New 2011 MacBook Pro Heating Issue?

URGENT MESSAGE TO APPLE:

(1) I want to buy a new MBPro, but reading these posts is not at all encouraging.

(2) Some have suggested simply returning and swapping for new. It's great that Apple is allowing folks to exchange lemons for oranges, no questions asked, but the very idea of "lemons among the oranges" in Apple Stores isn't encouraging either.

(3) I wasn't planning to have to pay Apple's Premium prices to revert to popping open my shiny new toy (as some have suggested here) in order to clean up what sounds like a potentially sloppy manufacturing Q/A problem and/or a poor heat/cooling design problem.

(4) Some have suggested their solution to what appears to be a real concern with the new MVP is to screw around with the software that implements the feedback look that controls the fans. GREAT. You pay a premium for a Rolls-Royce. Then you go opening up the transmission a week after taking delivery to clean sand out of the gears on your new Rolls. So you may be a great mechanic, but I'm not convinced that your new mod will keep your chips cool.....which is the most important end game here. Besides, although it's great to be able to hammer out new code and amaze the guys, it ain't cool to break down a Rolls in the front yard.

(5) Some posters here are concerned with fan noise. The bitter truth is that these ultra-thin, high-performance laptops have to move a lot of heat off those new high-performance chips....else they will cook themselves in thermal runaway and fail fail fail. ZAP So, it's either blow a lot of air thru the enclosure AND throwing off heat by conducting it through that pretty aluminum lap cooker......or kiss those chips goodbye. I do not envy the hardware design engineers at Apple, because they are faced with huge challenges, many of which are caused by Apple's ultra snazzy cabinet designs. While they look great, they must be a ***** to cool.

THE BOTTOM LINE HERE IS THAT I REALLY HOPE AND PRAY THAT SOMEONE AT APPLE IS LOOKING AT THESE POSTS, AND THAT SOMEONE AT APPLE IN ENGINEERING IS LOOKING AT ADDRESSING (1) HARDWARE MANUFACTURING Q/A; AND, (2) MAKING THE MBP THERMAL DESIGN A BIT MORE ROBUST THAN IT SOUNDS TO BE, HAVING COMPLETED READING SEVERAL PAGES OF THESE POSTS, here in only the second week after these puppies hit the market.

I AM A DEDICATED APPLE CUSTOMER, BUT RIGHT NOW I WOULDN'T TOUCH ONE OF THESE MBP'S WITH A TEN FOOT POLE.

My new MBP (2.3Ghz, 8GB Ram) is much cooler than my C2D MBP, the fans are always quiet. However, I have noticed that when playing X-Plane 9, the GPU gets very hot! About 187 degrees. Is this normal for the 6750? Performance is INCREDIBLE with this GPU!

Herb is right, sure there are a few posters here complaining about heat but when you compare it to the number of macbooks sold its nothing and every product has its failure rates. Not to mention every laptop released has ppl complaining about heat issues.

For every poster here there are probably 1000 that are happy with their quiet machine and going by the benchmarks for watts to cpu power these are by far the most efficient and therefore less heat making machines yet, until you need that power then fan noise is expected 🙂

Im going to go into the apple store and see if they do indeed operate at the sub 40c mark as some here indicate....

Apple doesn't generally read these forums as they're intended for user-to-user discussion, in the same way that the old Mac User's Groups (MUGs) used to fulfill. If you want make sure Apple gets your message on any MacBook Pro-related issue, go to: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

That said, while there have been a few posts regarding heat-related issues, if you track the responses you'll see that a few of us came back to report that things cleared up. Some had software issues creating runaway CPU cycles, others were basing test on high-intensity graphics applications, and then there were folks like myself that didn't give the system enough time to settle in (e.g. let Spotlight finish indexing, which is a CPU-intensive task the first time around). Unfortunately, not everyone reporting a heat issue - including the OP - has followed up on what they did to solve the "problem," or whether they returned their MBP.

