Tag: macbook pro

Display Replacement And Logicboard Upgrade In mid-2012 MacBook Pro

Last month, my workhorse MacBook Pro – my favourite mid-2012 model – suffered a small accident. Thankfully, no internal damage was sustained – but the glass in the screen was shattered. Of course, rather than buy a new Mac, I bought an A1278 MacBook Pro display assembly on eBay to repair my machine.

I had already been planning to upgrade the logicboard in this MacBook Pro. A tricky job, but I had found the correct logicboard on eBay some months back which would allow me to upgrade from the 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor to the 2.9GHz Intel Core i7 processor, and I had been waiting for the right time when I had enough free time to do an upgrade I had never done before – and to troubleshoot or restore the Mac to its former state after doing so, should anything go wrong, before I needed it to take out on the road again.

I had also planned for some time to fit a new trackpad, as the original was starting to get a little worn after six years of heavy use. The damage to the screen forced my hand; as I would have to open the laptop up and work on it anyway, I would do all this work at once, the week before an important show. I also wanted to document all of this in short videos on my Instagram Stories. I shall post some here for you as well.

‘Money Torx’

I began with the logicboard upgrade, following a guide on iFixIt. Thankfully I didn’t have to complete every single step of the guide, as the new logicboard I had bought already had a heatsink and a speaker and microphone fitted so I didn’t have to switch them over from my old logicboard.

I also paused my logicboard upgrade midway through to begin some of the other work I wanted to do – taking the battery out to gain access to the trackpad before completing reassembly of the logicboard. Replacing the trackpad is a fairly simple job to do, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fiddly! Check out the microscopic little screws which hold the trackpad in place, in my videos below!

First look at the new logicboard.
New Logicboard
First look at the new logicboard.
New logicboard fitted, and battery removed to access trackpad.
Logicboard Fitted
New logicboard fitted, and battery removed to access trackpad.
Fitting new trackpad with its tiny, tiny screws.
New Trackpad
Fitting new trackpad with its tiny, tiny screws.
Insulation tape ZIF retainer

With the logicboard and the trackpad both successfully replaced, I began to reassemble the MacBook Pro as much as I could before fitting the new display assembly – although not without a minor mishap of snapping the retaining clip of the ZIF connector holding the keyboard LED backlight ribbon cable.

That wouldn’t be the end of the world to lose this feature, but I do like it! I ended up holding the ribbon cable into its ZIF housing with a small tab of insulation tape instead, and so far the keyboard backlight has performed completely normally – so I think I got away with it, on this occasion.

However, it was when I came to replace the screen that things started to get really difficult.

In my haste to buy a replacement screen, I had simply searched on eBay for ‘A1278 display assembly’ and bought the first good-quality one I saw. The screen arrived and was in top condition (better than the original one in fact, which had already suffered a couple of minor dents in the lid – as is fairly common with these models of MacBook Pro). But when I went to fit the new screen I had bought, I saw that the connectors on one side did not match those on the screen I had removed.

Of course I knew that Apple had used the A1278 model identifier for a few different MacBook models released between 2008 and 2012, but I hadn’t realised the internal connectivity had changed along with the general component specifications. My MacBook Pro had an LDVS data ribbon connector (with a short cable) on one side, and four separate brass antennae (for Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) on the other; the new display I had bought had the same LDVS connector on the short cable side, but no antennae – instead, that had a second (longer) ribbon cable with a small LDVS connection.

I was fortunate to be able to borrow a slightly damaged but useable screen from a dead MacBook Pro which has used to belong to a family member, and which had the correct connectors on both sides. This meant that the Mac would at least be useable on my gigs during the coming weekend. I then had to source another new, uncracked display for this model of MacBook Pro, with the right connections on both sides.

The next new screen arrived a few days later. The antennae fitted perfectly. All seemed to be going swimmingly! And then, I found I struggled to reconnect the the LDVS data cable. Having now fitted various different screens onto this Mac over the past few days, I had become fairly adept and doing these fragile little components – so I was surprised to find I couldn’t insert the LDVS connector into its housing smoothly. Not wishing to force it, I looked up online whether anyone else had experienced the same difficulties…

Field surgery

An iFixIt forum post soon showed be that I was once again a victim of Apple reusing model identifier numbers for very slightly differently aged Macs. The screen I had bought was from a 2011 A1278 MacBook Pro, and not a mid-2012 A1278 MacBook Pro! They are identical in design. But Apple apparently changed the supplier for the LDVS connector, resulting in a size discrepancy of 1mm between the 2011 data cables and the 2012 data cables, with the 2011 ones being a tiny amount larger. This is why the connector would not easily fit into the housing on the logicboard for my mid-2012 Mac.

Fearing that I would now have to buy a third screen and double-check these details too, I read more comments on the iFixIt community post. A couple of people said they had successfully fitted 2011 displays onto mid-2012 MacBook Pros by using nail clippers or a small emery board to shave 0.5mm of fibreglass surround off each side of the LDVS connector. It felt extremely risky to go modifying the shape of components in my laptop using a pair of nail clippers – but I knew that if I didn’t try that I’d have to buy another new screen anyway, so I felt that was worth a go.

Discovering for the first time that the first new screen I bought wouldn't fit!
Original Replacement Display Issues
Discovering for the first time that the first new screen I bought wouldn't fit!
Discovering the LDVS cable won't connect on the second new screen.
Second New Screen Issues
Discovering the LDVS cable won't connect on the second new screen.
Getting ready to modify the width of the data ribbon connector using nail clippers.
Prepping For Surgery
Getting ready to modify the width of the data ribbon connector using nail clippers.
Finally a new display installed with connectors both sides fitting the logicboard!
New Screen Successfully Connected
Finally a new display installed with connectors both sides fitting the logicboard!

