads left over from trying my damnedest to reduce fan noise on a Dell XPS. Used pads on every hot stop and didn't help.
If I were to need any more performance I'd just swap it out for a newer MBA or a MBP with a fan.
> a longer maximum performance before throttling.
As implying that the purpose is to increase the thermal mass, not necessarily the dissipation. It should still be able to reach maximum performance for longer, it will then just also take longer to settle back down again.
Is the added plastic shell case a "bandaid on a bandaid" sort of solution to deal with that heat? Absolutely. But you might want that case anyway - I've had several laptops that would have had broken screens or were yanked off a desk by an attached cable and survived by the sacrificial plastic shell taking the impact.
Like all things, it's a tradeoff to consider.
You can also put cabinet fans under the macbook to draw air away.
AC Infinity ones are nice for that. Had to do that with an old i9 macbook pro that was completely incapable of cooling itself due to being too thin.
Take the product expected to have top-notch design with best in its class UX and discover you need to open it up and make a hardware modification and then cover its metal body with a cheap-looking plastic case...
If you run Asahi on it as well, at this point why even bother with Apple...
Have these new M3/4 MPBs gone back at all to being easy to dismantle or change the battery in? The OP with their M1 mentioned tearing overly thin ribbon cables.
No.
They're not as bad as the touchbar era (which was truly awful) but they're still a lot worse than the unibodies: ifixit scored the unibodies at 7/10, the apple silicon generation get 4/10 (although the criteria have changed a bit so the comparison is not quite 1:1 this matches my impression: while I've not yet had to dive into my M1P's guts what I've seen of it don't seem easy, while I was able to easily dive in and out of my 2010 and replaced the ram, the battery, the drive (twice), the superdrive (by an HDD tray, then put the superdrive back a few years later), the fans, ...
And the Unibody was a step down from my previous polycarbonate macbook in terms of accessibility (the battery could just be popped out, and let you access the RAM and HDD without even having to unscrew the case).
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/repairing-ibook-g3-grap...
I did it at least three times before that laptop died. Fun times.
Ratio of the squares of those numbers is 2/3, and so the laptop was certainly quiet without having to open it up. But I was surprised at Intel's product back then.
You can buy TCRS Carbon Black if you really need to repaste a Mac part instead of swapping a new part that was pasted at the factory.
The thermal paste applied in this article needs pressure on the two surfaces making contact to function at all, and to remain functional. The laptop isn't built like a desktop cooler setup.
I use the same one in my pc and it’s awesome.
[0] https://www.moddiy.com/products/Honeywell-PTM7950-SP-Super-H...
I get this same feeling whenever I change the fluids on my cars. I know from a practical perspective, it's very little changed, but I can't help feeling like the car just feels like it's in a better place. Which I guess it is? But I know it's entirely mental.
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The ZIF connectors for those fans aren't different or much more fragile than the ones in most other laptops.
The adhesives on certain cables tend to trip people up a bit with causing them to pull more than they should and damage things.
Gently working under and releasing the adhesives on those fan cables with the spudger (or a fingernail) before you even start trying to move/unplug them will work a lot better for not tearing things than grabbing them with tweezers will.
The TouchID cable is fragile. Still shouldn't be any serious risk of breaking if you know to treat it with caution, but that would always be the one to take the most care with and watch the most closely while you're working around it.
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The secondary challenge is pretty much just making sure you have all the cables out of the way when you're putting the board back in, because you've got a dozen or more that you need to watch the positioning of and/or tape out of the way.
Switched to a P50 with twice as much RAM, and that's just one socket of four. Since upgraded to the max, with bigger SSD, it's still a beast.
Compare with Apple's use of glue and special screws, when Lenovo provides detailed service manuals on its web site.
What I've done so far:
* Maxed out the RAM to 16GB (using lower voltage DIMMs to increase battery life)
* Swapped to a larger 9 cell battery
* Upgraded the CPU (and thermal paste) from a 2 core/4 thread i5 to a 4 core/8 thread i7
* Flashed a custom BIOS to remove the WiFi card whitelist and installed an Intel 7260 WiFi AC + Bluetooth card
* Replaced the stock 1600x900 TN panel with a 1920x1080 IPS display
* Replaced the barrel charging port with a USB-C connector (requires a 20v USB PD power supply, but those aren't super rare or expensive)
* Replaced the HDD with an SSD
* Replaced the optical drive and a 2.5" drive enclosure and installed a second SSD
Future projects:
* Flash Coreboot
* Upgrade to a faster i7
* Upgrade to a 1440p IPS panel
* Swap to a T420 keyboard
The actual issue I have with phones isn't that the connectors/cables break apart if you look at them funny, it's actually the god damn screens are insane to deal with and replace, with all of that adhesive crap.
