Chosen Solution
Good Day, I have a problem with my Early 2011 MacBook Pro 15" all was fine, after suddenly I started getting distortions and lines on the display. Soon after it wouldn’t start anymore. When booting the Apple Logo and the progress bar are now green i/o black… and halfway through it stops and the screen switches to white and remains. I’ve reset the NVRAM and the SMC, even opened and disconnected the battery for half an hour but no change. I also tried Internet recovery by booting with option/cmd/R - I can choose the network, enter the password and the globe starts turning and the progress bar starts (all in green) it finishes the download. Than the Apple logo and progress bar of the boot sequence comes again (still green, and half way through the screen goes white and thats it…GRRRRRRR Anyone able to help point me in the right direction? Dont know what else to try… Specs: MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011 2.0 Ghz i7 (Model A1286) Graphics HD3000 with 512 MB1TB SSD Samsung EVO 85016GB RAM DDR Corsair 2x8 GBLogic Board A1286 820-2915-A
This is the classical GPU (graphics card issue) 2011 edition. This problem was acknowledged by Apple and they’ve had a recall which ended in December 2016. Not a lot to do now even if you find a repair shop who does graphics card replacement/reballing the issue still remains because is a design flaw of this machine…
@mayer using gfxCardStatus, a little software that will disable the discrete GPU on startup, works very well. If you can still start the laptop, it’s easy to install (so do it as soon as the graphics problems start to appear!). If you can’t start it, there is also a method here https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/201… Anything regarding replacing the GPU (even with the so-called ’new’ version) will only be temporary, it will fail again (I tried), so better plan to use gfxcardstatus on the long term. However, I just had the SMC chip replaced on mine (it failed at the same time as the GPU did), and the cost - 300€ - was the same no matter what they replaced. As soon as the GPU fail again (between 6 months to 2 years from now), I will use gfxcardstatus to switch - and I can install it now.
