Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Can you please post a link to the law article in question?

Tuurlijk wrote:

 

Can you please post a link to the law article in question?

I just did, but the moderator just deleted my link to the Dutch law article!

This once more proves how smelly Apple's policy is: they do not want their customers to know their rights.

Mine lasted just over two years without the graphic problem. I bought it in June 2012 and it went flooey June 2014. Unfortunately, I had made the mistake of thinking apple was perfect (due to my many other apple devices I own) and didn't take out any apple care.

If you get emails when new replies are posted, it will be there.

I just started a page to collect all information regarding these issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:MacBook_Pro_Technical_Problems Please add your facts there. Take care to use as many solid references as you can find. A pastie of the current source is here http://pastebin.com/tp42WX3z just in case the article magically disappears.

Strange, it does show up in the notification mail, but not in the thread? Was the link malformed? Retry: http://www.conformiteit.nl/conformiteit-conformiteitbeginsel_garantie.html

Oh dear spoke to soon.

When switching users, the desktop doesn't fit the screen properly and only fills the top left hand corner with the remaining three-quarters filled with Apple desktop blue, also when turning off the ability to change between graphics card in the energy preferences the screen turned Apple desktop blue. Is this a sign of things to come with this machine?

Is it a matter of 'when' not 'if' with the 2011 MacBook Pro's and this GPU failure? Does this affect all MacBook Pro's up to the current 2014 models?

Thanks.

All I know is if you polish the plates properly to a shine and use decent paste they run an awful lot cooler on idle and cool much faster when they do get hot. It's not that difficult to work out what that does to the solder balls of the hottest pair of chips and largest surface areas ever put in this chassis with thermal paste gobbed on covering a lot of the pcb around the die heating that part up too instead of solely the die itself where the disappated heat from the chips really should go and where it isn't right now.

its been difficult replying using iOS 8 safari on this forum, even a dictionary reset doesn't fix it, more maddening!

I've had the logic board of my early 2011 15" Macbook Pro replaced twice already due to this problem; The first time was just a month over three years from the purchase, the second time less than three months later, and now I'm having the same symptoms here again, just over two months after the previous replacement.

I've had the local Apple authorized retailer / repair shop do the repairs; the first time they charged over 500€ for it as Apple wouldn't take any responsibility, and it came with a three month warranty.

The second time it fell under that warranty, which was extended another three months.

Now it seems I'll have to take my Mac to the shop yet another time. Seems like this is becoming something I as a Macbook Pro owner just have to do every three months or so as the problem isn't being fixed even in the replacement motherboards.

I'll keep you posted

sure, I'll let you know what happens next

Hi Kanimies,

have you tried having your motherboard fixed (instead of replaced)? It seems to be a permanent solution...

Hi,

nobody seems to be offering those services here in Finland, and anyway I think it should still be Apple's responsibility to fix the issue. As I've already paid once to get the problem resolved, I'll just keep on taking my Macbook Pro to Apple repair again and again as another logic board fails.

Also, based on reading this thread, it seems the "fix" by resoldering or replacing the GPU may fail as well, so even that doesn't seem like a permanent solution.

I'm not going to do anything to my Macbook that would remove the liability from Apple, and having the logic board tampered by a third party feels just like such an action.

When I last posted, I quoted the Apple store genius as saying that the problem was because caused by the SSD draining too much power. Since then I decided to write an email to Tim Cook (anythings worth a try :-). A few days later, I got a phone call from Apple support about the letter. They said I had miss-understood the probable cause. They said they had looked into it and talked with the local Apple store. The actual probable cause (according to Apple) is an incompatibility between the Samsung EVO 840 1Tb and the logic board on my 17" MBP. They also said they replaced the drive cable as a precaution, but it was still most likely to be an issue caused by the drive.

I brought the machine home and re-installed OS X Mavericks. It ran fine for a few days then I had a couple of display glitches and reboots. I've now swapped back to the original Apple HDD with a fresh copy of Mavericks on it and so far it's been fine.

I've also been running iStat Menus on it to watch the heat an whilst the machine does get hot, I'm not seeing any temperatures above 100 degrees on either the CPU or GPU.

I told the Apple support crew I would get back to them in a couple of weeks after I had some time to figure out if it was indeed the SSD.

Thoughts? Any idea how I can confirm if indeed the Samsung is glitching the logic board?

I'm running on original hardware here, including original non-ssd drive, so your SSD drive most probably has nothing to do with the GPU problems..