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My MacBook Pro 2011 GPU has failed earlier last week, I had to remove the GPU drivers to get it to work again.

After doing so, it either doesn't sleep at all (when closing the lid), or it goes to sleep when you choose Sleep from the Apple menu but never wakes up.

It also has an issue with overheating and screen brightness.

I'm wondering if there is any solutions to any of these problems.

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Ahmed Eid
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  • My 2015 macbook air started to do the same thing about a month ago, going to sleep and not coming back on, then it would come back on randomly, then when I restart or put it to sleep it just takes longer and longer to come back on... it is two weeks since my laptop has come on. I am not the only one with this issue as a few other people on the apple website forum and ifixit forum have complained about the same issue. This came just after upgrading to the latest high sierra. btw, I did all of the normal troubleshooting fixes and nothing works. – Christopher Maughan Aug 01 '18 at 02:33

2 Answers2

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The first thing I would try is resetting the System Management Controller (SMS).

How to reset the SMC on your model of MacBook Pro

  1. Shut down your MBP
  2. Unplug the power cable from your MBP
  3. For 10 seconds, press and hold at the same time the shiftcontroloption keys (on the left side of the built-in keyboard) and the power button
  4. After 10 seconds let go of all keys and the power button
  5. Plug in the power cable
  6. Switch your MBP back on
Monomeeth
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The root problem is quite common on that model and just removing the dGPU drivers for the Radeon chip one way to get it "to work" again.

But that leaves you with a machine that still uses the AMD chip for display, just without the proper drivers for accelerated display and no proper thermal management for the dGPU.

For a better fix in software you might want to try this solution here: GPU problem - Boot Hangs on Grey Screen. That will give you accelerated display using the Intel graphics chip and a certain amount of thermal management back. The full set of drivers is necessary to use the machine and get thermal management. The fix described in the link does work with High Sierra, but the drawbacks on that system are more numerous than with Sierra.

One problem with this solution is that on High Sierra the keys for display brightness will probably not work correctly. (Compared to Sierra Apple changed how that works/how that depends on GPU status or proper drivers…?)
To work around that, use macOS Sierra, that will also give you an overall much better experience in this situation. Alternatively, staying on High Sierra you might resort to using a software solution like Brightness Slider (free, AppStore-link) or a similar software. With Brightness-Slider you may even set up separate hotkey combinations for brightness control.

The sleep issue also gets worse with High Sierra. With the above "solution" linked to this should work well for a time, unless you connect too much peripherals (primarily to the ThunderBolt port) and it gets progressively worse, if you let the system go to sleep with these peripherals connected. With Sierra, Lid-Close-Sleep can be restored by re-setting NVRAM/SMC once the problem pops up. For both versions of macOS a more convenient solution is to avoid system sleep via lid-close. This is triggered via SMC and in the above configuration the data in SMC/NVRAM will eventually prevent proper wake.
To work around that, avoid lid-sleep and always issue it via keyboard shortcut or the menu item.

Bottom line: if it is in any way feasible at all for you, try to stay on macOS Sierra 10.12 for this problematic machine and use the general fix provided at the link.

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