
Baked MacBook Air: A cautionary recipe - woolie
https://www.woolie.co.uk/article/baked-macbook-air/
======
areoform
I am a friend of a famous Apple products repair person and one of the things
I've learned through our friendship is just how fragile repairs can be. As
this individual quickly learned, putting a MacBook Air logic board into an
oven is a terrible idea. Do not under any circumstances do it with your
computers. It is one of the worst fallacies of DIY repair out there.

What you're trying to do (as he stated in the article) is that you're trying
to reflow the poorly adherent solder beads in the hopes that you'll fix the
faulty connection. But the way you're doing it introduces the risk of damaging
the PCB and the ICs themselves through thermal stresses and gaseous expansion
by any trapped ambient moisture. This will irreparably damage your board and
it will lead to the phenomena he experienced here. ("popcorning")

The right way to do it involves a directed hot air gun and proper equipment so
that you aren't imposing excessive thermal stresses onto the board as a whole.
If you don't know how to do that, then please send it to someone who does.
There are several good repair outfits out there right now who specialize in
this and can help you out.

Do not repeat this person's mistake. This DIY method is like doing cardiac
surgery with a chainsaw. It's a terrible idea for your data and wallet.

 _Edit:_ Here's a guide that outlines these issues and offers ways to do it
properly with the right equipment. The "popcorning" is called board
delamination.
[https://www.latticesemi.com/-/media/LatticeSemi/Documents/Ap...](https://www.latticesemi.com/-/media/LatticeSemi/Documents/ApplicationNotes/PT/SolderReflowGuideforSurfaceMountDevices.ashx?document_id=8902)

~~~
abakker
FWIW, I did this with a 2011 MacBook pro 17" 7 times, and it worked every
time. Each time it worked for about 3 months, and then the video card would
glitch out again. Finally, apple did a warrantee extension on that logic board
and replaced it.

Just my 2¢ to say that it does work sometimes.

~~~
dpark
If you had to do it 7 times, that doesn’t really sound like it “worked”.

~~~
abakker
Well, it took a non-working laptop - video glitched and unusable, to one that
was working for 3 months. Was it a permanent fix? No. But, it sure beat buying
a new laptop on short notice.

~~~
jorvi
Sounds like my home theater amplifier (Pioneer VSX-921). The audio DSP chip
gets too hot during normal use and desolders itself ever so slightly, which
gives the error UE22. Someone figured out that taking a hot air gun to the
chip fixes it, but I had to re-apply the fix about every three months.

What angered me even more was that Pioneer USA acknowledged the problem and
would either repair or give you a replacement model, but Pioneer EU pretends
everything is fine and dandy, even when you point them to Pioneer USA its
stance.

~~~
lostlogin
Would a fan help?

~~~
InitialLastName
There's nothing that the folks who are willing to pay for home theater audio
gear love more than adding an acoustical noise source.

------
talkingtab
A possible (probable?) issue is your oven. In my experience, they heat in
cycles: if you set one to 180 it will heat to 240, then cool to 150, then ....
Etc. Even a large electric range will cycle with a range of temperatures. In
other words they are designed to maintain an average temperature rather than
constant.

In addition there issue of calibration. Even expensive full size ovens can be
significantly off.

How do I know this? I worked with Japanese laquer (Urushi) which was baked
onto metal for bonding. But Urushi is the sap of a tree related to poison oak
and over-heating leads to fumes that are not great. Experiments with small
(toaster) ovens and large electric ranges produced bad results.

Most electric kilns for ceramics, especially those that are computer
controlled, are highly recommended for sensitive work where temperature
control is important.

~~~
ambicapter
As anyone who has tried to bake in an oven in a rental has found out...I
finally bought an oven thermometer and my oven will easily go 100ºF over the
indicated temperature. I literally either cut baking time in half or lower the
oven dial by ~100º.

~~~
dpark
If you’re lowering the temperature by 100 degrees, your problem isn’t the
temperature swing. It’s that your oven’s internal thermistor needs
replacement.

------
ScottFree
Has anyone watched Louis Rossman's video series on this topic? It's pretty
funny. He thinks oven reflows are a bad idea.

Reballing flip chip GPUs is BULLSHIT - the truth about dead laptop GPUs &
repairing them. -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AcEt073Uds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AcEt073Uds)

Luckily, he also shows the proper way to do it:

Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shn7LdIrViQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shn7LdIrViQ)

~~~
dehrmann
I got an X1 Carbon rather than a Macbook Pro in part because if his Mac repair
videos.

