I spent almost 6 years servicing the Macs, until in April 2022 when I got tired of being charged by Apple for defective hardware that failed diagnostics after unrelated repairs. They started to get pretty crappy and flimsy after 2015.
I can help you with the firmware issue, if that's still a problem. You'll need an external drive (16GB or more) for the installer media. If you have a running MacOS, you can download High Sierra from the App Store at macappstores://apps.apple.com/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?mt=12, or if that doesn't work, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?mt=12 (it'll end up in the Applications folder once downloaded.) Don't run it from the download.
plug in the (will be erased) external drive (I believe you need about 16GB capacity for the High Sierra installer.) use diskutility to format it as HFS+ with the name "installer." you can use a different name, just use the same name in the terminal command (it will be erased again during media creation.)
Reboot the target machine holding Option. Plug in the installer drive.
Select the installer. Once booted, do not format your existing drive, but reinstall high sierra again over the install you already have. That's a "dirty" install. Will not mess with your data unless the existing drive is failing. DO NOT POWER OFF THE MACHINE AT ANY POINT DURING THE INSTALL. If you hard power off during the firmware update it /will/ brick the logic board.
It will install the newer firmware as part of the installation process. Then you should be able to Option boot to your internal high sierra drive and select it as the startup drive in Prefs.
Thank you for those extra links! I was able to break the logic board in with the Mojave bootable installer shortly after posting.
No joy on the faulty memory slot, unfortunately. That might be why this board became a "donor" in the first place. I'll have to just run it on a single 8GB card or maybe shop for a second board.
unfortunately, without micro-soldering equipment, you can't repair the dead memory slot. Best case is as you mentioned shimming in the module so it pressures the contacts back into position and then you may have the sudden shutdown/freeze/corruption of RAM failure from light impacts or random chance. We used to use the "spank test" to see if there was a memory slot issue... boot it up and smack the case of the machine repeatedly. If the display spazzes out, or the machine freezes or goes nuts, at least one slot is bad.
At an Apple-authorized shop there were no real repairs allowed. Module replacement only, so a RAM slot failure meant a whole replacement logic board.
Great story and glad the surgery and software struggles were solved. My father (RIP) bought me a MacBook Pro for my birthday back in 2009. We went to an Apple Store after work, and since it was a gift, I opted for the highest CPU available for getting the longest life out of the machine. I have since past it off to the wife, and besides replacing a failing HDD with a hybrid drive several years ago, it is still working. Case looks horrible but thanks to magsafe no cords broken from children causing to fall over its life. I have never done such an extensive repair as you, however I did have to replace a keyboard on my children's older powerbook (bought used from Macsales) which required removing the motherboard to remove the 67 SCREWS!!!! on the keyboard. Thankfully it booted back up.
Yeah - keyboard and display are probably higher in difficulty than logic board, though I say this without revisiting the respective ifixits. In essence the unibody was the last repair-friendly Apple laptop!
Agreed, you could upgrade the ram and hard drive. However my new machine has 32GB, have lots of apps open with zero issues. I think the days of needing to upgrade RAM are gone. However user replacable SSD is nice because I have had many drives fail over the years.
The Apple Silicon machines seem to work fine on 8GB as well. That's what I have on my Air, and is also consistent with other user reviews I have seen. Essentially the drive is so fast that swap is instantaneous. The only weird thing I notice is txt files don't load up all at once in Text Edit. Like it literally waits until I scroll down to pull text.
Also, spotlight is much less useful because it doesn't prioritize files; it will only serve up one file that matches the text string. I have the exact same files in my work folder but can't call them up with the same easy text strings that work perfectly in Catalina!
Yes, I bought a 8GB Mac Mini for my church to stream services, and it doesn't seem to struggle at all. I use 32GB on my work machine because I use lots of software development tools, sometimes Docker (takes 8 GB on its own) and run Windows 11 Arm inside of Parallels. Even this all that going on I don't see any lag at all. Compared to the days running System 8 on an iMac Bondi blue machine and having to check the seconds in the top right corner to make sure the system wasn't frozen, I am not sure how anyone can complain.
