We have a new MAC Air on the street, that is really nice, but what happens with "us" that have the "old" model and still have issues with kernel, over-heating, etc ?
Yes, I know, "Apple knows the issue, and we are working on that".
I hope the new one, does not have all the "issues" we had on the "old" ones, and we are not left behind.
Good for you, but I own one macbook air and we have 4 here at the office. I can reproduce this issue on all of them. Also two genius in the Apple store (NY 14ths street) confirmed that this is a know issue and they are working on a fix....
To be honest I think there is a tendency for users to perhaps understate the conditions to create an issue on the web. In the above you initially wrote more then 76 Fahrenheit/26 Celsius and ichat for xx minutes, thats all very well but if the temp was say nearer 30 C and it took say an hour of use on ichat to generate the problem it doesn't look quite so bad. You might be correct that they may be thinking of perhaps additional firmware tweak though I am doubting they will swap your 1st gen MB Air with a 2nd gen machine now.
I cannot use iChat nor Skype videoconferencing for more than 10 minutes in my MacBook Air, kernel_task starts eating all my CPU. Apple has to come up with a solution, this is unacceptable behavior, the firmware updates did not fix anything that is why this thread exists. This is a problem affecting many MBA 1.0, you just have to search in the forums for kernel_task. Search kernel_task in search.twitter.com to see what users are saying, if somebody at Apple is reading these forums we need an answer from you.
second one says they did the following to create an issue:
Installed the update, don't have 3rd party cooling software installed. First test I did was that iChat worked, and yesterday this performed nice. Today I was playing the whole morning streaming audio. My room temperature is warm, I wouldn't say hot, and tried running a you tube video in Firefox 2.x and the cpu bars (Activity Monitor) went all the way up in my Dock and system was beach balling. After I killed Firefox the cpu went down and system performed back normal. The Macbook Air felt very hot on the left top side.
Still not perfect even after the update.
So I think as I wrote above the issue seems to occur when conditions are hot and laptop is being used for heavy activity, I note also in second case killing firefox usage returned system to normal apparently.
I've had my Macbook Air now for about a month (first mac ever).
Aside from the constant dropping of the network connection (tested with 4 different brand routers) and I have all the updates, the problem persists.
The main problem I have is the overheating of the machine. It "idles" at 60C and under normal load/usage it hits 80-85C. No other machine I have at the office comes even close to these temps - including machines running ultra-intensive simulation software.. they hit 55-58C tops - lower than the idle temp of the air book. This includes laptops from other vendors (HP, Dell) and desktops running quad-cores.
I wouldn't care that much about the temp (CPU burns out, let apple replace it) but the heat soaking of the machine makes it unbearable to use as a notebook (i.e. on your lap). The entire upper left side of the machine gets hot enough to fry eggs on. Not just the botton but the keyboard as well.
Sure, the machine is neat looking and easy to carry around, but the temps negate all of that. Apple has some serious thermal design issues and I doubt a logic board swap is going to fix them. At this point, I'd gladly swap the macbook air for a regular macbook, which doesn't seem to have these issues.
Given what I paid for the machine, and all the other stuff to make it useful (like a DVD drive...) I expect Apple to pony up with a solution - either a trade-in program or something. If they don't, this will be the last Mac I ever purchase.
this occurs using both OSX and Windows XP (I'm running bootcamp).
To add my two cents, I was never a fan of Apple after using PCs for decades, simply due to the closed architecture. Way back, you'd have to buy everything from Apple, even a hard drive that would cost you twice as much as one for a PC. Extras are still costly.
Like many people, the ipod was a game changer for me and I decided to give the Apple MBA a try as I really wanted a highly portable notebook for net connection, word processing and ability to run some WinXP applications. I don't like the tiny netbooks and all other 13" screen PCs are heavier and have less battery life.
I'm not completely disappointed with the MBA but it did change my perception of Apple. Prior, I thought it would be hardware that just worked. Now I find the support isn't any better than I've received from Dell and worse than I received from IBM. My MBA does meet my needs but isn't without problems that are considerable. Mine gets very hot on my lap, no core shutdown issues though. Wifi is just bad, unusable at commercial hot spots, as the many threads have discussed; even with only connecting to a 802.11n router it still has problems at times. Bluetooth is worse, trying to tether via bluetooth PAN was unusable and a headset audio was poor but I haven't tried these in a while.
If Apple fixed these problems, I'd get another MBA. I'm going to wait and see before just buying on the brand name. I wouldn't consider a Macbook/Pro and will stick with PCs as my primary notebook.
Getting the first run of a cutting edge machine isn't without its risks. However, core shutdowns, wifi not connecting and bluetooth being unusable are really poor quality problems more than cutting edge issues. I'm assuming it is quality, not design because only some of us have one or more problems.
mgerbasio wrote:
To add my two cents, I was never a fan of Apple after using PCs for decades, simply due to the closed architecture. Way back, you'd have to buy everything from Apple, even a hard drive that would cost you twice as much as one for a PC. Extras are still costly.
Thats a bit of an exaggeration. You could pick up say a IdeaPad U110 for $1,849.00 or
ThinkPad X300 $1,839.00 from Lenovo at the moment. True if you're looking at the eee pc (and similar) its under $1000, but much less features and performance. I always thought Apple could have made the MB Air a sweater deal if they bundled the adaptors and superdrive into the cost of the SSD model.
