So my 17" is dying like many others. I can get it to barely boot with a number of kexts disabled, but it's definitely dying. This is a month after paying $175+tax to replace a swelling battery in early September. At that time they ran hardware tests and only mentioned the battery. Have any of you had luck when dealing with Apple on this issue? If so, did you email customer care or try any channel beyond the Apple Store itself? I can point to a lot of tech site reference on the matter as well as the fact that they authorized a repair program for imacs using the same gpu, but I doubt that matters. I've already been through the existing threads on this. Unfortunately I do have to replace it with something. I held onto the 17" because I like the screen space.
When I got bummed by Radeongate on my early-2011 15", I had a new GPU reballed in with leaded solder (I could have used unleaded, but Apple's crappy thermal design would mean that unleaded solder will break again pretty quickly) and also reapplied the thermal paste properly on the GPU and CPU.
Now it's running nice and cool, with average temperatures between 39-47ºC.
Apple isn't going to do jack **** for us, someone already did the math there (at Apple) and figured that it was cheaper to lose us customers and also the lawsuit that was filed against them by Whitfield, Bryson and Mason LLP.
Please join this FB group on the Radeongate debacle.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/498509366929187?ref=m_notif¬if_t=group_comment
In this group, there is a pinned document which contains a list of reballers in several regions that can reball a new GPU into your Mac.