~~~
astrodust
Bad soldering is bad soldering. Microsoft's XBox 360 had huge issues with it.

The problem is that it works from a QA perspective: They can test the thing
for hours and it'll run flawlessly. It's only when it goes through hundreds of
heating/cooling cycles that it starts to break down and cause problems.

You really never know which product or vendor is going to suffer from it next.
Every GPU vendor has had some issues.

I got red-ringed and I didn't swear off of buying Microsoft products forever.

~~~
drewmol
I was gonna chime in on 360's and saw your comment. The best solution that
didn't involve replacing solder was a reflow combined with case mods to add
screws that better stabilized the board directly around the problem chips
which limited board warping so the inevitable solder melting heat cycles did
not result in connection failures upon cooling, IME. There was rumblings that
lead-free solder was a requirement for 'toy' classification but I can't
confirm.

~~~
astrodust
The whole industry was moving lead-free but the first companies to do it were
the ones that had the least experience with how to manage the reflow
temperature profiles.

It's not just toys. Lead solder is being phased out for many applications.

------
andy_ppp
I mean even if the oven were perfectly calibrated for air temperature the
radiation from the exposed elements would almost always cause this to happen.
He’s basically grilled his motherboard not baked it, try baking a cake in that
oven and I bet it’s also burned on the top and soggy in the middle.

The obvious solution if you must use that oven is to wrap the board in silver
foil first and it might have had a chance.

~~~
pnutjam
That might also keep the vapor from the solder condensing on the oven. I would
be worried about using that oven for food in the future. Is apple lead free
for it's solder?

~~~
pjc50
Is there significant lead vapour pressure at a mere 200ish C?

~~~
blattimwind
The vapour pressure of an absent element is approximately zero pascals.

------
setquk
I've done stupider things during last ditch repairs. Once time I replaced the
tantalum caps on a board blindly hoping that it would cure a power rail short.
I'd never used SMD tants before and didn't know that the band was a + band and
not a - band. Within 3 seconds of applying power, there was a fireworks
display which destroyed the board entirely :)

~~~
iSnow
Oh yeah, tantalum caps... I stuck one into a prototyping breadboard but messed
up polarity.

It's surprisingly hurtful if one of those little fuckers explodes between your
thumb and index finger.

~~~
setquk
Ouch!

------
cr0sh
I don't know if this has been said or not already - but I wouldn't use that
oven again for cooking food, especially since something somewhere off-gassed.

I don't know how dangerous it would be to eat food from an oven that was
previously used for reflow soldering; if I had to guess, the danger would be
minimal - maybe an increased risk of cancer or something like that. Likely,
the fumes or whatnot was simply rosin flux vaporizing.

Rosin flux is usually something like refined pine resin with a solvent; it
won't kill you to eat it (or breath in the smoke while soldering - though that
can be a major irritant), but I am almost certain it might cause a flavoring
issue for future baked foods.

Then again - maybe it would lend those holiday dinners a festive flavor?

~~~
fouc
You're over-estimating the amount of heating/cooking involved. Ignore the
article where he's doing everything all wrong, the plastics etc shouldn't be
burning, only the solder is warming up and reflowing when done right. Fumes,
if any would clear out anyways.

~~~
cr0sh
I agree that when done right (ie, following a proper SMD reflow temperature
"curve"), all that should happen is the solder should flow and not much else.

Even so, just as I wouldn't reuse a pan or pot I had created sugar candy
rocket fuel in to cook dinner (no matter how clean I tried to make it
afterward), I also wouldn't reuse an oven for cooking purposes, that had been
used for reflowing a PCB previously.

It just seems like a "best practice" to me to not reuse equipment in that
manner for food cooking and consumption.

That's just me; I don't find the potential harm, no matter how objectively
slight it might be, to be worth it in the long run.

------
Spacemolte
I heated a Nvidia 780 graphics card a few times using a heat gun and a laser
thermometer (max 200 degree c). I did not want to use my oven as I don't want
to risk it. That revived the gpu 2 times, going from vga quality and weird
screen artifacts, to no issues at all, 2-3 months with each bake. In the end i
bought a new one as it really is temporary.

