Disbuttembled the Macbook

...there did in fact seem to be a bit too much thermal grease applied. Not as bad as the picture from the service manual but certainly more than the thin coating that is normally recommended.

Removed the dried gunk and applied some Arctic Silver 5... machine's not running any cooler (at least according to CoreDuoTemp) alas but for some reason the fans aren't coming on as bad, and they are quieter when the do come on, so maybe the chip is in fact cooling more evenly now.

This is why I prefer DIY ... in the past I've thought Apple made pretty good products for the most part but for the past 4-5 years their output has been amazingly shoddy -- the "wind tunnel" G4 towers, the first-gen iMac G5s with their dodgy fans and inverters, the "water-cooled" G5 towers that are still noisy as hell, the teething problems with the MB and MBP.

It's getting to the point that I think Apple should think about concentrating on the OS and API and let someone else design the hardware.

Then again, it's pretty hard finding a CoreDuo laptop with DVI out for under $1000 (amazon price: $999 after $100 rebate), so Apple's doing something right, right now.