I certainly don't think thermal runaway is going to be an issue with their case design. They've been running i5 and i7 chips in the 15" and 17" case designs for over a year now, without any major issues. Seeing as my temps and fan RPMs on my 13" i7 are in line with my 2010 13" Core 2 Duo, I don't see an issue there, either.

It's all certainly a darn sight better than back when I picked up the original 12" PowerBook, which got so hot some of Mac blogs tried to literally cook an egg on the bottom of the case (it didn't work, but the system did get extremely warm). Apple solved that issue by having the fans kick on at a lower temperature, and from point forward the 12" PowerBook was never silent. If you take a peek at the teardowns of the current 13" design, you'll see that the ventilation system is far better than what they used to employ.

As I stated in my "claim chowder" post earlier in the thread, my 13" MBP i7 has been cool and quiet for days, despite having to drive a 27" LED Cinema Display (2560x1440 pixels), with a fair few applications running, and the whole thing being left on for 12-14 hours a day. The fans will spin up something very graphically intensive - like 3D building renders in Google Earth, or playing a bit of Portal - but the same thing happened on my Core 2 Duo.

In short, as someone who did rather strongly feel that there was a problem with the 2011 MBPs, I now believe that I was mistaken. They run well, they run relatively cool, and they run relatively quiet.

Don't use your machine on your bed. Read the owner's manual.

haha, the manual actually said that you shouldnt use your 'laptop' in bed?

isnt that one of the top 10 reasons ppl buy them 🙂

Does it offer a reason why not also?

FYI, I found a data base of mac temperature posts for many years/models with ambient temperatures for references also.

http://www.intelmactemp.com/list/page14

Many thanks to "SmartMoose" for your well crafted and thoughtful responses to the concerns/comments I made relative to the subject of this thread. (In re. "SmartMoose" 3/5/2011, 1:19PM)

I'm very very hopeful that other posters will see the "issue" the same as you ("SmartMoose") have described - i.e., in the end, not an issue at all. Suffice to say that I hope to have a new MBP in my hands soon, but "soon" for me does not mean now.

^^^^^

(Perhaps my vision here has been clouded a bit by one of my earlier experiences with another Apple product, where I had a CPU over-heating problem that was never completely satisfactorily resolved - in spite of significant effort, time, and expense on the part of both Apple and myself to resolve it. It's a story that is much longer than needs to be discussed here. But, suffice to say that I've been around the CPU over-heating block before, and it can be a story that is not at all pretty. After that bitter experience, any association of the words "heat" and "Apple" on the same page have made me very gun shy to buy early in a new product cycle.)

I agree completely, buying the first of a new architecture is always a risk and the next revision is the smarter buy, Im not sure I want to wait another 6 months for this but I will certainly be waiting another month to give apple time to settle on its manufacturing process before I do at least.

Here's my experience on my new MBP 15 base :

since I heard people complaining about heat with just a few apps open, I tried to stress the GPU by opening 32 apps, among which heavy ones like 2 versions of photoshop (cs3 and cs5),bridge, vmware fusion, iweb, iphoto, premiere elements, cinebench,all the browsers I have, excel, word and so on.

Results:

cpu 61°C
fan <2000

I maxed the cpu up by using handbrake and the temp reached 88°C and fan 5800
as it finished all went down to <70° and < 2000

Bye

It isn't a laptop, and yes, the manual explains why you shouldn't use it on any soft surface, including your lap. Read it.

I just wanted to go a tad deeper relative to the post made a couple of tics higher here on the list (today) by Paolo Selva.