~~~
shereadsthenews
I repaired a 2009 iMac gpu the same way with a heat gun but that was good for
two years each time the first two times and didn’t work the third time. It’s
worth a shot if you strongly suspect broken solder ball.

~~~
ovi256
Same here, for the same equipement. Did not use heatgun but oven, wrapped in
tinfoil. Same results as you reported. Finally sourced a compatible GPU from
eBay, an ATI 5xxx from the next model year iMac. It was much much cheaper than
sourcing an ATI 4xxx.

Opening the iMac the first time was very stressful.

------
bArray
We used to "fix" our old XBox consoles by wrapping them in towels and
purposely overheating them to get the ?GPU? solder to reflow correctly. With
some extra cooling methods added, still works to this day even though it got a
red ring of death.

~~~
ascagnel_
Yea, the original run of the Xbox 360 had issues with the then-novel lead-free
solder breaking down under high thermal loads.

~~~
Doxin
If anything lead-free solder would hold up to higher temperatures. The problem
was just that the entire thing got too hot in general, there was a whole spell
with the PCBs warping because of the heat.

~~~
sosodev
Yeah, both the PS3 and Xbox 360 had terrible thermals when they first
released.

------
interfixus
After flickering unhappily for a while, part of the screen backlight on my
trusty Lenovo laptop recently died, rendering screen usable but hightly
annoying. Short of actually buying a spare part and swapping out, I did
absolutely everything imaginable, including liberal amounts of _percussive
maintenance_ : Opened the thing up, had the whole screen out, checked
connections as best I could, squeezed and flexed, had the screen out again,
squeezed some more - you know how these things go.

So, the machine is stranded on my desk, hooked up to a stationary screen, lid
kept slightly ajar. The most laidback member of the household comes by, a
fully grown male of species felis catus. Apparently slams the lid shut and
goes to sleep on laptop for the duration of the night.

Machine has been fine ever since.

------
encypruon
To add to our set of anecdotes:

I baked a dead graphics card in the oven and it hasn't failed for half a year
or so until I replaced it with something better. It probably wasn't the
smartest thing I ever did and I wouldn't recommend it unless to anyone unless
they have an oven they aren't going to use for food anymore in a well
ventilated are (which was not the case for me).

The card had bad graphics glitches in whatever mode the BIOS puts it in and
would cause boot to fail at an early stage.

First I disassembled the card and ensures that all remaining components were
heat resistant and that there was nothing that seemed likely to fall off on
the bottom side. I carefully mounted it in the oven on some balls of tinfoil.
I also added a thermometer that came with a cheap multimeter because I didn't
feel inclined to trust the oven not to overshoot.

I ramped the temperature up slowly, using hot air and keeping it under 100°C
for a while in hopes of getting out any water and keeping it from going
popcorn. When raising the temperature to the point where I expected the solder
to go soft (can't remember the exact temperature) the thing suddenly started
to smell rather badly (but not burnt), forcing me to open the windows and
leaving the room most of the time. At that point I got worried about the fumes
and where they might condensate but decided to go through with it, heating it
up a bit further and then cooling it down slowly.

In the aftermath I got a working graphics card and a smelly oven. The smell
went away after a few hours at max temperature, a lot of ventilation and some
cleaning. I hope there wasn't a health issue with any substaces remaining in
the oven as the smell was gone and food doesn't really get in direct contact
with the inside of the oven. Anyway, it's the reason why I wouldn't recommend
it or do it again.

------
eigenloss
Could have just mailed it to Louis Rossmann. [0]

[https://rossmanngroup.com/](https://rossmanngroup.com/)

------
cseelus
As strange as this may sound, this technique isn‘t uncommon at all. Many XBox
owners used this as a last resort to fix the infamous Red Ring of Death.

------
silvester23
I actually once (kind of) fixed a permanent startup blue screen on my years-
old LG G3 by putting the motherboard in the oven.

It worked again for ~2 months, which gave me plenty of time to backup all
local data. Then the blue screen returned and after trying to bake it again,
it would not power on at all anymore.

------
zitterbewegung
The above technique is a myth . See
[https://youtu.be/1AcEt073Uds](https://youtu.be/1AcEt073Uds) .

Trying to randomly unsolder and put back resistors or other components when
you don’t know what the error is is another bad idea.

The author should have tried to actually attempt to fix the logic board first.
But before all that he should have inspected the board and use a voltmeter to
see what the issue is. But even doing that he might need a replacement part.

