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Repasting a MacBook

My favorite memory of my M1 Pro MacBook Pro was the whole sensation of “holy crap, you never hear the fans in this thing”, which was very novel in 2021. Four years later, this MacBook Pro is still a delight. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a laptop, and while I’d love to pick up the new M4 goodness, this dang thing still seems to just shrug at basically anything I throw at it. Video editing, code compiling, CAD models, the works. (My desire to update is helped though by the fact I got the 2TB SSD, 32GB RAM option, and upgrading to those on new MacBooks is still eye wateringly expensive.)

The solution is to put a little bit of thermal paste (basically a special grey toothpaste gunk that is really good at transferring heat) between them, and it fills in any of those microscopic gaps. I looked up if I could just grab another replacement cable here, and sure enough you can… but the Touch ID chip is cryptographically paired to your MacBook so you’d have to take it into an Apple Store. But if you do have that experience and are very careful, or have a local repair shop that can do it for a reasonable fee (and your MacBook is a few years old so as to warrant it) it’s honestly a really nice tweak that I feel will hopefully at least get me to the M5 generation.

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