This all to say, I think Apple is doing poorly here, their ribbon cables should probably be more robust on these often quite expensive devices. I know they can do it because I've experienced Apple devices with pretty robust internals... (and also similarly, have seen and heard of Apple devices where they've mysteriously cheaped out on components like voltage regulators and made their devices totally unnecessarily worse and more failure prone.)
I have had trouble in the past because of this, usually not with small electronics. I busted a 4-pin Molex in a computer trying to plug it in with the pins not lined up quite right. It does require a decent bit of force, but accidentally breaking things is not uncommon for me because I just can't tell when I'm going too far. Same with screws, I pretty much always overtorque screws if I do it by hand.
I've never had any feeling that anything is going to break. Certainly not any of the cables or connectors.
I had worked on desktop computers before, but never done anything more complex than changing RAM on a laptop.
Although author seems to have broken the TouchID sensor and button in the process, which is less neat and maybe not so friendly even for Apple.
Maybe if you're referring to iPhones and iPads.
The Intel Macbooks were always super easy to open for cleanup or replacing parts. I did it for years and never broke anything.
Or the new laptops ;) They're no longer Intel Macbooks, and compared to laptops from other brands, the new Apple hardware seems way harder (although I'd confess to not having the experience of picking any of the M* models apart personally). https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...
Didn't the latest iPhones have some sort of "repairability" push or something? Don't remember exactly, but seems to have given me the idea that Apple is moving towards making it easier to repair the iPhones specifically.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/100693/more-modular-than-ever-be...
Yeah that was obvious from the OP :)
You just have to be careful not to pull on the flex, but the connector instead. This logic applies as much to pulling a plug out of a wall socket as it does a thin flex with a board-to-board connector.
That said, would I characterize disassembling any Apple product as "quite friendly"? No. Do not attempt unless you're either familiar with how things go together or you're willing to spend the money to replace the parts you broke. If those aren't options, find a local repair shop.
Like you said, you need to be careful, but you better be prepared to pay dearly (or manage without) for your mistakes...
I wonder if something will change for the better in the future, given that the EU will force (from 18th February 2027) every computer sold in the EU to have removable and replaceable batteries.
I'm glad the Dell repair guy who gets sent out has a pleasant experience when he replaces the guts of a machine but my team still has to spend time and money shipping around replacements and dealing with warranty repair at a rate we just don't see with the Apple gear.
Once upon a time our entire corporate fleet was all Macbooks but the only thing we had worse luck with than these Dells was training nontechnical users on how to get to their Excel or specialized actuarial/compliance software through virtualization
I keep them for use at home as Linux machines because of the repairability and ease of upgrading, but my main machine is still a Mac.
I'd love MacBook level of hardware quality combined with easy access to repair and swap parts.
I've never understood companies that cheap out on laptops. Even if you only pay someone minimum wage (€1800), a high end laptop is ~1 month wage, and you get a tax write-off on it too.
Even if that person only works there for 2 years, that's 4.2% of the cost of employing them.
Even worse is when management doles maxed out iPhones and MacBooks Pros out to themselves, but the main workforce has to make do with €650 craptops and cheap Samsung phones. For me that's always a double red flag because it tells me management is both inept and greedy.
After reading this, an Apple middle manager is gathering an emergency meeting to figure out who fucked up
I gave my modded 17" 2009 "cafeteria tray" Macbook Pro to my father, and after using it for many more years, he brought it in for… something. I had replaced the internal optical drive with an SSD and reformatted it as a “Fusion Drive” (a kind of smart multi-drive partition that would put commonly-accessed things on an SSD and large rarely-used storage on an HD, identified as a single drive), apparently every Genius Bar employee crammed around the table because they had never seen any Apple computer like it :D
The results were impressive, and I think it’s a bit veiled how paste degradation over time impacts perceived laptop speeds. I’ve been tempted to replace the paste on new devices but haven’t taken that plunge.
https://fluffyandflakey.blog/2019/04/13/increasing-thermal-h...
