Ten minutes later, still a grey screen-and the fans are spinning madly. Apple logo, then progress bar, then grey screen. Huh-usually the GPU issue would present itself during the AHT, but not this time. I ran the quick test, which found no errors. Replacing the slow hard drive with an SSD makes this thing feel brand new! Beginning of the Debugging Journeyįearing the worst, I rebooted into the Apple Hardware Test mode (right after startup sound, hold 'D' key). Horizontal banding, some weird color issues.

But then, I noticed the display would 'glitch'. First off, it was using a slow 5200 RPM hard disk after replacing that with a nice, fast SSD, and ensuring she had 8 GB of RAM in the laptop, I was pretty pleased with my work, and was about to shut down the laptop and send it on its way. My sister just turned over her 2011 15' MacBook Pro, which she said was running slow, and I dug in. I've handled three 2011 MacBook Pros (none of them my own-I had an Air back then), and all three of them were scrapped because of the GPU issue. The problem was so rampant, Apple was forced to set up a free repair program for affected MacBook Pros-though the 2011 model has since been dropped from that program. There was a major flaw in the AMD Radeon GPUs included with that model year's logic board which seemed to cause GPU failure either due to overheating, internal chip problems, BGA solder joints getting broken, or a combination of the above. The 2011 MacBook Pro has, for almost a decade, been the exception to that rule. I've been a Mac user for years, and I've repaired hundreds of different Macs, from the early II series to the latest 20 model MacBook Pros, iMacs (and other Apple hardware to boot!), and there is almost never a hardware situation where I've thrown in the towel and told someone to ditch their Mac.

Macbook air boots to os x utilities