I've done a moderate amount of surgery on Macs, but I admire your fortitude tackling a motherboard. That was the point where I would Just Say No, ifixit notwithstanding.
Come to think of it, opening up a Duo may have been of equivalent difficulty.
It wasn't too bad, actually! The only sketchy connections are the keyboard+backlights. Worse (but also more satisfying when I got to the end) was a simple hard drive replacement on my 2010 Mini (eventually lost in a fire in 2019).
Jan 8, 2023·edited Jan 8, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
Oh, there was one generation of minis that were absolutely horrible to get into. At the time there were half a dozen of them under my care. I still have a special right-angle screwdriver that made the operation possible.
What a fun read! I had no idea you were a former Apple employee.
I was an independent Mac consultant for, well, since about 1985. Coincidentally, just this week I'm transplanting ~1T of stuff from my 13" mid-2012 MacBook Pro to a 2020 MacBook Air. I saw the writing on the wall on learning that the old baby wouldn't go past Catalina, and the Bluetooth started acting up. Also the 2 TB SSD I stuck in it just last year is failing with a number of bad blocks. (As I used to tell my clients, a failing drive is often no more serious than a burnt-out lightbulb in a lamp, at least until a few years ago when they started soldering SSDs onto the logic board.)
Some of the problems you experienced can be ameliorated by having a box full of external hard drives on hand. Nevertheless, a couple of comments…
"Option-Command-R, for whatever reason, is prompting the High Sierra-operating firmware / board to serve up a 2012-vintage Mountain Lion install." Maybe I'm misremembering the actual details, but at least in some circumstances Apple will only offer you the operating system that originally came with your hardware. That was always annoying.
"And, the app store would not give me Catalina..." Pooh on the App Store. With some judicious duck-duck-go-ing, you can find full installers for older systems, and yes, from Apple servers, not from sketchy third-party sources. I used to keep an external hard drive with about 12 partitions on it with a bootable installer for all versions of the OS. That worked until Apple made some other annoying change having to do with expiring certificates or something.
I'll mourn the 2012, though it will stay in service (after yet another SSD replacement). That was the last good model you could open up and do stuff to.
Hm, I hadn't even considered or tested whether the bootable installer would have been flagged as expired anyway. I already forget if I even tried to boot into it before reformatting. Also, I could have just tried converting the HD build to Catalina via the App Store but I think the stick was definitely the way to go.
How funny - the exact same two machines I have! I picked up the Air after they announced the new model this July, assuming the prices would have just gone a bit lower.
As far as keeping the 13" running, I'm only worried about whether any boards can really keep running long-term unless protected from moisture. Otherwise, even with the downgrade to I5 it's still light on its feet, boots Catalina in 22 seconds. The thing is, I don't think the industry is really going to be able to offer affordable "disposable" laptops for much longer so I like the idea of something that can keep going.
At Apple I was in a niche role, not really hardware or software - MobileMe support, lol. But I was quite good at it in so far as there were no real tools to fix any problems so you just tried random stuff.
Just in case you need to know and there's a "next time" to doing this, it's good to send prayers to St. Isodore of Seville. He is the patron saint of computers. Long ago, I wrote this same post after experiencing the blue screen of death and ended up being a featured Google story, lol. Praying always helps.
Just curious - have you ever owned the Apple time machine? I have an old one that reliably backs up my Mac (wirelessly) every night. Of course they want you to use the cloud now for everything so they haven't sold this for many years.
Now my problem is - I can't find the password for the Time Machine in the event I ever need to restore my hard drive (ssd) to a locked machine. Hmmm....not sure what value a one-way backup is...but as long as my Mac is running, i can move files from the Time Machine / aka time capsule at will. Very handy and very reliable.
You're talking about a Time Capsule. Time Machine is the software. I like Apple's routers a lot because they have a proprietary administration interface that is hopefully less hackable than the Chinese consumer level crap.
