Repaste Your MacBook (But Don't)

Summary

You should repaste your MacBook (but don't) July 10, 2025 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.) But my MacBook is starting to show its age in one area: it’s not quiet anymore. If you’re doing anything too intensive like compiling code for awhile, or converting something in Handbrake, the age of the fans being quiet is long past. The fans are properly loud. (And despite having two cats, it’s not them! I clean out the fans pretty regularly.) Enter the thermal paste Everyone online seems to point toward one thing: the thermal paste on computers tends to dry up over the years. What the heck is thermal paste? Well, components on your computer that generate a lot of heat are normally made to touch something like a copper heatsink that is really good at pulling that heat away from it. The issue is, when you press these two metal surfaces against each other, even the best machining isn’t perfect and you there’s microscopic gaps between them meaning there’s just air at those parts, and air is a terrible conductor of heat. 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. The problem with this solution is after hundreds and hundreds of days of intense heat, the paste can dry up into something closer to almost a powder, and it’s not nearly as good at filling in those gaps. Replacement...