Overheat? The fans revved and suddenly I could use nothing but the cursor. Had to hold down the power switch to kill all and then re-power & startup. I wasn't doing anything unusual, but I had 7 apps open and was amid an auto-backup to TimeMachine.
Just a little disillusioned and concerned, wondering if anyone else there has experienced a hard freeze like this.
I'm back to update my experience for anyone interested. After my first few freezes last week, I noticed that anytime I launch VMWARE the graphics selection goes from integrated to discrete and stays that way. I was quite happy for a whole week as I didn't over stress the CPU's and hadn't witnessed any freezes. Until this morning. I plugged in my iPad to recharge it for the first time on this machine (last night), this is the only variable I had going. This morning, when I woke the display up with a mouse wiggle, it went straight to the classic freeze. This time I could see the time of freeze (clock), temperatures, and the input power draw on the top menu. The CPU temp was 78C, which is the average temp with the applications I have running. I sent the profile to tech support and they observed that time machine was running (it's been running all week) at the time of the freeze.
I spoke with two support people, both were very quick and confident that this issue, it's signature (everything seems fine, cursor moves but keyboard seems completely disconnected), is basically non-existent.
So, what the heck, might as well believe them. This would mean that the people observing this issue on this forum are statistically non-existent and perhaps in the correct population for random hardware failure escapes. I know some have returned their laptops and the problem was still there, but VERY few ... in my case no graphics cards were switching, the discrete GPU selection was in play at the time of the freeze. If I force the GPU to switch while VMWARE is running, I lose VMWARE, if I switch back, it comes back. That's not a big surprise.
So I'm replacing mine with a new one (bought a 2nd and returning the first), which will leave me with the old machine for transfers. If the new one freezes, I'm not going to be so quick to assume a firmware fix. Firmware fixes are often software workarounds for hardware issues. Some, albeit rare, hardware issues don't have solutions. The only one who stands to lose in that assumption would be me.
Compared to my prev generation Macbook Pro though, this thing is unbelievable. Very very hard to contemplate not having it.
for what it's worth, I received a call back from Apple Support and they confirmed Engineering is aware of the issue and working on it. No timeline on a fix. They only recommend to keep it up-to-date.
I pressed and pressed for more info, but they wouldn't provide a thing. My rep did share this thread with the engineers, though I'm sure they were already aware.
Michael K wrote:
for what it's worth, I received a call back from Apple Support and they confirmed Engineering is aware of the issue and working on it. No timeline on a fix. They only recommend to keep it up-to-date.
I pressed and pressed for more info, but they wouldn't provide a thing. My rep did share this thread with the engineers, though I'm sure they were already aware.
Michael,
I don't question what you are saying, but let me tell you precisely what the gentleman at the "Genius Bar" at Apple's flagship New York store told me:
He said that when Apple acknowledges a problem, it does so on its web site. If it is not on the web site, it is not an acknowledged problem.
He said that Apple does not follow this forum and he dismissed this thread as "talk on the internet".
He said that there are "millions of issues" and that he has not personally run into this problem nor been made aware of it by anyone in the company.
Of course, when he started my computer and couldn't get it to respond to either the trackpad or the keyboard, he did come fairly quickly to the realization that maybe things weren't hunky dory.
Having paid about $2800 for the computer, and in light of the fact that Apple's New York store doesn't have a clue what the problem is or how widespread it is, I wasn't about to accept a replacement.
Ok .. but I've had an open issue with support for about a week now. I've been sending them data about my system, including screen shots of system temperature and anything else I've run into. They escalated my issue to engineering on Saturday.
Today they called me back acknowledging the issue.
What I do find odd, is that much of my communication was via email with support. It seems my support rep had a "problem" with email today and needed to call me to share this info. Seems to me they have a policy of not putting anything into official writing.
I'm not trying to deceive anyone, nor have any guarantee they are even working the issue .. I'm just sharing what they told me.
This essentially what the higher level Apple support guy who was handling my case told me: This isn't a known wide spread problem. The people on the forums represent a statistically insignificant subset of the total population and not indicative of a larger problem.
That said they did take in my freezing machine because:
When Apple launches a new product we are required to take samples of all the failures. This process helps Apple Produce a better future model.
So I would imagine that statement indicates that they may be acknowledging this issue at least internally. I don't suspect they will admit to a fault publicly until they have a fix for it. "We have a problem just run software update" sounds much better than "We have a problem just sit on that $2800 brick until we figure it out".
If you're having problems watching YouTube videos, even 1080p ones, try updating your Flash player. The newer versions are hardware accelerated and shouldn't tax your CPU nearly as much. I just finished watching a 1080p movie trailer on YouTube on my '11 MBP and my CPU utilization didn't go over 10%, the temps stayed in the 50's, and my fans only spun up to about 2900rpm (completely inaudible).
Are you on the dedicated or your integrated card?
Could you post your idle/1080p fullscreen youtube temperatures for the CPU/CPU Heatsink/GPU while running on the integrated card.
I'm not sure whether I'm on the dedicated or integrated card since I'm not running a graphics card monitoring program and I have "Automatic graphics switching" checked in System Preferences.
