MacBook Air Fan Noise With Lion

I've called Apple Support 3 times about this issue and as usual they indicate this is not an issue with anyone else. There's definitely an issue with Lion and fan usage on MBA. Let's hope they are aware about this and create a patch since it's definitely an issue I don't see on MBP or iMacs of various specs.

those guys are becoming victims of their own success. As ignorant as Microsoft. And as buggy.

Surely you jest! I remember the first generation MacBook Pro. Now there was a machine that put out a lot of heat!The most successful patches to the intial configuration were to make the fans run faster. :-)

I've got a 2011 Air with the i7 CPU. There's normally no noticeable fan noise when doing routine operations such as Web browsing, database work, word processing, etc. and certainly no heat issues - the Air book barely feels warm.

But if I run a 3D Hearts game, yes, the fans are rlunning constantly, although they do seem to keep the computer's innards safely below potentially damaging temperatures.

Frankly, I had expected more heat from the i7 CPU than I'm experiencing. Apple has done a good engineering job of speeding up the Air very considerably this year, while holding down heat in the process - including adequate fan cooling. But given Intel's current generation of CPU chips, about all Apple is likely to be able to do on the hardware side is perhaps introduce patches to reduce heat by throttling down performance. But I've also got a suspicion that Lion can be tuned to reduce processing overhead for some operations.

In fact, Apple has been speaking very sternly to Intel about the lack of effeciency of intel's chips, as that has consequences both for heat generation and for battery life. Discussions have gone as far as a threat by Apple that they may quit using Intel chips if energy efficiency improvements are not forthcoming.

What I don't like about the i7 in the Air is the shared-memory graphic processing built into the chip. That taks some precious RAM resources away, and of course results in the CPU area running hotter than if the graphics processing were done on a separate chip. Althoujgh my 2010 and 2011 Airs have the same 4 GB of RAM, graphics processing on the 2011 results in effectively less RAM in the 2011 machine. I need all the RAM I can get!

I've got to say that the 2011 Air is a pleasure to use for my work. It's noticeably faster than the 2010 Air, and the SSD makes disk-intensive operations blow away my iMac with quad-core i7. And when I'm actually working rather than playing, the fans almost never come on and certainly never roar.

I have both the 2010 and 2011 Air with i7 & 256GB SSD. There definately is a fan issue on both. obn the 2010 there was an immediate period of high fan noise after upgrading to Lion. It then calmed down a bit but is still there. The innitial problem was probably caused by indexing but it still runs much more than it ever did with Snow leopard.

With the 2011, it seems to happen spontaniously. As I have a Mac Pro in my office for photo editing, i have had a number of times when I am working on the Mac Pro and the new Air fan will start to spontainiously run full blast, this after my not touching the Air for an hour or two.

I also have a new 2011 MBA w/ i7 & 256G SSD and my fan runs A LOT. This really is impacting the battery life too. I just spent 30 mins in OL'11 doing work email, copying & pasting between Word & Reader, to create a new Word doc. The charge was fresh when I started and after 30 mins, I was at 49% battery.

The fan ran all of the time and the machine was very hot.

Definitely a disappointment.

Ditto everything everyone has said here about the fan behavior. I just bought a new MBA 13" i7/4GB/256SSD.

Spins up loud, trails off; sometimes with reason, sometimes spontaneously.

Really sad part is: this was my first Macbook EVER, and I bought it because my old Vaio (which I loved) had a fan that drove me nuts. Everyone's Macbooks have always seemed so sexy and so quiet. The ones in the store have always seemed quiet.

The Universe is clearly laughing at me.

So...I just sent it back.

*sigh*

I have the same problem with my 2010 after installing Lion and my 2011 i5 256GB with Lion preloaded.

I hope Apple can release a fix!

+1!

Got a MBA late 2010 2.13Ghz and I got the same issue. I already checked many times my activity monitor and I blame web browsers. Especially videos, one simple video on youtube and the fan starts...

I had Snow Leopard before and it wasn't like that so I guess it's simply Lion that needs more optimization.

Let's keep our finger crossed and hope that an update will come soon (to save our batteries!!) and hopefuly that it won't ONLY fix newer MBAs but all Macbooks!!!!! 😕

to my experience (apart from video software) it is the new mac osx lion mail app that causes fan to run and the machine to overheat. when that is quitted my mba lays cool on my belly.