------
nicky0
> With confidence high and the bake nearly finished, for the final 60 seconds
> I thought I’d go off-piste and crank up the temperature to 180 °C - I wanted
> to make sure things were cooked through. Curiously peering through the oven
> window, all hell broke loose within 30 seconds: The room filled with sounds
> of popcorn being made as resistors and components desoldered themselves from
> the logic board and dropped onto the oven floor. The previously clear air
> was replaced with an acrid haze. Then the bake reached it’s finale as the
> logic board bowed up in the middle, accompanied by the screeching sound of
> the CPU being wrenched off its socket. I lunged for the power switch and
> yanked open the oven door, hoping to limit damage. Then, as quickly as the
> bowing started, everything calmed down and the board returned to its
> original shape. With the board still hot, a wooden spoon was employed to
> desperately poke the CPU back onto its mount - with little success.

I'm sorry about your MacBook, and I just wanted to thank you for this
wonderfully evocative bit of writing which made my day.

------
yardie
For those that didn't read the article the error he made was using a small
toaster oven. And then cranking up the heat at the last moment. The oven's
thermostat is reading the current air temperature. But the heating coils are
radiative. A small oven has wild temperature fluctuations. And when the coils
are active they put out a lot more heat than whatever is dailed into the
thermostat.

I recently repaired our iMac GPU after it started acting strange. Baked it in
a convection oven for 6 minutes at 160° and not a second more. I also used a
heavy baking sheet as a heat sink. I did not need a reflow station and if it
failed I would have simply ordered a replacement GPU.

~~~
rootlocus
I think the error he made was baking the motherboard, period. As multiple
people have pointed out this is a bad idea.

------
wvenable
I actually managed to temporarily fix a laptop using a torch-like lighter
directed at the GPU. This particular batch of laptops had faulty solder
connecting the GPU to the board. The heat and cooling would eventually crack
the solder and disconnect the GPU.

I had nothing to loose and saw a video about it on YouTube. So I cracked it
open and ran the flame around the GPU for several minutes. I eventually got it
boot up and it lasted for another 9 months and then I needed to do the process
again. I did it a few more times and probably got another year and half out of
the laptop.

------
hannofcart
> I figured, if it’s good enough for those four people on the internet - it’s
> good enough for me.

Words to live by. :)

------
hycaria
Great writing, I'll make sure to suggest "percussive maintenance" from now on.
Still leaves us wondering what would've happened with a less confident chef !

------
0815test
You may find that Debian with LXDE+Xfce installed (and the non-free repository
enabled, for firmware components) will work quite a bit better than Lubuntu
for the laptop you picked as your MacBook Air replacement. Recent versions of
*buntu seem to be a bit bloated compared to available alternatives, and this
especially matters on older hardware.

------
fouc
This article he's just being funny and deliberately doing everything wrong and
ignoring instructions.

In 2012, I successfully baked my 2007 MBP logic board and it worked for 2
years after that. It was a known issue w/ the Nvidia GPU connection.

Obviously you have to pre-heat the oven, you don't want the heating elements
to be on continuously as that would be too hot. A trick to reduce variance is
to pre-heat to say 200c, then put the logic board in. The heat that escapes
during that time would bring it close to your target 170c.

There should barely be any smell. In my case it was just the smell of burnt
dust, slight metallic smell, probably the solder.

Followed the instructions from:
[http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-
or...](http://russell.heistuman.com/2010/04/27/cooking-the-books-or-baking-my-
macbook-pro-logic-board/)

------
jankotek
If I recall correctly, Louis Rossmann claimed official Apple repair center
baked some motherboards as well. I don't have a link to exact video, but it is
probably covered here:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8)

And yes, I use Dell :)

------
lqet
> Weighing up the consequences of covering our main oven in molten MacBook, I
> also chose to use our standalone oven

Anyone who ever tried to bake a frozen pizza in one of these ovens following
the instructions on the box would've immediately recognized that this is a
_very_ bad idea.

------
baybal2
Guys, you will never ever be able to do work of a $1000 programmable reflow
oven on a kitchen appliance

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Depends on what you're doing and how patient you are- I know several people
that have done similarly with kitchen-grade toaster ovens, thermocouples, and
relays / SSR's to manage temperature and get professional-quality results.
It's within reason that someone with a laser thermometer or such to be able to
manually do the same thing.

~~~
baybal2
Can a toaster oven vent heat away on demand? No

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Can I wire a servo to open the front of the toaster? You bet. That'll be
another $15 for a servo, some wire and some code.