Just thought I'd add a couple more observations... Firstly, in reading one of the forums, I found something interesting about the "soft freeze" (where applications seem to continue to run, but the keyboard and screen are non-responsive, often blank)... I read in one post that someone said this happened, and he entered his password on the blank screen even though the login dialogue was not up and this returned the machine to a usable state. I wonder if there are people who have set the screensaver to pop up after a time, and some percentage of those have passwords enabled on the screensaver -- suppose there's actually a problem with the login window not showing up... the machine would continue to run tasks, but you wouldn't be able to interact with it. This poster indicated that simply by typing in his password on the blank screen, the machine returned to usefulness... Worth trying for some, I imagine.
Secondly, while waiting for the courier to call to collect the machine I am returning, I did some more playing... I left it on for most of the day and it didn't freeze at all (Photobooth, some yes > /dev/nulls, etc.). I also simply left it idle at times, or playing Youtube videos. After a time, I cranked up three yes > /dev/nulls and right away it "hard froze". Except this time, I had "top" running in a terminal window on my other machine, connected via SSH. It was still running -- so this wasn't REALLY a "hard freeze" -- at least not yet. No cursor, no screen update, it really looked frozen, but TOP on the SSH window was showing that processes were still running. Interestingly enough, I was able to quit and restart TOP a few times, but each time it got slower and slower. I tried to kill a process or two -- no effect... and then the last time, trying to restart TOP simply hung. So it looks like when the "hard freeze" happens, it's more like a rapid descent to oblivion. It starts out with the machine still operating (I'm not sure what would happen if I tried a shutdown or kill login window at that point), but fairly quickly degenerates to non-responsiveness...
Anyway, some more data points for consideration...
I'm hoping to hear from Apple on Monday so I can return the first one -- will do some stress testing and provide an update when the replacement arrives.
I've been having a few complete freezes running on my 2.3 2011 i7 15".
The last time I was running VMware and Virtual box guest quite happily had a bunch of terminals running. Graphics were using the 6750M at the time according to gfxCardStatus.
All I did was to go to finder and selected Waterroof and .. then it frooze. I had to perform a hardreset.
I've been having the same issues with my new 2011 MBP since the second day I had it. I custom ordered it and went with the high res screen and bigger HD. It first started freezing when it would go to sleep by itself so I changed the setting to never sleep unless I do it manually. It also freezes once or twice a day while I am using it. All I can do is move the mouse cursor around. I use it at work, connected to an external monitor, and I'm not doing anything intense like playing a game or working with videos, etc. They are refunding this unit and sending me a brand new one. I have tried to reformat and do all of their hard resets. I even brought it into an apple store and did a diagnostic test, nothing showed up.
I use 2011 office for mac home version. Do all of you who are having this problem use this software?
I'm having this problem with almost nothing installed. I don't think it's really related to specific bad software. They simply make you wipe the drive to eliminate that as a variable. I formatted, reinstalled and got everything up to date before I called support because I knew if I didn't do that they would try to blame the problem on a third party application. It's an easy way to get you off the phone, and in their defense it's also quite possible errors people experience are caused by third party software.
Scott,
I think the 'hard freeze' might have been a mis-identification of what was going on by the original poster. I'm sure, without any other information, it might have appeared that way. I've noted above that I could ssh into the machine. I actually tried to reboot and halt the machine from the ssh connection as well. It hung when I did this.
John & ryandir, I'm having the "exact" same issue. Screen appears to freeze, mouse works and can remote into the box. It does appear to happen more often under load (I've been able to consistently reproduce the issue by loading 12-16 YouTube windows simultaneously).
So I went to my neighborhood Apple store last night and picked up another MBP (15" 2.2 4GB 750) to test and guess what....same behavior, same freezes with nothing installed but Chrome....
Both notebooks also have a funky video glitch on external monitors plugged into the ThunderBolt/MiniDisplayPort. Check this out (go full screen to see more)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ3ItL4_k6Q
I have a replacement 15" 2.3 coming soon - and I'm hopeful that they've done something to resolve the issues.
Until now, all of my other Apple experiences have been excellent... I haven't lost hope but this has been a very expensive experience (time and lost billable hours from random restarts).
I wanted to see if there has been any resolution to this issue.
I just purchased a new Macbook Pro Core i7 2.3 GHz with the RAM maxed out at the Apple Store. Runs great -- except when I am using graphic-rich, processor intensive applications, when it just up and freezes. Sometimes I get the spinning ball, sometimes I don't. The mouse usually remains active, but the OS seizes up (clock stops, all windows unresponsive). Only solution is a hard reset.
The freezing is always preceded by a spike in the CPU temp (the base of the machine feels hot to the touch, as opposed to normal operation, when it's just warm) and the fans increasing to max speed.
I haven't called Apple yet, as I am wary of a tech reading from a script telling me to reinstall the OS, which I'm pretty sure would be a waste of time. Plus I just got this thing setup, which included migrating a lot of data and apps from my old machine over the course of a couple days.
Having dropped over $3000 on this machine, I'm hoping there's a quick and easy fix out there.
(And I can't tell if this thread is about After Effects or some other issue, but several other threads redirect here for what sounds like my issue.)
