Back in March I bought the 16″ MacBook Pro I’ve been using this year, and by using I mean it’s basically an electronic RV that I move from place to place and live out of – for both work and home use.
The machine runs about eighteen hours a day, seven days a week – and longer on holidays. I even tend to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in front of the machine while I’m working on things…
So, this morning I broke out my iFixit oddball screwdriver set and popped open the laptop for a thorough cleaning to evict any accumulated cruft.
And after two lengths of eight weird apple pentalobe screws and some tense moments prying on the bottom cover to release the clips – I was in.
Overall the insides were cleaner than I expected; the several right-angle bends used for the intakes (the oval holes on each side where the battery is) does a pretty good job of separating out the dust. Most of the grittier stuff was on the case lid, where it falls out of the air stream as it flows around the bends – which is good.
The fans and heatsinks themselves were pretty clean, and given the extremely fine blades and fins this is also a good thing… It wouldn’t take much to impair them.
Anyway, cleanup took a few minutes, then I put it all back together… The hardest part of the whole ordeal was getting the bottom back on the laptop; it’s held on with massive amounts of over-engineering to remove *any* flex so that the laptop feels like a solid chunk of aluminum.
Listening to "Cliffhanger" by 80's Stallone