------
wickchuck
I had the same issue with my MacBook Air with the exact specs, though I never
dropped mine. Just shut it off one night after watching Thrones for a few
hours and it never turned back. Pleaded with Apple for quite a while to see if
they would replace the logic board due to defect, but they did not. Mine was
purchased in May 2013 and dead Nov 2014. Finally broke down a couple of years
ago and bought a low end I3, with 4gb of ram logic board and it's working
again. Guess I would have tried this as well had i known it was an option at
the time :)

~~~
Scoundreller
If you still have that logic board, sell it. Someone will buy it for repair or
donor parts.

~~~
wickchuck
Unfortunately I sent the whole thing back to the repair shop and I'm guessing
they probably sold it. In hindsight I should have taken it out prior to
sending it to them...

------
puzzle
Another thing that is commonly baked, by professionals: old tapes that have
trapped too much moisture and start to deteriorate. They're placed in ovens
for much longer, at lower temperatures.

~~~
rasz
dry boxing and pre baking older parts are standard practice in electronics
manufacturing. You put your parts in [https://www.manncorp.com/dry-
cabinets](https://www.manncorp.com/dry-cabinets) between the runs.

------
om3n
I've baked components before, only once with limited success.

Several years ago I had a 9800GTX graphics card fan go out, and its core temp
rose to 117 Celsius[1]. Eventually it died, and I attempted to bake the card
to re-flow broken solder. I'm not sure if that actually fix anything, but the
card worked for a bit longer.

Eventually I had to replace it.

[1]
[http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii191/om3n07/WHOA.jpg](http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii191/om3n07/WHOA.jpg)

------
toastking
I sort of wonder if using a heat gun in the area they thought was broken would
have worked better. Then it would have been more localized and easier to
control temperature-wise.

------
zackmorris
A MacBook Air can't survive a 30 cm drop (less than 1 foot)? Most phones can't
survive a 10 second dip in a toilet bowl? Is it just me or is technology today
weak?

I mean seriously, anyone could build these things better than the big
companies are. Yes, the technology in the chips and logic boards is
astounding. But the engineering of the cases is.. either amateurish bordering
on the inept, or companies design in such brittleness to sell more devices.

~~~
saagarjha
> A MacBook Air can't survive a 30 cm drop (less than 1 foot)? Most phones
> can't survive a 10 second dip in a toilet bowl? Is it just me or is
> technology today weak?

Was there ever a time where you could do this things to your electronics and
guarantee that they would work afterwards?

------
codercotton
Back in the early 2000s my iMac (Lime G3/400), which ran constantly, wouldn’t
turn on after being shut off and cooling down. It definitely didn’t fit in the
oven, but it’s ass went in anyhow, with the monitor hanging out the front of
the oven.

It came back on and worked for a couple more years... the next cool down
killed it for good though. No amount of baking would bring it back. Granted, I
didn’t pull the logic board (I’d upgraded to a G4 by then)...

~~~
lostgame
Oh, the G4. My favourite Mac ever. It's aesthetics are unprecedented. I still
run one in my studio - with dozens of GB of 360p formatted old shows like
classic Simpsons and the 1985 Twilight Zone, and tossed a SEGA, GBA and NES
emulator on it with a little USB game controller for when I need to unwind.

------
NeoBasilisk
I think I'm most disturbed by the author's comment that he has dropped it from
a height of 30cm multiple times.

~~~
Kurtz79
It's a 11' thin and light laptop, it is easy to abuse of the portability and
ending up using it in places such as on bed, sofa, moving it around the house,
etc...

Not saying that OP shouldn't be more careful with such an expensive piece of
hardware, but accidents happen, and some people are more careless than others
(I'm one of them and a smartphone or tablet of mine doesn't even get out of
the box withouth a matching protective cover).

------
asveikau
More than a decade ago I "successfully" fixed a thinkpad with a loose GPU
using a heat gun. Prior to the fix, the screen would have artifacts unless I
held the GPU in place with my hand. The repair only lasted a few months
though.

These days I would imagine the parts are smaller and more delicate.