I wonder how my situation differs from Christian's.
It might make a difference how much usage is being put on the machine leading to degradation of the original thermal paste faster or slower.
They say you either learn history or are doomed to repeat it.
But not only he refused, he went on to mock the other developers who were implementing an Apollo-like client for Lemmy (Voyager) and went on to work on a YouTube viewer for the Vision Pro.
It seems like some people just enjoy being put in a cage and get constantly abused.
Then, after realizing that Reddit's management was just using him as a scapegoat and to justify the API closing off, what does he do? He could've used his influence to get people out of Reddit and porting Apollo to some other alternative, he went on to spend a good part of an year working on, you guessed it, an YouTube client for Apple's Vision Pro.
Sorry, but a sibling comment has it right: Chris does not suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. It's full-on Battered Wife Syndrome.
The government told the woman to find solace in dying on the job. The woman was critical of this so the psychiatrist claimed she had sexual attraction to the hostage taker
In the case of the Stockholm hostage situation, it's not just a situation where a hostage is doing what she's told to in order to survive. Anybody who is interested can find tons of footage, documentaries, interviews.
Just never let it get too low?
Doesn't Apple offer this service if you have AppleCare+? or even if you dont? that way its on them?
I use leased laptops for work and I generally replace them after three years with whatever is new and shiny. I recently upgraded from the M1 macbook pro to a shiny new M4 Max. And damn this thing is fast. My build speeds massively improved. This is cutting hours of time in a week. Which is an unbelievable upgrade of my quality of life. And it also means I run tests more often and pro-actively instead of going "I could do it but it's going to take five minutes". My build speeds are now routinely below 1 minute. Ram throughput and having more CPUs are making the difference here. I was expecting my builds to be faster with a new laptop. But not by 4-5x. So, I don't think I'll ever be faffing about with thermal paste. Because that would mean I'm penny pinching instead of getting a massively faster laptop.
It's a judgment call of course and a bit personal. Not everyone needs a fast laptop. But I gladly spend a bit extra for this stuff. On the current contract, my new laptop is costing 100 euro per month. That include apple care coverage. And it's a 48GB M4 Max. Worth every penny. I'm not going to worry about thermal paste because I'll upgrade before that becomes an issue.
- Fortified with glass beads to maintain uniform bond line over the life of the device
- Eliminates die/component hotspots caused by incomplete heatsink contact seen with use of other thermal compounds
Additionally, a thermal pad requires a presssure mount with a narrow gap, while Carbon Black is designed for non-pressure-mounted components.
Long term high CPU usage goes on a properly silent and easy to repaste (and LARGE ofc) desktop.
As a consequence, the oldest laptop I have around (a 2009 macbook white) is just fine(tm) noise wise.
I've used all my laptops like that and they're still silent [1].
[1] Silent, but the keyboard is broken on the old emoji keyboard macbook pro, may whoever designed it and stuck to it burn in whatever hell they believe in forever.
I had that same "wow, no fan" when I got my M1 Mac (still have my 2014 Intel MBP and the fans come on almost immediately)
> this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it.
Unfortunately, this year I started playing with stable diffusion stuff, while it might be possible to optimize, what I have (automatic1111 and comfyui), is slow and my fans come on. Slow = 6x to 12x slower than friends with gaming PCs.
>[After] Max CPU temperature: 96°C
What? Is that normal for macs?
Vaguely unrelated I'm only buying thermal grizzly paste in future...that factory tour they did was super impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsIk_mMrt2w
I might not hit problems within the lifetime of the device, but it's a pretty tight margin of error. If I can roughly roughly cut aging in half by dropping 10C, then I want to do that 2-4 times.
Found a yt that for my precise card being repadded though so should be ok
Is this normal? Changing laptops every 2 or 3 years seems absolutely bonkers to me
On the other hand, I suspect this is the main reason we have those Electron abominations and bloated web apps nowadays.
A software engineer costs more than a laptop per month, and it's insane that companies have devs waiting on builds a single second longer than necessary. The faster the edit-compile-test cycle, the more value you get for the massive investment of engineer salary.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250711190104/https://news.ycom...
Next time buy a Framework 13.