Gizmodo: thermal grease

A Reader's MacBook Has Thermal Grease Leaking Onto SO-DIMM Slots

Jason Chen — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 21:45:49 EDT

Reader Amin's ran into a bit of trouble when he went to upgrade the RAM in his fancy new MacBook. He writes:

Hello, i'm a long time gizmodo reader, I've ran into a big issue with my MacBook in where the thermal grease applied to the internal components has leached into the RAM slots on my motherboard and have 'soiled' the DIMM's with thermal grease...

Has anybody else run into this? Or is he just the unlucky victim of a sloppy assembly plant monkey? – Jason Chen

Flickr [Thanks Amin!]

MacBook Disassembled

Jason Chen — Wed, 17 May 2006 21:52:06 EDT

Do you go to the San Diego Zoo and wonder what the guts of an orangutan would look like sprawled out? Kodawari-chan (honorifically owned!) does, and he takes his love of dissection and directed it towards a MacBook instead.

As much as we wince seeing a perfectly fine piece of equipment manhandled this way, his efforts do show that there's much less thermal grease on these MacBooks compared to the MacBook Pros.

Disassembled MacBook [Kodawarisan]

Thermal Greasy: Apple Sics Lawyers on Something Awful

Joel — Wed, 03 May 2006 16:37:54 EDT

After a Something Awful denizen took apart his MacBook Pro and discovered that Apple had slathered on far too much thermal grease, he found that using a more modest amount dropped his MacBook Pro's temperatures by several degrees. Now the forum has recieved a threatening letter from Apple's legal staff, requesting a link to this image [pictured above] be removed because "The Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple's intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law."

Of course the real problem isn't the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple's $2,500 laptop but by Apple's own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple's mistake.

My MacBook Pro has the problem with the whining screen, too. Perhaps I'll wait until they acknowledge the sloppy application of the thermal grease before I go in to request repair. In the meantime I will keep telling people how much I love using my Mac while silently questioning my devotion to a company who would rather use the law than service to assuage their customers' complaints.