MacBook Air 11" Screen "Flicker" and Freeze

11" macbook air

When using without external monitor everything is fine. Just started hooking up external monitor yesterday and found screen shimmer happening sever times every few minutes. Very repeatable.

Sound familiar to anyone?

As long as I am not hooked up to external it is OK. The MBA screen doesn't shimmer or have any other problems with or without external monitor

Software is fully updated.

Yosam

MBA 13" here, the flicker lasts 2-3 seconds then goes away. I would say, annoying issue but not a deal breaker. However I'd like to see a fix soon!

For my problem which was only on the external monitor I tried another monitor and it was fine. Maybe the shielding in the new MBA is not quiye as good as others and some interference is going on.

I am happy now to know that depending on which external monitor I ues I can have a flicker free experience.

The main LCD has never had a problem though.

Yosam

I guess it was just a "waking from sleep" issue. Closing the lid again and waiting a few seconds cleared it up.

Has anyone experienced this problem in a situation NOT waking from sleep or connecting to an external monitor??

I just did, again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqK4FNASMZc

Listening to iTunes and working on MS Word 2011 at the time of the crash.

This is a hardware problem for sure, not a software one.

Oh hey lookit, another occurrence in one day! Woot...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoO8nmBNJLA&fmt=35

This is the worst instance of all three that I've experienced...going to Genius Bar tomorrow and I'm honestly not confident this thing will even last til then.

That is exactly the same, what happens to mine.
it is no sleep issue, it happens just while working.

Mine is now in Ireland at apple care - will get a new one soon.

If same symptom happen on both mac and windows I'd suspect hardware defect. One simple test you can do is Apple hardware test. Restart with your system restore USB stick plugged in and hold D key and it will boot into a hardware test software. Run the test and it should report no problem if it's normal. If it displays some code you better call the tech support or take it to the apple store.

still experiencing this trouble, at least once a day :\

btw I noticed that if i didn't plug any usb device in or ext monitor the system works fine, as soon as I plug both of the randomly it happens again...

Hardware test is useless.

Mine came back with zero error codes, and I've experienced the flicker/freeze three times now.

I suggest taking it to Genius Bar as soon as an issue pops up, since AppleCare is useless as well (all they could recommend was setting up a Genius Bar appointment).

I have the same problem when using an external monitor. Every few seconds (random) screen gets the wobbles. Seems to happen more if there is video on the screen (flash etc).

I'm using a brand new MacBook Air 11" and have updated to the latest OS version.

Dropping the resolution from 1600x1200 to 1400x1050 has caused the flickering to stop. Seems to be an issue at the higher resolutions. Both settings were at 60Hz.

Seems there's a group of people who get the colour bars when it freezes and others get a solid screen. I'm in the grey screen of death camp but occasionally get a black screen. As in the youtube video, the LCD backlight stays on even if you close the cover and I also get nothing unusual showing up before the crash in the console log.

Seems to happen less often after I've upgraded to 10.6.5 and not using bluetooth tethering (or could be just coincidence), but still a big issue because it messes up my open encrypted 'sparsebundle's when it crashes. Luckily, a sudden crash doesn't seem to mess up the user filevaults.

As it was Dead-on-arrival I could get a new one, but they can only do that in my home city of Hong Kong and I'm now away in the mainland for a month. I called telephone service people about 5 times and saw the Genius Bar guy here. Seems they haven't characterized the problem very well so far. They could apparently change the board but that would require a few days. Who can live and work without his laptop nowadays?

There are claims that Mac OS X 10.6.5 update resolved some of these video issues. Is that true for a lot of you?

Ref. Hardware test - it's not a catchall. I can attest to that since it failed to discover issues with one of my Macs recently. So now after more repairs than I can count I have a brand new computer on my desk! Yeah AppleCare. 🙂 Booo hardware test.

I have not seen any video issues on my 13-inch MBA since reapplying the video patch that was released with the notebook or shortly after and applying the 10.6.5 update. However, I saw it without an external monitor. I'm going to test my VGA adapter today and see what happens. Note when I did see it I was stressing out my ethernet adapter (USB) doing file copies. Not sure if that was part of it or not.

nope on my MBA 11" the problem still occurs, btw I have never experienced this problem resuming from sleep mode, but it happens randomly... last time it goes black or gray and then I had to reboot in order to have it working again.