Wherein I discover a 17″ Macbook Pro needs a replacement fan, endeavour to replace said fan at a modest price, and encounter unexpected resistance along the way.

We use Macs almost exclusively as our work machines these days, and we don’t have a lot of spare hardware lying around. Going without a machine for even a few hours is a big productivity hit. So the awful grinding noise that began emanating from Katrin’s Macbook last week was not a welcome sound. Luckily it was clearly coming from the fan, not the hard drive.

We were having an extremely busy week, and having waited days in the past for support at the local Apple store my first instinct was to find a local repair shop that could do it quickly. After all, it’s just a fan, so it should be fast and cheap, right?

Silly me.

After calling several repair shops I realized that the fix was going to run between $150 and $200. Pretty steep for a simple part swap — I can get parts in my car fixed for less than that — so I decided to do it myself.

Here’s what I discovered:

1. I couldn’t find any stores in Toronto who were willing to sell me the part. They all want to do full repairs.
2. More generally, it seems Apple doesn’t allow local service providers to resell parts. They are full-service only.
3. Laptop fans are commodity even in Macs, according to one of the folks at laptopexpert.ca, so you’re better off shopping for the fan by its physical dimensions rather than an Apple part number. (I.e. you pay more for an “Apple fan” than a “laptop fan”, but they’re the same thing.) This may help in the future, but in my case I didn’t know the fan size and couldn’t find it online.
4. Darryl at iRepair.ca was most helpful on the phone and pointed me at several web sites for finding the part. He also had the most reasonable repair prices, about $50 less than everyone else I called.
5. I couldn’t find any Canadian wholesalers who had the part. Perhaps I didn’t search hard enough, but I was surprised, nevertheless.
6. IFixIt.com and PowerBookMedic.com are two US-based businesses that sell parts online. Their shipping options are slightly different, and the part prices in this case were about the same. It’s worth checking both and deciding how important delivery speed is to you.
7. There are fans for sale on eBay, but when I searched I only found used parts. A used fan is a pretty silly thing to buy, in my opinion, so… no joy there.

End result: I bought a fan from IFixIt for $40, they shipped it overnight (FedEx: $40), and I paid another $5 and change in HST. I used the excellent IFixIt repair guide and had the repair complete in under an hour. If I wasn’t in such a rush I could have chosen a $4.00 delivery option instead, and waited for US Post.

Thank you, IFixIt, and Darryl at iRepair.ca. Darryl, you’re first on my list the next time I need repair help.

P.S. I did also try an app called smcFanControl, to no avail. Worth a try.