Here we have a video of me bringing a 17-inch MacBook Pro back to life with a heat gun.

It did revive this particular machine.

That is the firsthand result.

It should not be confused with a proper repair procedure.

These MacBook Pro models were among the machines Apple identified as potentially affected by failures involving the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT.

Apple’s remedy was hardware service or logic-board replacement, not reheating the GPU area with a handheld heat gun.

Back when I made this video, I wrote that the heat treatment might keep the machine running for somewhere between three and twelve months, and suggested that adding flux could make the result last longer.

I do not have evidence for a predictable lifespan like that.

Adding flux also does not turn uncontrolled heat-gun treatment into proper BGA rework.

A handheld heat gun provides broad, poorly controlled heating and can damage nearby components, warp the board or create additional faults.

So the correct way to describe this experiment is:

the heat treatment temporarily revived this particular failed MacBook Pro.

Nothing more universal than that.

I later tried a similar heat-gun experiment on a PC video card and, at this point in 2013, was considering trying the same thing on a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

That remains part of the historical experiment.

It is not a recommendation to repair those machines this way.

Still, temporarily seeing this MacBook Pro come back to life was rather satisfying.

Sources