How to repair the parts that explode in Lenovo Yoga laptops

Summary

Lenovo Yoga laptops, especially those from the “900”, “920”, “930”, and “940” series, have a design defect where their power circuitry can self-destruct. The company will not acknowledge this defect as serious enough for a recall, and has left many customers with broken audio (or worse) on their notebooks. I have micrograph of this defect on my own Yoga, transistor “Q5” has a hole blown clean through it. According to the schematic I found, it’s a power MOSFET that turns on/off the audio circuit. A blown up component on a $1400 computer?? “upgrading your drivers” won’t fix this one, this exploded transistor once controlled the computer’s audio system Like many others, including people on amazon and more than 50 people on Lenovo’s own forum, company support was unhelpful as inconveniently, these failures often happen just out of the warranty period. Furthermore, lenovo has no sufficient replacement parts available for sale, and what is for sale online from 3rd party sellers is more expensive than buying a whole new laptop. It doesn’t help that a lot of the computer’s electronic components themselves cannot be purchased from digikey or mouser –many of them are also undocumented. Unless Lenovo straightens this out with the customers they have sold broken machines to, I advise avoidance of yoga-branded laptops, as this is unacceptable practice for a manufacturer of thousand-dollar computers. If you have experienced the similar defects, were denied a refund, and are interested in joining me for resolution, please reach out to me [at] adammunich [dot] com with whatever evidence of your frustrations you’d like to share, or do so in the comments below. Update: Sept 10, 2019 I have received no response from Lenovo and decided that the only productive way forward was to take the issue into my own hands. The suspect part in the laptop is a P-Channel MOSFET that turns on power to the audio amplifier. This part is available from mouser electronics for $0.50 or so, and so I ordere...