MacBook Air: apparent overheating, leading to freezes

[April 30th]

Though the MacBook Air is generally one of the coolest Apple notebooks shipped to date in terms of surface temperature, systems appear to be overheating under various circumstances for some users, resulting in freezes.

As one poster to Apple's Discussion boards, chriscamero, wrote:

"I have a stock Macbook Air 1.6ghz with the hard drive and I'm on my second machine. Both have done the same thing leading me to believe there is a serious defect in the Macbook Air. What happens is that after about a half hour of using the machine and running it with some apps like Parallels, video, whatever, it will get really hot. Especially in the upper left region of the computer. It feels hot to the point that you can't really hold on to it as it's too uncomfortable.

"iStat claims the case temperature is: 108 degrees fahrenheit. This is prior to it getting really slow and crashing, since I can't really get to iStat when that happens anyway. The whole process of the Macbook Air getting to this point seems to correlate with using the disk and pushing the CPU. What always seems to be true is that the upper left region of the base of the computer is really hot."

We've received several other reports that point the finger at Time Machine backups. Other processor-intensive tasks like virtualization with Parallels or VMWare Fusion, or graphics-intensive applications can cause the freezes as well.

Another Apple Discussions poster, garnold, wrote:

"The fan on my air seems to run continuously now as long as the notebook is on either under battery of ac. The notebook gets verrryyy hot."

Other symptoms typical of overheating include erratic trackpad behavior, with the cursor jumping around the screen.

Avoid soft, pillowy surfaces If you are experiencing similar issues, try placing your MacBook Air on a hard, cool surface like a desk. Overheating and associated freezes are more likely to occur if the system is being used on a pillow, blanket, or some other soft, insulating surface.

Apply the SMC update Make sure you have applied the MacBook Air SMC Update 1.0.

Cooling pad A cooling pad such as Road Tools' Podium CoolPad may prove beneficial in some cases, though it's certainly not an ideal, long-term solution for the Air.

Thermal grease Overheating issues were extant with early iterations of the MacBook Pro and MacBook as well. Some postulated the units contained too much thermal grease, though those theories were seemingly debunked for the most part, with most users reporting similar temperatures after re-applying a thinner layer of thermal grease.

Still, some MacBook Air owners have resorted to scraping excess thermal grease from their systems' logic boards -- a dangerous, warranty-voiding procedure. This Japanese site has one user's experience and some instructions for disassembling the MacBook Air.

The user writes: "When half of the quantity which was applied (temperatures stayed around 60 degrees celsius rather than 70 degrees. Noise from the fan was also decreased).

Again, we strongly recommend against attempting a thermal grease reduction procedure. Try the other suggestions in this article, and if you're still experiencing repeated freezes, take your MacBook Air in for authorized service.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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