Your Mac has to know your Time Capsule backup drive password, otherwise the backups would not be happening. Take a look in Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.
I was never happy with Time Machine. I blamed it (without evidence) for corrupting my Mini's hard drive and then stupidly wiped the external before fixing the problem with the Mini drive, losing a bunch of stuff. But, YOLO, as they say.
I am so impressed with Apple's newer MacBook Pros, which I have been using for my database and software development work (running a Windows VM under MacOS), that I have been migrating back to PCs. The latest Mac, a 2018 Pro that I purchased in 2019 as the previous one was dying after three years (which I purchased after the original one died after three years or so because of a manufacturing defect in the video chip as I recall), began to succumb to "butterfly keyboard syndrome" after about three years.
The other day I received an email notice about a class action settlement involving the "butterfly keyboard". I don't know if it is a scam, but it accurately describes what happened. I am no fan of Windows but I am getting work done on my two physical Surface PCs and one virtual one, and while it may be my imagination, it feels like Windows Professional is actually running more reliably than it used to. I do spend quite a bit less time fixing OS problems.
One of the PCs, a Surface Pro 7 2-in-1, turned three at the end of November and while now out of warranty, it still runs like new. As I would expect. Even the keyboard. Even though I haul it around with me. Imagine that.
Right, a settlement for the butterfly keyboard is in the news. And I believe machines in both the 2nd and 3rd gens were prone to GPU failures. Otherwise nothing was really bad about the 3rd gen except the inability / limited ability to upgrade memory / storage.
The M1 hasn't given me any problems in 6 months. Which is good, since it's basically unrepairable.
My first Mac, in 2009, wasn't a "Pro". It lasted for a good many years. When my work outgrew it a few years later, I gave it to my housemate and she continued to use it for I forget how long.
I tend to keep all my hardware until it will no longer run a recent enough OS, whether it's a phone or a computer. If you don't count hard drives, which are a consumable anyway, I've had really good luck with all my Macs since 1985. The laptop I'm retiring now still works fine and it's 10 years old.
"Luck" seems to be the key. Except for my original Mac, I seem to have picked the wrong model years. There were other factors not due to manufacturing defects, but rather to my usage. I used my first MacBook Pro while commuting to and from work on the bus and on light rail, and with all the bouncing around the hard drive (this was pre-SSD) gave out in less than three years, and Apple replaced it under extended warranty.
I think I ran Windows mostly using Boot Camp at first, but later on using VMWare Fusion exclusively (due to Boot Camp compatibility limitations). The VM caused the system to run hot and likely contributed to the short operating life. (The heating does not occur when running Windows under Windows using HyperV on my new PC.)
I am thinking about having the 2018 model repaired, replacing the keyboard (and everything it is attached to) and the battery (which is swelling). I do prefer Macs to PCs for personal use, and I would keep it for running my Mac software and as a standby system for my consulting work, but keeping the VM shut down almost all the time. That would depend upon whether replacement parts are still available. It should go for years under lighter use, like my original Mac. Possibly more years than me -- I'm wearing out too!
Yeah, anything in 09 that you can swap to SSD will still hold up today except in one department, which is GPU, and those were deplorable on the Pro's until the Retina era anyway. Similar with the phones - there was nothing left to improve after the 6s so they just started branding hardware deletion (audio out, home button) as "improvement."
My 2012 MacBook Pro is not a Retina but not being a gamer or a video editor, I never noticed a problem with the GPU. It all depends on what you need to do.
Aside from those, it's also nice (especially in an alleged "pro" computer) to be able to drive two externals, which didn't arrive to the 13" until the Retina era.
You mean displays? I didn't realize it had that limitation, because I only use one. Around 2012 I had a mini to which I had two big displays connected. I felt like a hacker in a movie.
I spent almost 6 years servicing the Macs, until in April 2022 when I got tired of being charged by Apple for defective hardware that failed diagnostics after unrelated repairs. They started to get pretty crappy and flimsy after 2015.
