News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 7, 2006

hardware

Heat sinks now in stock; ready to combat MacBook random shutdowns?

Posted Oct. 7, ’06, 9:40 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Hardware

Heat sinksWhen last we heard about MacBook shutdowns (apart from Kieren McCarthy’s contention that somehow they’re related to Apple’s handling of security vulnerabilities), a engineer in Germany had suggested that the problem might lie in a too short heat sink cable which was causing a short circuit (not, unfortunately, the Johnny 5 kind).

This jibes with my experience: the heat sink was what they replaced in my own randomly-shutting-down MacBook. Now Macworld UK is reporting that Apple resellers have been told that logic board replacements are not necessary in all shutdown cases—maintenance partners have been told to replace the heat sink first, then the logic board if problems persist.

Best of all, it seems that they’ve finally got adequate supplies of the heat sink and logic board for repairs. Apple had apparently been having shortages of the heat sink for some time, resulting in long repair times for some users (like yours truly, who waited about a month). Glad to hear it; I’d hate for others to have to suffer the same fate that I did. Hopefully all the kinks will be worked out around the time the Core 2 Duo MacBooks arrive.


2 Comments

Harald Koeppen said:

I waited a month. They replaced the heat sink and now it works fine.

October 8, 2006 1:49 AM
shiv said:

“Unfortunately, several users who’ve had their MacBook’s heat sink replaced by Apple are reporting that RSS problem quickly resurfaces. AppleCare has told some of these users that their systems will require a new logic board that is under “development” with an unknown release date.”

October 12, 2006 2:15 PM

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