Respectfully......Paolo, clearly your intention was to pile a huge amount of work on your MBP CPU in order to observe whether (or not) the machine would go postal, and perhaps you did indeed logically do that in the experiment you described in your post, but the engineer in me just had to ask myself about what all those 32 "open" apps were actively doing during your experiment. As I understand, an app. like MS-Word, a browser, Photoshop, etc., once opened, but not tasked to DO SOMETHING that takes a long time, may pose very little long term CPU load (that would, in turn, generate heat). For example, the Safari browser, while not actively engaged in the process of actively seeking out a new URL - will very quickly drop down the list when you look at percent CPU load. If what I said above is true (and I am certainly open to correction), then the best CPU load test (and thermal test) might be to open some heavy duty, really churning "processor intensive" kinds of apps. What comes to mind would be to simply open many instances of an active video app until you drive the total CPU load to whatever level you deem as max acceptable. (I seriously doubt that the MBP will still be running and displaying 32 simultaneous HULU TV shows (for example) long before you have 32 video instances open. But, heck, I could be wrong.) At some "to be determined" CPU utilization level the machine will probably tell you to stop opening them, long before you open 32, simply because the machine will either simply lock up or shut down, or the videos will begin to no longer look like motion videos. Once driven to a TBD high continuous CPU utilization level, I would let it cook for a while to see if the cooling system would keep the temps below CPU spec levels and, of course, record them. Does that make sense ?? The main point of my post, though, is that I am not comfortable that even a large number of "open" but potentially "inactive" apps. will cause a CPU to be highly stressed. (But, again, heck, I could be wrong.)

I have been doing a lot of reading on this, and unfortunately while there is a lot of information on what people are runnng at, there is very little information on what is normal.

I did a sort of stress test on my new MBP 15 " i7 2.2 Ghz Hi Rez, 8 Gb Ram - 500 Gb 7200 RPM. Using iStat 3.0 for measurements. Ran Handbrake doing a normal encode to iPad resolution of Matrix - estmiated time of encode about 30 minutes. CPU 1 and 2 running at 90C and CPU A running at 87. Overall TMP was 84 C. Fans running at 4000 RPM. GPU running 55C (no video preview was on). Other than the idea of having a circuit running around 185 F, no problems with the computers. Running games (Braid) - the GPU has got about 85C, but the CPU runs only around 55 - 60. With Safari, various small tasks, Word, etc. CPU runs around 40 45 C. Also, when I stopped the encode of the movie, the temp dropped down to the mid 60's within 10 seconds! (at least that is what iStat showed in the window).

So, I am not at all worried about using this for routine things, but for graphic intense, and CPU intense functions it runs pretty darn hot (not knowing what is OK). Is it going to be OK to do several encodes at a time for a couple of hours? Can I do this day after day after day? Are the circuit boards made to with stand this? Would anyone say I have a thermal paste issue, or does this seem normal / OK?

OldestGamer.....

The CPU(s) and hard drives typically generate the most heat in any PC, and are the most susceptible components to heat-related damage. (Memory chips also get pretty hot, but I don't recall Apple monitoring memory chip temp.) (These three component types are also among the most expensive board level components in the PC.) Other components are typically of little thermal management concern. Apple PC board designs typically include CPU and HD temperature sensors that can be continuously polled by third party software apps. that are readily available on the Internet and that enable you to store and display them in graphical and/or tabular form. All components have maximum temperature specs that are provided by their respective vendors. (For example, check Intel's CPU specs for the CPU(s) max. operating temp. They should be available on the Internet.). Sustained operation close to, or in excess of, chip manufacturer's specs will eventually cause catastrophic chip failure. (AKA, a dead MBP.) I'm not an Intel chip failure expert, but I would imagine that there is some level of increasing permanent chip performance degradation over time, with sustained operation at or near the high temp spec, that may occur. So, the CPU chip continues to provide service, but it does so prior to an eventual catastrophic failure - maybe after the Apple warranty is dead. What I am saying is that high temp kills chips, but you may not see obvious immediate evidence of impending disaster until AFTER the warranty expires. Then it's YOUR problem, not Apple's problem. Running them as cool as possible is best case situation. I would rather hear jet engine roar from fans than see the chips cook themselves to a slow eventual death. When it's YOUR problem, Apple tech hourly rates are a killer when you have to pay for them out of your own pocket.

I'm not trying to be a scare monger here. The MBP 2011 "heat issue" may not be a real issue at all. But, it is absolutely true that heat is not a friend of semiconductors. And it is also true that ANY manufacturer's product is designed and produced by well-meaning human beings. Finally, we all know that occasionally even well-intentioned human beings make can make an occasional mistake.

So what his novel is saying is 'heat is bad'