I can help you with the firmware issue, if that's still a problem. You'll need an external drive (16GB or more) for the installer media. If you have a running MacOS, you can download High Sierra from the App Store at macappstores://apps.apple.com/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?mt=12, or if that doesn't work, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-high-sierra/id1246284741?mt=12 (it'll end up in the Applications folder once downloaded.) Don't run it from the download.
plug in the (will be erased) external drive (I believe you need about 16GB capacity for the High Sierra installer.) use diskutility to format it as HFS+ with the name "installer." you can use a different name, just use the same name in the terminal command (it will be erased again during media creation.)
use terminal
createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/installer --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app
accept the Yes, let it make the bootable disk.
Reboot the target machine holding Option. Plug in the installer drive.
Select the installer. Once booted, do not format your existing drive, but reinstall high sierra again over the install you already have. That's a "dirty" install. Will not mess with your data unless the existing drive is failing. DO NOT POWER OFF THE MACHINE AT ANY POINT DURING THE INSTALL. If you hard power off during the firmware update it /will/ brick the logic board.
It will install the newer firmware as part of the installation process. Then you should be able to Option boot to your internal high sierra drive and select it as the startup drive in Prefs.
Thank you for those extra links! I was able to break the logic board in with the Mojave bootable installer shortly after posting.
No joy on the faulty memory slot, unfortunately. That might be why this board became a "donor" in the first place. I'll have to just run it on a single 8GB card or maybe shop for a second board.
unfortunately, without micro-soldering equipment, you can't repair the dead memory slot. Best case is as you mentioned shimming in the module so it pressures the contacts back into position and then you may have the sudden shutdown/freeze/corruption of RAM failure from light impacts or random chance. We used to use the "spank test" to see if there was a memory slot issue... boot it up and smack the case of the machine repeatedly. If the display spazzes out, or the machine freezes or goes nuts, at least one slot is bad.
At an Apple-authorized shop there were no real repairs allowed. Module replacement only, so a RAM slot failure meant a whole replacement logic board.
Great story and glad the surgery and software struggles were solved. My father (RIP) bought me a MacBook Pro for my birthday back in 2009. We went to an Apple Store after work, and since it was a gift, I opted for the highest CPU available for getting the longest life out of the machine. I have since past it off to the wife, and besides replacing a failing HDD with a hybrid drive several years ago, it is still working. Case looks horrible but thanks to magsafe no cords broken from children causing to fall over its life. I have never done such an extensive repair as you, however I did have to replace a keyboard on my children's older powerbook (bought used from Macsales) which required removing the motherboard to remove the 67 SCREWS!!!! on the keyboard. Thankfully it booted back up.
Yeah - keyboard and display are probably higher in difficulty than logic board, though I say this without revisiting the respective ifixits. In essence the unibody was the last repair-friendly Apple laptop!
Agreed, you could upgrade the ram and hard drive. However my new machine has 32GB, have lots of apps open with zero issues. I think the days of needing to upgrade RAM are gone. However user replacable SSD is nice because I have had many drives fail over the years.
The Apple Silicon machines seem to work fine on 8GB as well. That's what I have on my Air, and is also consistent with other user reviews I have seen. Essentially the drive is so fast that swap is instantaneous. The only weird thing I notice is txt files don't load up all at once in Text Edit. Like it literally waits until I scroll down to pull text.
Also, spotlight is much less useful because it doesn't prioritize files; it will only serve up one file that matches the text string. I have the exact same files in my work folder but can't call them up with the same easy text strings that work perfectly in Catalina!
Yes, I bought a 8GB Mac Mini for my church to stream services, and it doesn't seem to struggle at all. I use 32GB on my work machine because I use lots of software development tools, sometimes Docker (takes 8 GB on its own) and run Windows 11 Arm inside of Parallels. Even this all that going on I don't see any lag at all. Compared to the days running System 8 on an iMac Bondi blue machine and having to check the seconds in the top right corner to make sure the system wasn't frozen, I am not sure how anyone can complain.
