Why I Drilled Holes in My MacBook Pro and Put It in the Ovenwritten by sterling 

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?

I first started noticing heat issues about a year ago. My model of MacBook Pro is notorious for running too hot. And I run mine pretty hard: I’m a programmer for iFixit, and in my spare time, I game and make electronic music. On an average day, my laptop hovered between 80º and 90º C. One time I saw it climb as high as 102º C—hot enough to boil water.

So I tried some simple fixes. I blew out the inside of my laptop with compressed air. I bought a laptop stand and stopped using it on my lap. I enabled smcFanControl, a program that lets me run my fans at the max speed of 6200 rpm all the time.

But it still ran hot. And one day in March, it died. I was working on it when the screen suddenly went black. When I powered it off and on again, the power light lit, but I got no boot chime and the screen alternated between glitchy and black—it all screamed that something on the logic board was busted. Probably the water-boiling temperatures had caused the board to flex, knocking solder loose from its ball grid arrays. The likely fix?

 

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