OMG! You were not joking about the "felt" like appearance of the dust!

My MBP seems to always have the fans on. I do occasionally run compressed air across the vents (from the outside) but decided to open it up thanks to this thread.

As I was cleaning, I noticed that when blowing compressed air into the vents, one of the fans was not turning (indicating no air reaching?) I grabbed some precision tweezers and pulled this out: https://i.imgur.com/aIPSRdi.jpg

Nice find, but please don't blow compressed air into a fan without blocking its rotation. It will induce currents and can cause damage to your mainboard.

Even more important: do not blow air in the opposite direction of the one the fan is made to rotate. If you are unlucky you'll damage it, if you are very unlucky it will stop working enterely. Source: I broke a lot of them

I'm pretty sure I managed to blow dust into the screen of an XPS 12.. So yeah, it pays to exercise caution.

Seems like a problem a simple diode would fix. Is this really an issue?

Most motherboards (but not all) have basic protection for this, so it's quite unlikely that you break your motherboard electronically that way.

That said, blowing compressed air at a fan will spin the fan much faster than what it was designed for. So you still risk breaking the fan mechanically. Always hold the fan when blowing compressed air at it.

Almost certainly not an issue on Apple hardware. Maybe on discount motherboards.

that's a really good point. thank you for pointing it out. I've cleaned many a fan, and have never thought about this.

Compressed air effective against little dust particles. But in case of fabric pieces or hair-like things it only making things worse.

Glad I could help!

Enjoy your now silent and non-thermal-throttling laptop =)

I love that it looks literally like a dust bunny.

wow! That's a lot of 'felt'.

> Pro tip: If your MBP is overheating (constant high fan speeds) the problem is usually a lot simpler than the thermal paste issue described in the article. It's usually just dust buildup.

Another thing also worth looking at is the process list and the Chrome process manager, sorted by CPU. I have no idea what, for example, sueddeutsche.de does - leave a page of them open in the background and the ads will run amok.

Another thing that can cause high CPU load is memory pressure resulting in massive swapping. If 2GB RAM are already set aside for the Docker VM and another 2GB for the core OS, you're left with 12GB RAM and that is not very much.

On the software side of things, I find that Safari treats my laptop a lot better than Chrome. I get maybe 3x better battery life when running with a bunch of active tabs in Safari. Not sure what they're doing to throttle things, but it's pretty effective.

Safari (like most other Apple-developed apps) aggressively restricts processing in tabs or windows that aren't visible to the user. Apple calls it, adorably, App Nap: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...

The annoying part is that App Nap also does this with plugged in desktops or even worse with servers that don't even have a monitor plugged in. At least it can be disabled systemwide.

Throttling background apps has its place on a desktop, too - leaving aside power efficiency, there are material performance gains to be made when the OS automatically prioritizes foreground tasks. I wouldn't want FCPX rendering impacted by a rogue banner ad on HowToAddLensFlare.co.cz, know what I mean?

I can see how it might be problematic in a headless environment, but for most people most of the time it's probably a useful feature.

Until some unknown stray process starts to eat 100% of your CPU and you just have no tools to find which tab it is. You can kill the process easily tho, but I'd rather fix problem at it's root.

"you're left with 12GB RAM and that is not very much"

omg

Outlook consumes 1.5GB RAM alone. Then Mattermost and Slack with each 1.5GB, whoops you're at 7.5 GB. Another 2GB for Photoshop, another GB for Cisco Jabber, Excel... then 50 open Chrome tabs and whoops, where has all the RAM gone?

For people working on 64GB+ workstations this is no problem but Apple only supports 32GB in the newest lineup of MBPs.

My currently open Outlook is holding onto 125 MB of RAM. I have at least 12 spreadsheets open in Excel for 112 MB.

IMHO you are wildly overestimating the RAM use of those programs, aside from the others, as they normally run (sure - I can get Excel over a GB running scripts or manipulating a large file).

Right now I'm sitting at:

- Slack 1.08GB

- Safari (11 tabs) 4.50GB

- Chrome (5 tabs) 2.17GB

- Outlook 1.13GB

These are ludicrous numbers and, frankly, the only reason why I need 16GB+ machines.

> sueddeutsche.de

German leather?

The "felt like" buildup of dust reminds me degunking a ball mouse every few weeks. Oh the feeling of a smooth mouse afterwards.

How do you open it?

You need a couple of things:

1) Suction cup.

2) Screwdriver kit that contains pentalobe and torx bits. You don't need to buy some expensive kit as you can get them cheaply from any hardware store.

What is the suction cup for?

Pulling off the bottom plate once you've removed the screws. It's not essential, but it obviates the risk of damaging the case with a spudger or other prying tool.

I always lifted it up from the heatsink side with my fingers. It overhangs a few mm from the hinge.

I think it's not possible to open 2016+ models without suction cup anymore, there is some weird clips inside that open up with bending of of case.

I think Apple finally won with making their computers impossible to open.

Ifixit has a lot of good tutorials with Images you can check them out.

You can Google that and find many guides on that topic. iFixit has really good guides.

TLDR: Remove the screws on the bottom. You need a special screwdriver and keep in mind that (at least on the <=2015 models afaik) there are different size screws used around the hinge.

You probably won't find that screwdriver at local hardware store though. I had endless issues finding even semi-common torx bits at Lowe's.

ifixit can solve that problem as well (though reasonably expensiveish (additional thing. their magnetic mat with squares on them was the greatest purchase I ever made for the workshop at my first job.))

The ifixit Pro toolkit really is a necessity for anyone even remotely interested in taking things apart.

I've used mine to take apart every conceivable consumer electronic, and through social bits for Nintendo, Apple, etc are priceless.

I also got the magnetic mat, a Christmas gift from my wife, and when disassembling things with lots of screws is useful for drawing out the device for their location.

> You need a special screwdriver

P5 Pentalobe screwdriver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentalobe_security_screw