------
georgeecollins
Does anyone ever try to address these issues with a soldering iron? I assume
these machine soldered boards have connections too fine or too inaccessible to
solder individual connections. But if you are trying something as crude as
baking the board.. maybe there is some way?

~~~
iSnow
Most likely, one of the bigger chips would have developed a cracked contact,
simply because of the bigger surface would introduce more stress if the whole
board was deformed/shocked. Now, those BGA's, you cannot solder them with a
soldering iron, reflowing is the only option.

------
gowld
> dropping it on the corner like that might have shaken a few bytes of SDRAM
> around

Is this a plausible diagnosis?

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Short answer, no. He’s just being cute.

Longer answer... well... two components I can specifically think of can be
effected by shock and vibration:

 _1._ Spinning disk hard drives are one, although you could probably debate
this because there are protections in place. The idea being read, shock,
corrupted read now in ram. Head of a hard drive should park itself under
shock, and checksum bits should protect against bad reads.

 _2._ The other is crystal isolators. XTALs are tuning forks. And if you
physically hit them the right way, they vibrate. It’s absolutely possible to
induce a pulse per minute variance with a crystal oscillator under vibration.
A lot of Apple products are moving to MEMS clocks, which are silicon “solid-
state”, do not suffer the same problem, smaller, cheaper, but have other
issues (remember that story about iPhones dying in the hospital because
someone vented the helium? MEMS can die in helium, but the story was nonsense,
not even slightly enough ratios to actually affect phones). Don’t know if you
could hit a crystal oscillator so hard and so sharp that you actually injected
a full clock cycle into a running device, but, answer the question yeah it
kind of sort of could be possible to corrupt ram with a shock to a crystal and
probably ceramic clock.

------
KIFulgore
I managed to revive a GeForce 8600M GT board using the oven method a few years
ago. A much smaller board with fewer components. The bake time was only about
8 minutes though, and I pre-warmed it thoroughly to ~105C in a separate oven
first.

------
lostgame
I did something similar to this on an iBook G4, I believe?

It's still working to this day. I feel like I was a lot more careful. The
author seems to describe their behaviour as rather reckless and haphazard.

Certainly putting it up to 180 wasn't a great idea. :3

------
magna8
I did this around 10 times with my MBA Mid 2011 in the last years now, it
worked every single time.

Why did you put it upside down with the heavy components underneath? You
should have read the guides.

~~~
merlincorey
When reflowing components, one definitely does not want to do so upside-down,
no matter the heat source, excepting in very special circumstances, perhaps.

------
tachion
Why don't people simply use their consumer rights where they apply? In UK
there's 6 years period for electronics good where the seller is responsible
for things working.

------
fouc
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7371908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7371908)
The earlier referenced article.

------
majikandy
You are an excellent writer, so funny and gripping. I suspect writing is your
true calling in life. Lol @ what on Earth is that oven? :)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Although I am tempted to take it to the genius bar now, just for
entertainment.

Do they serve baked MacBooks at the genius bar?

------
notyourday
Out of all dumb ideas sticking a logic board into a non-calibrated oven to
"bake" takes a cake.

~~~
anc84
I and many others had great success in "baking" our nvidia graphics cards a
couple of years back to resurrect them.

~~~
notyourday
In a calibrated oven.

------
mobilemidget
"if it’s good enough for those four people" made me lol

But at least now it is 4 to, well at least, 1 no success

------
babyslothzoo
I have a friend who did this with a PC motherboard, and it worked. Personally
I would never try it.

------
michaelcampbell
re: Ubuntu

> However, since 4.18.0 everything seem to work well!

This weird mixmastering of the version (18.04)... Yes, I know it's based on a
date, but it's a version number. Probably best to just leave it.

------
schlotzisk
He should definitely mailed it to Louis Rossmann. Sendyourmacbook.com

------
lapinot
Ok folks, i think we found the guy that started the fire in paris tonight.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666991)

------
hmart
Better Call Louis (Rossman)

------
wffurr
The saddest part is that it's impossible to replace that Macbook Air now. The
new ones have the garbage keyboards and even worse they discontinued the 11"
model.

Best you could do is pick up another used one. Can't even buy refurbs from
Apple.

~~~
saagarjha
> Can't even buy refurbs from Apple.

[https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/macbook-
air](https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/macbook-air)

~~~
wffurr
No 11 inch available

------
peteretep
TLDR: "or the final 60 seconds I thought I’d go off-piste and crank up the
temperature to 180 °C"

------
StreamBright
You have to wait until it gets crispy.

------
pnutjam
HP stream makes a nice linux laptop. I'm running opensuse Leap on one with no
problems. It handles KDE just fine.

