My early 2011 MBP has had one logic board replaced so far at my own expense a short while after AppleCare expired. This site has been compiling relevant information to those experiencing the same problem, and the #mbp2011 hashtag on Twitter is also a good resource for those affected:
Had two 2007 MacBook Pro's break down that way. Local Apple Care Service providers didn't want to apply Apple-mandated extended warranty. I was pretty disappointed to find out that later models exhibited similar flaws, because the soldering issue of 2007 models was blamed on nVidia.
When a friend was buying her mother a christmas present iPad, I went with her to examine which models handle the tablet workload better. We ended up picking an older generation, non-retina model. A few previous generation retina models, presumably running latest iOS updates, had ridiculously high temperatures just idling on the shelf.
Nvidia made a run of defective GPUs somewhere around 2007-2008. Tom's Hardware claims[0] that all G84 and G86 GPUs other than warranty replacements produced in late 20008 are defective.
It's not a BGA solder issue like we've seen on numerous laptop GPUs over the years, but a problem with the internal interconnects. Heating it, as if to reflow a BGA does temporarily solve the problem, but in my experience, the period of time it keeps working after heating gets shorter each time.
Here in Europe Apple is replacing affected logics for free with consumer law claims. The are only two conditions: 1. you need to have the original receipt 2. it must be a non business purchase (so you must be a consumer)
I had one logic board replaced under AppleCare in 2013. It only took a few months before the new logic board exhibited the same GPU/heat problems.
Finally, just a few days ago -- right before Christmas -- it just up and died. Seeing how I didn't want to pay for a new logic board with the same design defect, I just ended up buying a new laptop (and no, it is not a Mac).
My early 2011 MBP was probably the most expensive laptop I've bought in a long time (the most expensive was the Powerbook 170 - oh how I loved the trackball on that thing), and I loved the form factor and expandability. It really bugs me that it died while it was still more than usable in terms of performance.
I had my "2011 MBP - refurbished" covered under Applecare so I got to at least get it covered as these issues were cropping up. They replaced both the logicboard and the harddrive.
I ended up selling it for whatever I could get for it a month ago and just cutting my losses before the Applecare ran out.
tbh if this is the GPU, then this is prob an AMD and nVidia problem with using cheap solder on their daughterboards. I remember a rash of manufacturers, sony, asus, etc having this sort of issue. I'm kind of leery of discrete gpu's in laptops these days, esp when the Haswell on-board one is good enough for most of what I do.
The issue isn't that EU-mandated tin-alloy solders are cheap, it's that the solder balls aren't solid and non-lead solders are brittle. For components that don't undergo constant radical thermal shifts, this is a nonissue. For the only ball grid array-mounted component on the board (the GPU), this is a recipe for eventual failure.
If the balls were factory tested for solidity this would become far less of an issue. Industry papers on the manufacture of solder balls indicate they are not; when those balls were lead, it didn't matter because lead's not thermally brittle.
ah thanks. hard to me to find laymen articles on this (interest prompted on an ATI daughter card failure on an '09 iMac), so always interesting to find out more.
http://mbp2011.org/
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23mbp2011