When my MacBook was on 10.6.8, it ran like a dream. Pretty much ran like a dream since 10.5.8, which came native. Since Lion, my fan has been kicking up form the normal 1999RPMs to 5-6,000RPMs quite frequently, and the only way to continue safe use is to stick the laptop on a riser platform with a USB fan built in.

I use iStatPro to monitor internal temperatures and smcFanControl to adjust fan speed as needed, and the aforementioned ext fan, but what a pain the @$$.

Also, since Lion, I've noticed iTunes sometimes doesn't auto-launch when I plug in my iPhone, and even more often the MB won't even recognize the iPhone (no charge OR sync). I have to restart when this occurs.

Can't find anything that might fix this issue (this started the day I upgraded to Lion), but I've run POE and tried the phone and the cable with other iPhones, cables, chargers, and computers and it only happens here, with my MB. And to boot, the USB ports work fine with other devices, like my ext fan!

Initial research on rolling back to Snow Leopard from Lion makes my head hurt. I've tried PRAM resets, SMC resets, everything Apple could run through over the phone. Really trying to avoid bringing it in or rolling back the OS, but I think the latter may be the better option. I'm afraid if I don't my battery (or worse!) may be at stake. If anyone has any ideas please bring 'em–and thanks in advance!!

Oh and I don't run Mac Mail OR Citrix, I've verified and repaired permissions a handful of times, Spotlight finished indexing the morning after Lion was released, and nothing in Activity Monitor looks out of the ordinary CPU-wise. I'm mainly in Chrome, Excel, Word, iTunes, iCal, and sometimes Photoshop. The last OS update didn't seem to make a lick of difference.

MacBook 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo | 4GB RAM | 500GB 7200RPM HDD | OS 10.7.1

I'm going to chime in here at the risk of getting chased out of town. I just set up my 11" i7 today. Here are my observations:

1. Running Migration assistant from a 2008 Aluminum MacBook to the Air, both devices had their fan on but the Air was much quieter

2. I played the game Portal and the fan went to full speed, that is the only time I have hit full speed. It runs my old MacBook fan at full speed too.

3. The fan will come on a lower speed when writing to or reading from the SSD drive in any quantity

4. The fan will come on a lower speed when scrolling or loading pages in rapid succession in Safari

For the most part my machine is quiet. I did not migrate any software from another Mac, but installed everyting fresh. Writing this right now, I've been operating off of battery for about 30 minutes and I have about 4h40m of battery life showing.

Bottom line is if you push the thing hard the fans have to kick in to cool it, especially the i7 model. Lion is performing more tasks than Snow Leopard (autosaving, local backups, real-time spell checking, full drive encryption, push notificaitons, sandboxing, library memory randomization, etc.) All this adds up and needs a bit more power. That said, I'm getting great battery life so far. Heck it just went back up to 5 hours in the 9 minutes it took me to write this up!

Hi, found this thread via web sarch.

I've just installed Lion 10.7.1 on a clean partition on my MacBook (13" unibody 2008). There is nothing else installed yet but the fans didn't stop running for two hours. However, while writing this post, the fans stopped so I have to assume they were running due to the Spotlight indexing job.

(I have snow leopard on the other partition and the fan only runs when I'm stressing the CPUs with photoshop.)

I have a new MBA i7 1.8GHz running Lion 10.7.1.

The fun runs at full speed within 2 minutes of switching on and does not stop until I power down. There is nothing running that you would reasonably expect to cause this. Currently only running mail.

Running Mail does not cause my fan to run full speed. You have a background process running you are unaware of, you are using your MBA in an excessively warm room, or you have a hardware issue.

You should install an app to monitor your mac's process (like iStat nano).

I constantly monitor my MBA with Lion as I did with Snow Leopard. In SL if I had too many tabs on google chrome and more apps running the fan would start (without noise).

With Lion I noticed that when dropbox update some files and use 60% process it turns the fans on 100%!!!

Same thing with Transmission, which launch the fans also.

Before a I could play a video on youtube on SL without any fan noise, now the fan start with only one tab on youtube, com'on!!!