MacBook Pro Repair

Today I decided to fix an old MacBook Pro 15" with my wife.

The Mac wasn't booting, no boot chime and had a solid sleep light always on when we tried to turn it on. There was some information that we found on the internet about a possible Nvidia issue that needed reballing.

We don't have any tools to do reballing and clearly this isn't a quick easy and cheap fix.

Anyway, like I said, it is an old Macintosh and there is nothing to loose.

We searched a bit more on the internet and decided to do it without the oven method, instead we decided to use the heat gun.

The methods are similar, but we prefer to use the oven to make cookies 🙂

An important thing we had in mind was the temperature that solder melts. Using a laser thermometer that we got cheap, we kept checking the temperature to see if it was a bit higher than the melting point (around 190º to 200ºC). We did it like the video shows - about 10 min across the several chips (including the graphic card). After it was done, we waited for the board to cool (which wasn't hard since it is a bit chilly outside).

After reassembling everything using the iFixit guide and applying some thermal compound, we booted the Mac and... surprise it was working!

If the MacBook works for a few months or 1 year, it will be worth it for sure, since the only cost was the the thermal compound and time.

Good luck if you want to try to do the same.