FireWire Audio Heat Problem (Macbook Pro, Late 2008) VIDEO proof

that basically means that it's unlikely to get fixed by apple. which seems rather bold to me considering that for a significant number of people the major reason to buy a mbp is the desire to use it along with a firewire interface. the thing i don't get is that it's obviously nothing but a poorly crafted driver which some gifted programmer should be able to fix. it's not like they would have to redesign the entire machine..

I agree. It seems like a software problem and not a hardware issue. There has got to be a fix for this from apple eventually. No one wants to hear their fans running high when recording, mixing, or listening to audio through an FW interface. This is certainly a disappointing problem, and it looks like it is not unique to certain years/models of macs. I expected PRO quality from Apple. Lets continue to inform them and hopefully we will see a response soon.

It has been suggested that this problem began with Leopard OS, maybe they can take a look at earlier systems to resolve the problem.

No unibody MBP can run Tiger. The earliest ones require a minimum of OS X 10.5.5, and later models require newer versions.

Hey . That is the way it is. Never had a problem on my Powerbook G4's.
All my Intels and OS 10.5-10.6 all had this issue. As I said, MOTU made it slightly better. Not sure what or who the culprit is at this point.

well, it may not be the coreaudio driver causing the heat problem, but it is definately a software issue, most likely introduced with 10.5. there hasn't been a problem with tiger and there is no problem with windows either. several years have past already since the release of leopard, we now have snow leopard's 4th update and still they havn't been able (or willing) to fix this. so what's going wrong here? did steve lock up all talented coders in a windowless room to produce pointless apps for the ipad? this is rather irritating, i mean we're talking about macbook PRO, a PROfessional computer designed for PROfessional graphics, video and audio. and i cannot hook up my PROfessional audio interface without frying my system? not acceptable, if you ask me

yeah, i left my feedback a couple of days ago but i honestly doubt that it will lead to anything. i had my first mbp (2007) for two and a half years. since the first day with leo there was an issue with the keyboard being unresponsive after left alone for some minutes. it was fine with tiger though. they never managed to fix it. they replaced the keyboard, the logic board and god knows what else, with no success.
apple used to be for pros and creatives but those days are probably over. steves target group is clearly the mass consumer market these days and that's how apple's products feel now. they spend heaps of money and brains for stuff like the iphone, the ipad or for making osx more shiny but fail to fix years old bugs. but who cares? certainly not the average consumer who uses his/her mac for word processing, web surfing and to show off in fancy cafes.

Hello all .. I have the same problem on a 15" i7 MBP with MOTU Ultralite MkIII ..I have already written bug report and complaint email to apple and I will paste it here as well hoping that it will generate some feedback . .

Good Luck . . .

"
I use a MOTU ultralite MkIII firewire audio interface .Whenever I plug my firewire card regardless of any load on it my computer gets very hot rather quickly . Other than this temperatures are always as expected.First by monitoring temperatures and fan speeds I have isolated the issue down to the firewire connection then by monitoring the currents I could see that normally my cpu (i7) was drawing 0.9A when idle and 2.7A when idle with the firewire plugged in .This seems to cause a rapid heat build up within the computer.My audio interface is powered externally so I do not think this is an issue of firewire drawing too much power causing the heat.Since audio production is already a cpu intensive task with the added heat generated by just plugging the firewire interface the temperatures get quite high in these warm summer days we are in . I have been searching the internet and found in various forum topics that this is a common problem amongst firewire audio users.They report various firewire interfaces of different make/model creating the exact same scenario.The fact that I have just paid a few thousand dollars to get this machine and ditch my windows machine in order to utilize my sound card the best, somewhat frustrates me as I write these lines.I assume apple will do nothing less then it's best to address this problem ASAP before it gets epidemic .If you keep in mind that majority of audio producers are using macs with firewire interfaces then it won't be hard to imagine sooner or later they will question this heat buildup and like I did find other complaints over the internet on the same exact issue ..

Best regards

"

Add me to the list:
Echo Audiofire 4 (bus powered)
i5 Macbook Pro
Lucent chipset (manufacturer Echo are happy with that chipset)

Nothing when plugged in (it's not default audio interface). But as soon as I start any CoreAudio app, CPU jumps to 50% with no activity whatsoever. Not sure what the software engineers are doing there.......... I've alerted Echo to the issue, they said "we use Apple's driver". Hope Apple fix it soon.

i've been using various profiling tools to try and find out what's going on. it looks like applefwaudio is cycling through some heavy threads related to MIDI (MidiTimerHandler and timeoutAndRelease in mach_kernel). Those seem to tax up to 15% on each physical core in the i5 hence 30% and upwards of CPU use for doing nothing, just by having the interface connected (depends on software running)..

i've submitted a bug report to apple and it's been staying "open" ever since. hope they fix it in 10.6.5

any news on this issue?