MacBook Air Fan Noise With Lion

Lion runs hot. Until there is a solution available to undervolt it then you will be stuck with the fan noise. I've found it doesn't take too much to get the fans revving. The big issue is when you use it heavily with Flash for example you will quickly heat up and in a lot of cases have the system shut down due to being too hot.

i had the same problem too. some told me that this happen because of the spotlight index. my 11" 2010 MBA are getting noisy when chrome, pages, skype and msn run all together.. which i do not have this problem until i upgrade to LION. and i notice that my air is out of memory (2G ram model) even only chrome is running.

I'm having the same issue. Upgraded to Lion and my fan is coming on all the time now. 13" 2.13ghz 4gig RAM AIR. Rarely did the fan come on before upgrading to Lion and now it comes on regularly. I'm running activity monitor to see if I can track what is causing it to happen.

-jamie

Not having that problem here. Been running with the power connected too and in fact haven't heard the fans come on once.

jamie,

I have a question for you - do you generally find your MBA overheating? like the bottom side near the keyboard edge and the top side over the ESC - F5 keys?

years ago I had the first generation MBA - it was overheating badly. then I had 2009 MBP 13" and it was just great with respect to heat. then in April 2011 I switched to the new 2011 MBP 13" i7 and it KILLS me with heat... I am thinking about getting MBA 2010 - 2.13 Ghz - just like yours, as I am afraid new MBA with i5 and i7 will be hot too...

Generally I didn't have any issues at all and love this thing. However Lion seems to push the processor a bit more than Snow Leopard did and it gets hot in the area you describe from time to time. Running flash for any length of time makes it heat up quickly. If I run activity manager, I've noticed that new features like screen switching (doing a two finger sweep to the right to bring up Dashboard in Lion) make the processor spike temporarily. Installing/updating some software also makes the processor hot. Likewise the first time I upgraded to the new Mail in Lion things got hot, fan came on and then after Mail was done sorting/updating for the new version it cooled off quickly and was back to normal.

These are a few examples of thing I didn't have problems with before switching to Lion. It isn't a constant thing and usually only temporary, but the frequency that it heats up and turns the fan on is more often than before upgrading to Lion when it was rare.

Hope that helps.

- jamie

<edited for clarity>

I have had a mid 2010 MBA, 2.13 Ghz, 4GB, 257 SSD which I upgraded to Lion. I am getting lots of fan running where I did not before. I just purchased a new i7 MBA.....Same problem. Apple needs to fix. I am running only mail and Safari right now and fan is running full blast. Bummner!!! Apple needs to fix what ever is going on.

The only time I've heard fan noise on my new 13" MB Air (i7 CPU, 4 GB RAM, 256 SSD) was after I had migrated 216 GB of files from my 2010 MB Air. I chedked using Activity Monitor, and the CPU usage was almost entirely due to Spotlight indexing. Haven't heard any fan noise since, and the Air stays barely warm.

Tomorrow FedEx will deliver my new Pegasus Thunderbolt RAID system, and I'll offload quite a few GBs of data from the Air to it. The only gripe I had with the 2010 MB Air was slow I/O via USB 2.0. Thunderbolt will make the Air a real (and fast) workhourse for my document databases -- and I'll have a lot more room for databases that I couldn't cram onto the 256 SSD in the 2010 MB Air.

The light weight of the Air is important to me, especially for travel. I've got bigger Macs with more RAM and quad-core CPU, but I found myself choosing to work on the 2010 MB Air most of the time.

The only unfulfilled wish connected with the new 2011v Air is that it doesn't have more than 4 GB RAM. I try to avoid hammering away at the SSD with Virtual Memory swap files, and have worked out some tricks that let me almost totally avoid doing that.

yep im getting the same problem on my mba!im tempted to go back to snow leopard!

Me too!! I am getting a lot of heat since upgrading to Lion... I just bought my MBA in May this year and am overly precious. Please reassure me that it will be all OK. Do you think Apple will issue a fix?

I also have an imac and I have noticed no change with Lion installed, so definitely just my MBA that is working harder.

When the MacBook Airs first came out a few years ago, they had some serious heat issues, and Apple actually did release an effective fix. So there is some hope!

I hope so!

To add to my woes I have also come across my Time Machine, which seems to be crippled to very slow speeds on both my imac and MBA since upgrading to Lion 😟

Do Apple people review these forums for use problems?

By the way, have you repaired permissions after installing Lion (via Disk Utility)? That's usually a good thing to do after installing a system update, and it can sometimes fix strange behavior.

Just repaired on both computers tdowling, and looks like there is no change. My MBA is still not backing up properly. Been 'Preparing backup' for over 5 minutes then backing up KB by KB...

Thanks for your suggestion though 🙂