MacBook Pro (2010) Freeze

Anyone else with the new i7 MBP experiencing a hard freeze? No Grey Screen of Death, just freezing screen and input. Only remedy is to hold the power button to cycle the power.

It has frozen twice in the last week. Both times the machine was on battery power and certainly not under load - just light browsing, no gaming.

Just curious if this is going to be a longer term problem...

[System]
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
Memory: 8 GB

[Serial ATA]
Model: APPLE SSD TS512B
Revision: AGAA0206

MacBook Pro (2010), Mac OS X (10.6.3), Intel Core i7 2.66, Apple 512GB SSD

Posted on May 3, 2010 1:56 PM

Reply
1,712 replies

Dec 27, 2010 9:50 AM in response to Portia_Wilson

Hi Guys, I got Leopard 10.6.5.
I got the following problem, sometimes when I'm browsing on the web My MacBook froze, the screen blink. I wait to see if it come back, but it don't. i have to press the power button to shut it down and turn it on again. and the computer start perfectly. that had this problem just twice, I wonder if this is a Bug or other kind of problem. ? (i got this problem since I update to 10.6.5) For me it seens that this is aaaaaaaaaaa HUGE BUG!!!!

Thank you so much

Dec 30, 2010 2:03 PM in response to Mitch Towne1

the genius bar couldn't reproduce my problem and the machine passed hardware diagnostics, but after explaining to applecare the whole situation, they offered a replacement. it arrived yesterday and has been working perfectly...knock on wood. in fact, the performance of this machine seems much better than the previous one. at one point with the first, problematic machine, i erased the hd and re-installed with the 10.6.4 disc that came with it, then attempted to upgrade to 10.6.5. it froze halfway through the install of course. definitely some bad hardware. i'm loving this new one though.

Jan 2, 2011 4:18 PM in response to Artitron

I can report same thing. My new Macbook Pro i7 with 512MB SSD and high-res screen seems to totally freeze when on battery power. Sometimes once every 3-4 hrs, sometimes (like this afternoon) every 10-15 minutes or so. Maybe happens more with video playback? What the heck? Last night happened when playing a (rented) movie in iTunes. This afternoon happened when I was browsing youtube. This evening happened when I was viewing pdfs in Preview.

NOT exactly an endorsement of Mac OSX "stability" advantage over other OSs.

I see this thread is loooooong now. Has there been any public response or acknowledgement from Apple on this issue? Or is it up to individuals to try to deal with it on their own?

Jan 2, 2011 7:23 PM in response to Artitron

my mbp 15" from 2008 just started freezing in the last 2 weeks. Everything just randomly freezes. cursor and all. have to power off and on every time. it seems worse while in Safari. Firefox not as bad. but computer can freeze while doing nothing, with nothing open. getting really annoyed. this thing has been such a champ until recently. and with all the reading i've been doing - i can see this is a big problem for apple.

Jan 3, 2011 7:55 AM in response to Artitron

Just froze again today.

1) HDD swap by Apple did not eliminate freezing.
2) Full OSX reinstall without Migration Assistant / TimeCapsule did not eliminate freezing.
3) Flash 10.2 beta did not eliminate freezing.

The laptop is broken and I've wasted enough time on this. I booked an appointment at the Genius bar for this afternoon.

Time to start bit-wiping the drive...again...

../mk

Jan 3, 2011 6:44 PM in response to Artitron

I just had this freeze happen for the first time today. It happened twice. Both times were under relatively heavy network load.

Machine is 17" MBP i7, purchased in June-July 2010. The only thing that might be different about my specs is that I'm using the 128GB SSD.

Weird that it wouldn't happen before now.

First time everything froze up and I could still use my mouse. Had to hard power off. Second time I had the screensaver on and noticed that it was moving frame-by-frame slow. Had to hard power off then, too.

I haven't applied EFI Firmware Update 1.9 myself as far as I'm aware, but it looks like I have the right ROM number and the update won't install if I try to do it myself, so I must have already done it and forgotten about it...

This isn't system-breaking for me yet, but it is worrisome enough that I thought I'd come poke around here for some solidarity. I'm off-warrantee so I won't be able to just ask for a replacement, alas.

What's the best/accepted way of contacting Apple about this problem? It certainly must be a known issue by now, even if they're not acknowledging it.

Jan 3, 2011 7:02 PM in response to Kong Wen

Couldn't edit for some reason, so replying instead:

Another thing I just thought of is that the only thing that's changed on my system between yesterday and today when the freezing started happening is that I upgraded to Messenger for Mac 8.0.0. It's been running during both of my freezes. And when I restart, messenger's logging/history tool resets and asks me whether I want to save conversations again (instead of remembering my setting). I know this won't be the problem for most of you, but it does seem to be related to some kind of problem for me. I'm testing it some more and if it happens again with the program up, it's coming off my computer.

Jan 5, 2011 3:08 PM in response to cam13

I also have a late-2008 15in mbp. first freeze a few weeks ago. on restart just gray screen with spinning icon. Re-installed EVERYTHING fresh from original disk. Ran fine for a couple weeks. Froze again while copying a 35g file from iMac over home network. MBP started getting hotter, fan kicked up, then transfer failed at the very end (initiated from iMac) while my MBP locked up. Fortunately this time i was able to get it restarted with just power button. Seemed to boot up ok. This has GOT to be some software issue as there are a couple of us 'older' MBP users out there that have coincidentally gotten the same issue as you new folks. (oh, after restarting i tried to install new software updates and they failed...hmmm...NEVER had that before) Something is going on that's fishy.

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MacBook Pro (2010) Freeze

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