https://www.change.org/p/timothy-d-cook-replace-or-fix-all-2...
It's ludicrous that to attempt to fix this problem, you would have to go so far as to bake your laptop.
It cost me over $US 500 to get this fixed at an Apple Store.
When a friend was buying her mother a christmas present iPad, I went with her to examine which models handle the tablet workload better. We ended up picking an older generation, non-retina model. A few previous generation retina models, presumably running latest iOS updates, had ridiculously high temperatures just idling on the shelf.
It's not a BGA solder issue like we've seen on numerous laptop GPUs over the years, but a problem with the internal interconnects. Heating it, as if to reflow a BGA does temporarily solve the problem, but in my experience, the period of time it keeps working after heating gets shorter each time.
[0] http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-g84-g86-chips-overhe...
http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/shopping/shopping-abroa...
Finally, just a few days ago -- right before Christmas -- it just up and died. Seeing how I didn't want to pay for a new logic board with the same design defect, I just ended up buying a new laptop (and no, it is not a Mac).
My early 2011 MBP was probably the most expensive laptop I've bought in a long time (the most expensive was the Powerbook 170 - oh how I loved the trackball on that thing), and I loved the form factor and expandability. It really bugs me that it died while it was still more than usable in terms of performance.
I ended up selling it for whatever I could get for it a month ago and just cutting my losses before the Applecare ran out.
If the balls were factory tested for solidity this would become far less of an issue. Industry papers on the manufacture of solder balls indicate they are not; when those balls were lead, it didn't matter because lead's not thermally brittle.