Q: Macbook Air 2012 Hot, Constant Fan, Short battery life

See below.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1473

You're welcome. Are you using VM Fusion on your computer? It may cause your issue. See the article below.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=display KC&externalId=2011360

Same exact situation here. I am interested in a solution.

I have the same problem, exactly.  Macbook Air just out of the box today.  Transferred everything over from my old MacBook Pro.  Haven't opened Parallels yet, but getting the rapid fan and the problem where "Dock" is taking up a large percentage of the CPU.  

Not sure what happened on my end but the problem stopped. It appears that there were some large updates being downloaded in the background that ran the battery down. Maybe this was under the catagory "dock", though that doesn't make complete sense to me. After the download was complete I rebooted and the battery estimate went back to about 6 hours at 93% charged.

I have Parallels and there is an update this month. Maybe that has something to do with it as well.

+1 for "Dock" process with 90%+ of CPU. I quit and my battery estimate went way up and fans turned off. Any idea what this process could be? It seems to have respawned, but is using 0% of the CPU for now...

I have a 2012 macbook air 11'' with 2.0ghz i7, 8gb ram, and 256gb storage....experienced same "dock" process overheating issues....found this from another thread and it solved the problem:

Hey Everyone,

TL;DR: Genius went through preference files and found the corrupt one -- works fine now

Background: I had a mid-2011 MBP with lion, and transferred to my mid-2012 11" mba. I soon discovered that the "dock" process was using up >85% of my cpu, and causing all sorts of related problems (fan speeds, temp, battery life).

Solution:

Went to the genius bar and this is what he did:

Replaced the mba (since I bought it yesterday), and transferred all my data to the new computer. Result: same problem

Created a new user on the mba. Result: problem solved

So he renamed my existing library folder ("\Users\*username*\Library\) to

"library old". Then, from the new user's account (he logged in as "root" user) and copied/pasted the clean "library" folder into into my original user's library (replacing the existing one).*

*here he did some terminal stuff to show hidden folders b/c the user's library is hidden

Then he copied, folder by folder (then file by file when we isolated the problem to be in the preferences folder), my files from "library old" into "library," after each folder, logging out (cmd+shift+q), relogging into my user account, and running activity manager to see if the "dock" application was still acting up.

After ~1.5hours, we identified "com.apple.desktop.plist" and "com.apple.desktop.plist.lockfile" as the corrupt files and deleted them.

Result: problem solved.

Hope this helps!

So to summarize:

You must delete the following files in your library folder:

com.apple.desktop.plist

com.apple.desktop.plist.lockfile

FYI...You probably already know this, but some may not: your Library folders are hidden by default in Lion. To get to your /Library or /Users/yourusername/Library (also known as the ~/Library) folders in Lion:

• Launch Finder and click Go > Go to Folder and type: /Library or ~/Library
• Hold the Option key while clicking the Go menu item, which reveals your ~/Library folder in the menu.
• Make it permanently visible by entering the following command in Terminal, then press the Enter key:

  chflags nohidden ~/Library

Hope this helps.

The same thing occurs on the Macbook Pro 15" 2012 (non-retina).   I tried this and it worked like a charm!   Thanks for the tip.

Thanks This worked for me too!