I've done a moderate amount of surgery on Macs, but I admire your fortitude tackling a motherboard. That was the point where I would Just Say No, ifixit notwithstanding.
Come to think of it, opening up a Duo may have been of equivalent difficulty.
It wasn't too bad, actually! The only sketchy connections are the keyboard+backlights. Worse (but also more satisfying when I got to the end) was a simple hard drive replacement on my 2010 Mini (eventually lost in a fire in 2019).
Oh, there was one generation of minis that were absolutely horrible to get into. At the time there were half a dozen of them under my care. I still have a special right-angle screwdriver that made the operation possible.
What a fun read! I had no idea you were a former Apple employee.
I was an independent Mac consultant for, well, since about 1985. Coincidentally, just this week I'm transplanting ~1T of stuff from my 13" mid-2012 MacBook Pro to a 2020 MacBook Air. I saw the writing on the wall on learning that the old baby wouldn't go past Catalina, and the Bluetooth started acting up. Also the 2 TB SSD I stuck in it just last year is failing with a number of bad blocks. (As I used to tell my clients, a failing drive is often no more serious than a burnt-out lightbulb in a lamp, at least until a few years ago when they started soldering SSDs onto the logic board.)
Some of the problems you experienced can be ameliorated by having a box full of external hard drives on hand. Nevertheless, a couple of comments…
"Option-Command-R, for whatever reason, is prompting the High Sierra-operating firmware / board to serve up a 2012-vintage Mountain Lion install." Maybe I'm misremembering the actual details, but at least in some circumstances Apple will only offer you the operating system that originally came with your hardware. That was always annoying.
"And, the app store would not give me Catalina..." Pooh on the App Store. With some judicious duck-duck-go-ing, you can find full installers for older systems, and yes, from Apple servers, not from sketchy third-party sources. I used to keep an external hard drive with about 12 partitions on it with a bootable installer for all versions of the OS. That worked until Apple made some other annoying change having to do with expiring certificates or something.
I'll mourn the 2012, though it will stay in service (after yet another SSD replacement). That was the last good model you could open up and do stuff to.
Hm, I hadn't even considered or tested whether the bootable installer would have been flagged as expired anyway. I already forget if I even tried to boot into it before reformatting. Also, I could have just tried converting the HD build to Catalina via the App Store but I think the stick was definitely the way to go.
How funny - the exact same two machines I have! I picked up the Air after they announced the new model this July, assuming the prices would have just gone a bit lower.
As far as keeping the 13" running, I'm only worried about whether any boards can really keep running long-term unless protected from moisture. Otherwise, even with the downgrade to I5 it's still light on its feet, boots Catalina in 22 seconds. The thing is, I don't think the industry is really going to be able to offer affordable "disposable" laptops for much longer so I like the idea of something that can keep going.
At Apple I was in a niche role, not really hardware or software - MobileMe support, lol. But I was quite good at it in so far as there were no real tools to fix any problems so you just tried random stuff.
You have to worry about humidity. I live in the desert so for me it's heat, static electricity, and dust. And scorpions.
I think scorpions were definitely heavily involved in degrading my previous board.
Just in case you need to know and there's a "next time" to doing this, it's good to send prayers to St. Isodore of Seville. He is the patron saint of computers. Long ago, I wrote this same post after experiencing the blue screen of death and ended up being a featured Google story, lol. Praying always helps.
Just curious - have you ever owned the Apple time machine? I have an old one that reliably backs up my Mac (wirelessly) every night. Of course they want you to use the cloud now for everything so they haven't sold this for many years.
Now my problem is - I can't find the password for the Time Machine in the event I ever need to restore my hard drive (ssd) to a locked machine. Hmmm....not sure what value a one-way backup is...but as long as my Mac is running, i can move files from the Time Machine / aka time capsule at will. Very handy and very reliable.