Remarkably, that worked perfectly, and the Mac booted with the new screen attached without any issues!

So finally, a few lessons to take from this mammoth repair/upgrade going forward:

  • When buying secondhand spares or parts on eBay, always double-, or triple-check that they are correct in all aspects – especially when it comes to model numbers which get reused across multiple years or devices! Be prepared for the fact that finding exactly the right item may take some time.
  • Physically modifying components is not impossible! But always go very, very slowly, take lots of care, and make sure the lighting is good.

Why The mid-2012 Is Still The Best MacBook

That maybe a nigh-on ten-year-old design, but the mid-2012 MacBook Pro (A1278) is still the best laptop Apple have made. There are people who say that the model which superseded it (the A1502 Retina MacBook Pro) is the best one. I won’t fight them on that – those 2015 MacBook Pros are still excellent machines, with many of the same attractive qualities as the A1278 – but they are wrong.

The A1278 is more serviceable and more upgradeable. You can easily change the battery when its performance inevitably starts to wear out (as happens to all batteries). You can change and upgrade the storage (in my own mid-2012 MacBook Pro, I have fitted a 1TB SSD as a system drive, plus a 2TB SATA disk in place of where the original optical drive used to be). And you can change the RAM up to an actual maximum of 16GB in a matter of moments.

With the A1502 model, on the other hand, changing the battery is difficult as the original battery is glued in place – and a replacement battery can cost up to five times what a new battery for a mid-2012 MacBook Pro costs. You can still change or upgrade the storage – but the NVMe SSD this model requires also costs a lot more. RAM is soldered onto the Logicboard and cannot be replaced or upgraded. And although you gain onboard HDMI and more Thunderbolt 2 ports (compared to the A1278), you lose Ethernet and FireWire 800 ports.

However, if you are content with your specs (or happy to spend more time and money on maintenance) the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro is still a very good machine, and very nice to use. It’s after 2015 that things really start to go downhill…

For the last five years, Apple have insisted on producing worse laptops than they did in the past. Gradually removing all the features people actually liked and used, whilst at the same time making the machines all but impossible to repair or maintain.

Consider some of the features of the older MacBooks I have mentioned which no longer appear on the newer models… Apple’s MagSafe charger design is a work of true genius. It’s subtle pieces of brilliance in design like MagSafe which in the past have set Apple’s products apart from the herd, and made it worth paying the premium for their brand. So in 2016, Apple discontinued this universally-acclaimed design in favour of charging over USB-C on their new A1707 MacBooks (which iFixIt scores a lousy 1/10 for repairability).

Likewise, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro and the earlier Retina models produced alongside it feature a scissor-style keyboard using a mechanism Apple calls a ‘Magic Keyboard’, which in my opinion is an absolute joy to type on. In 2015, Apple started using their ‘Butterfly Keyboard’ mechanism instead – a keyboard mechanism which is painful to use, received consistently negative reviews, and was actually the subject of a lawsuit – purely for the sake of slightly thinner MacBooks.

This single-minded pursuit of thin and lightweight has resulted in laptops which are less repairable, less upgradeable, have keyboards which hurt your hands, and feature next to no connectivity (a MacBook Pro which has four USB ports – one of which has to be used for the charger – and nothing else is not, in my opinion, Pro at all).

So although they may seem chunky by today’s standards, the mid-2012 MacBook Pro is still a vastly more Pro device than almost all the MacBook models released after it. The specs are still comparable to much more recent machines – and if you happen to buy one with lower specs, you can upgrade it to the maximum for around £100, with less than an hour’s work. You can plug in almost everything you might need to plug in, without having to take out a mid-sized bank loan to purchase Apple’s own cable adaptors. And you get all the advantages of some of Apple’s best design work – especially the MagSafe charger.

The only serious downside of the older A1278 is that the onboard graphics chip seriously limits performance if you are running a very graphics-intense workflow (video editing or rendering, for example). It is possible to get around this, although the workaround is a clunky and not-especially-portable solution.

A couple of years ago, Apple finally opened up the use of external graphics cards with MacBooks, recognising that thermal throttling on graphics issues is one of the biggest causes of loss of performance for MacBook users. Officially, eGPUs are only supported on Thunderbolt 3 enabled Macs running macOS 10.13.4 (‘High Sierra’) or later. However, it is possible to force eGPU support on Thunderbolt 2 Macs (including the A1278 MacBook Pro) using the PurgeWrangler script, which is something I have done successfully prior to my Cheesegrater Mac Pro build.

(I should note that since I did that, Mayank Kumar who designed the PurgeWrangler script has released a new version called Kryptonite, which supersedes PurgeWrangler as it does not need root level kernel modifications requiring System Integrity Protection to be disabled on your Mac. I have not personally tried Kryptonite, as I have not used my eGPU much recently.)

I would not recommend taking this route unless you know that you are going to be running lots of heavy-duty graphics on your Mac. But it is always worth being aware that these types of modifications are available for certain specific use cases.

In conclusion, the only thing you gain by opting for a MacBook built in 2015 or later is a marginal saving in terms of size and weight. Personally, I would always rather have a computer which is slightly bulkier, but is actually fit for purpose and which can be repaired when it goes wrong.