MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Hey Schwa,

We're collecting information on this wiki page to summarize this problem. We were discussing this last night, so I thought I'd point it out to you. If you want to add anything, you're more than welcome:

http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/

I have had the exact same freeze. I am crashing with only FCP open, my scratch disk is external via firewire 800.

crazy thing is that even my 2009 Quad Core "Nehalem" 2.9Ghz Mac Pro with 16Gb of RAM and the5770 graphics card crashes a lot....not as much as the new MBP (17" top of line), but still.

Disillusioned for sure, hope a fix is coming soon, or FCP 8 solves this.

The 2011 Macbook Pro has the Sandy Bridge chipset right?

I found a few stories talking about a possible recall on the chipset.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/processors/sandy-bridge-recall-rippling-through-the-i ndustry-216

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20030070-64.html

I'm experiencing the same thing on my 17" 2.3 8GB, 120GB SSD machine.

Under heavy load, the machine gets too hot to touch and eventually it freezes. Sometimes I have cursor control, sometimes not.

Has Apple made an official comment on this yet?

So much for it being a "Pro" machine if it can't handle some rendering.

I don't know if this is related to the issue being discussed.

While using MS Word 04 in OS X, I have these moments where, while fast scrolling through large documents, the document freezes for a couple of seconds, where there is no response to the 2 finger swiping. It soon resumes and jumps all over the place.

This happens while using integrated as well as the AMD GPU. Also, checking the activity monitor, when the scrolling freezes, the CPU shows 100% activity.

Any clues why this is happening?

RationalGaze,

I believe that issue is related to the old version of Office that you are running.

Do you have all the latest Service Packs from Microsoft installed?

Upgrading to either 2008 or even 2011 will resolve a lot of Office performance issues under Snow Leopard.

+1 with this issue. Often freezes when using handbrake and setting up a queues, or when running browser based flash games. Will keep cursor control but OS basically turn into a picture. Called apple yesterday, they suggested repair disk permissions, and empty cache folders, didn't help.

I hope apple addresses this issue soon.

2011 17" 2.2 i7 MBP

@John:

Thanks for the info! I've been able to re-create a lot of the crashes others have posted here (when I should of been studying haha) although i've only incidentally had it happen twice to me once while using Handbrake and once while playing SC:2.

I'll definitely be giving Apple a call after I've done my assignments to add my name to the list of users having problems and to see what they say. Sigh this is so frustrating, otherwise I just love it! Great improvement from my old portable.

JJ

Andrew Preece,

Thanks for your reply. I do have all the updates done. Will try to get the latest version of Word.

Also, my 2011 2.2 GHz 15" has the same freezing issue. SmallluxGPU took ~ 5 secs.

I just read your post and the exact same things happens to me as well. When I'm using FCP or any CS5 app while using my external f/w 800 drive as a scratch disk, its a recipe for an insta-freeze or crash as soon as I make a couple edits or get a few dozen layers in PS. It happens whether or not I use my external drive as a scratch disk, but I find it happens more often when it's used. ********. apple better own up to this

My Mac Book Pro 2011 (17inch Antiglare screen 8GB RAM 750GB HDD ) froze several times when I run CPU/GPU-intensive application. Only the mouse cursor moved.

VMware Fusion 3 (guest OS: Windows 7 Pro)
Starcraft II (1920x1200 w/medium graphics settings)

It is technologically disappointing because it's either
1) Mac OS X failed to prevent *one faulty application* from freezing the entire OS.
2) or Mac Book Pro hardware malfunction made the rock solid Mac OS X freeze under load.

It is emotionally disappointing because
3) Supposedly superior, BSD Unix-based, rock-solid, updated Mac OS X 10.6.6 froze on me
4) Apple's tightly-controlled hardware/software integration did not result more stable machines

I neither bother to return nor explain this to Apple retail employees called Geniuses. They would have put me through their routine procedures in spite of my professional/academic credentials just "to make sure the machine is really at fault."

When you buy the first batch of any kind of machinery, unfortunately there is usually risk of under-refinement. It's the price to pay as an early adopter. I was hoping Apple would shield its loyal customer base from the early adopter price.

If this persists after few major updates, I'll probably request an exchange.

From one scientist to another, you should try to be as dispassionate about this as possible. As Apple is notorious for having problems with their first generation products.

You have a couple options. You can just sit back and wait for a fix. Alternatively, you can do all the tests beforehand (or just lie and say you did), spend 30-45 minutes on the phone with apple care, and become another documented dissatisfied customer. I can tell you that if you don't register your complaint they will never know you had one. If you read through the thread, I think you'll discover that this problem is very pervasive and a replacement may not fix your issues.

I've been working with some others to lay it all out here:

http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/

Goodluck.

I have been watching the twitter trends for the term "macbook pros" since I found out about the wide reaching glitch. Shortly after I reported about the trend going huge on twitter.

http://twitter.com/#!/search/macbook%20pros

Since then a spammy looking not at all well written story has been retweeted and mentioned several times... "New MacBook Pros default boot in 64-bit mode"... Does anyone else find this unusual?

I have a 2 week old 2011 MacBook Pro 15" 2.0GHz i7.

I haven't had a single lockup on it yet. Here's what I've done with it:

- Audio encoding of hour long plus audio in GarageBand
- Installed and used Windows 7 in Parallels
- To try to reproduce the issue, yes was executed in 4 terminals. The fans spun up quite loudly and the MBP became warm, but after 2 minutes the machine had still not frozen.

Just my two cents. Sorry I don't have any assistance to offer.

There is a teardown of a 15" Macbook Pro 2011, here: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Unibody-Early-2011-Teardown/4 990/1. They observed that the thermal interface(aka thermal paste) was shoddily applied. I don't know if this is the cause of what so many are seeing, but it is possible. It maybe more about this then the responsiveness of the fans. The "Absurd amounts of pre-applied thermal paste" could leading to overheating. They observed this on both the CPU and the GPU.