MacBook Pros are not immune to internal dust build up

We’ve posted pictures of dusty computers before, but never of a laptop. It seems like common sense to keep your computer dust free, but many folks ignore that. In a number of cases we’ve seen the dust build up to a point where it can cause a failure.
Dust can restrict airflow, and it insulates electronic components and hard drives preventing them from cooling properly. When we’re replacing a dead hard drive, it’s very often covered in thick layer of fuzzy dust.

See the large size version of this picture here.
In this case it appears that dust build up may have over heated this MacBook Pro logic board and burned it out. The build up of dust was under the logic board, so it would have been hard to detect without taking the unit apart. If this user knew they were operating in a dusty environment, and that might be a risk factor we might have been able to save the unit if we had seen it in time.
In any case we thought this was worth posting as something to keep an eye on. There are vents on the back of the MacBook Pro, so you might want to shine a light into them from time to time to ensure that your unit is not having a dust build up issue.