Put the focus where it belongs -it's a bad cooling system, bad design with no intake vents, and above BAD CHIP!!!
You appear to be confusing these failures with a previous, unrelated problem. The recent failures are
not believed to be internal to the GPU, but rather in the BGA solder connections between the chip and the motherboard. There are no bad chips involved, to the best of anyone's knowledge.
This is really all a pile of misinformation that takes the blame off of Apple(where it belongs) and places it on an element(lead free solder) that works fine for EVERY SINGLE OTHER MANUFACTURER OF LAPTOPS.
If you want to argue that lead-free solder hasn't caused problems for anyone else, good luck with that, because the statistics I've seen agree with me. All electronics have shown a significantly elevated failure rate since RoHS. It isn't just cracking; that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Tin also tends to form "whiskers" (long growths that stick out from the surface), which can also cause serious failures. For example, Swatch had a $1BN recall because of tin whiskers caused by switching to lead-free solder. And initially they suspected that the unintended acceleration events in the Toyota Camry were caused by tin whiskers resulting from the use of lead-free solder (though NASA studied it and concluded that this was probably not the actual cause of the failures). Any time you have two contacts within a centimeter of one another, you're at risk of failure because of tin whiskers. BGA contacts fall well within that limit.
And there's also tin pest, where at cold temperatures (below about 56F/13.2C), tin begins a self-catalyzing transition into a brittle, nonconductive, crystalline form. If this occurs sufficiently in a BGA joint, that joint is going to shatter the next time you heat up the chip, no matter what kind of cooling you're using, and it may fail to conduct electricity even without shattering.
Worse, tin pest accelerates the growth of whiskers.
That's not to say that inadequate cooling can't make fracturing problems worse—it certainly can—but problems caused by lead-free solder will eventually occur in almost all electronics no matter how well you cool the components.
Thinkpad T520: mine litecoin on it.
It isn't high temperatures that cause solder joints to shatter. It is
changes in temperature. A device that uses the GPU very little would be unaffected, as would a device that uses it nearly continuously. You start to have problems when a GPU goes through periods of heavy use followed by periods of light use. Keeping the chip hot reduces the rate of both tin pest and whisker formation, and reduces the stress on the solder balls, so your mining almost certainly will extend the life of your Thinkpad, not reduce it.
If you have evidence to back up that statement, please present it. This round, all evidence currently points to this being a simple BGA failure, not a failure of the in-chip solder bumps or other in-chip failures as you seem to believe.
Lead solder for repairs is allowed by law, and those who use lead for reballs do so to make an effective permanent repair risking their own health as a consequence.
The ironic thing being that it would be much safer to use lead at the factory, where chances are good that no human is involved in the process at all.
My PVC-free Apple iPhone charging cable self-destructed randomly one day. The plastic coating just disintegrated. Turned brown and then split open and went green. As in gooey green gunk.
Apple Store guy tells me this is a consequence of using less environmentally harmful plastics.
Half right. The failure was likely caused by the wires breaking and shorting out, causing localized overheating. The resulting discoloration was because of the PVC-free coating.
I couldn't tell you whether the plastics fail to protect the wires as well as previous plastics did, but my gut says that the reduced thickness of the newer cables and the resulting increase in flexibility is a bigger contributor than the nature of the plastics themselves. Metal tends to flex only so many times before metal fatigue takes its toll, and the thicker the wire, the less it will flex, and the longer it will typically last. That's why when I replaced my second Lightning cable, I replaced it with a much heavier-duty third-party cable, rather than with an Apple cable.
So, Apple laptops die faster with lead-free solder?
I would argue that all hardware dies faster with lead-free solder. The only question is whether that hardware will die soon enough that someone still cares about it.