You're talking about a Time Capsule. Time Machine is the software. I like Apple's routers a lot because they have a proprietary administration interface that is hopefully less hackable than the Chinese consumer level crap.
Your Mac has to know your Time Capsule backup drive password, otherwise the backups would not be happening. Take a look in Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.
I was never happy with Time Machine. I blamed it (without evidence) for corrupting my Mini's hard drive and then stupidly wiped the external before fixing the problem with the Mini drive, losing a bunch of stuff. But, YOLO, as they say.
I am so impressed with Apple's newer MacBook Pros, which I have been using for my database and software development work (running a Windows VM under MacOS), that I have been migrating back to PCs. The latest Mac, a 2018 Pro that I purchased in 2019 as the previous one was dying after three years (which I purchased after the original one died after three years or so because of a manufacturing defect in the video chip as I recall), began to succumb to "butterfly keyboard syndrome" after about three years.
The other day I received an email notice about a class action settlement involving the "butterfly keyboard". I don't know if it is a scam, but it accurately describes what happened. I am no fan of Windows but I am getting work done on my two physical Surface PCs and one virtual one, and while it may be my imagination, it feels like Windows Professional is actually running more reliably than it used to. I do spend quite a bit less time fixing OS problems.
One of the PCs, a Surface Pro 7 2-in-1, turned three at the end of November and while now out of warranty, it still runs like new. As I would expect. Even the keyboard. Even though I haul it around with me. Imagine that.
Yep, I use a 14 in M1 MacBook Pro for work and it best machine I have ever used.
Right, a settlement for the butterfly keyboard is in the news. And I believe machines in both the 2nd and 3rd gens were prone to GPU failures. Otherwise nothing was really bad about the 3rd gen except the inability / limited ability to upgrade memory / storage.
The M1 hasn't given me any problems in 6 months. Which is good, since it's basically unrepairable.
My first Mac, in 2009, wasn't a "Pro". It lasted for a good many years. When my work outgrew it a few years later, I gave it to my housemate and she continued to use it for I forget how long.
I tend to keep all my hardware until it will no longer run a recent enough OS, whether it's a phone or a computer. If you don't count hard drives, which are a consumable anyway, I've had really good luck with all my Macs since 1985. The laptop I'm retiring now still works fine and it's 10 years old.
"Luck" seems to be the key. Except for my original Mac, I seem to have picked the wrong model years. There were other factors not due to manufacturing defects, but rather to my usage. I used my first MacBook Pro while commuting to and from work on the bus and on light rail, and with all the bouncing around the hard drive (this was pre-SSD) gave out in less than three years, and Apple replaced it under extended warranty.
I think I ran Windows mostly using Boot Camp at first, but later on using VMWare Fusion exclusively (due to Boot Camp compatibility limitations). The VM caused the system to run hot and likely contributed to the short operating life. (The heating does not occur when running Windows under Windows using HyperV on my new PC.)
I am thinking about having the 2018 model repaired, replacing the keyboard (and everything it is attached to) and the battery (which is swelling). I do prefer Macs to PCs for personal use, and I would keep it for running my Mac software and as a standby system for my consulting work, but keeping the VM shut down almost all the time. That would depend upon whether replacement parts are still available. It should go for years under lighter use, like my original Mac. Possibly more years than me -- I'm wearing out too!
Yeah, anything in 09 that you can swap to SSD will still hold up today except in one department, which is GPU, and those were deplorable on the Pro's until the Retina era anyway. Similar with the phones - there was nothing left to improve after the 6s so they just started branding hardware deletion (audio out, home button) as "improvement."
My 2012 MacBook Pro is not a Retina but not being a gamer or a video editor, I never noticed a problem with the GPU. It all depends on what you need to do.
Aside from those, it's also nice (especially in an alleged "pro" computer) to be able to drive two externals, which didn't arrive to the 13" until the Retina era.
You mean displays? I didn't realize it had that limitation, because I only use one. Around 2012 I had a mini to which I had two big displays connected. I felt like a hacker in a movie.
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