OS X Lion Causing Mac To Heat Up A Bit More Than Usual

Hi there, I also upgraded to Lion, experienced the same. For me heat issue was bigger. CPU temp never goes down from 72C. Sometimes as high as 92 (Suddenly). After that I did a clean install - not an upgrade. Weird, same issue. Went back to Snow Leapord.

Thanks!

Hello everybody,

Not sure if this is the case, but when you first install Lion, there is some Spotlight indexing that goes on for the first hour or two.

That said, I also have a Macbook Pro similar to yours (i7 CPUs, Mid 2010 15") and am now running at approximately 158 degrees Fahrenheight.

I am also running a bunch of other apps, but my CPU usage is very low (varies from 6% to less than 1%).

If I were to switch to battery power, however the CPU temp would go down a bit. I am not sure what is causing it.

Just an observation....

IMHO, monitoring things like fan speed and temperatures is a waste of time (although I admit I have iStat nano on my dashboard - idle curiosity). I do not know of any place that publishes the operating parameters for Apple hardware, although I am sure that information is available someplace. I really cannot see that what has been posted here is relevant to anything - including mean time to failure of equipment.

Like any other manufacturer, Apple employs armys of engineers to design and manufacturer things that are reliable. Apple users are fortunate that the operating system and equipment is made by the same manufacturer - unlike a different world that I will not mention.

My apologies for the pedandic lecture. I see this sort of post all the time and decided to provide some perspective.

Barry

You are correct!

There is such a site where one can view the normal CPU operating temperatures:

http://www.intelmactemp.com/list?sort=cpufreq

Same thing here with a MBP 13' i5 early 2011. Did an upgrade from Snow Leopard and everything was allright. But this weekend I chose to do a Clean Install and the CPU is boiling at 75ºC in idle and even reaches 90ºC while doing flash.

I don't know why this is, but this reminds me a lot to the issues I had with this Mac when I bought it, exactly when it launched: it overheated a lot, but then Apple launched a firmware update and the performance was enormously better. Maybe since this is a clean install it 'erased' this package and now things are hot again. Anyway, hope that someone from Apple reads this soon enough.

Cheers

Aside from looking in "Activity Monitor" and seeing if any processes are taking up most of your CPU cycles, try this experiment: Run it on battery power.

Right now my MBP is sitting at approx 133 degrees Fahrenheight - which is cooler than earlier today when I had it connected to the Cinema monitor at 158 degrees F.

We might be on the verge of a firmware update. At least I hope so.

Flash is usually pretty CPU intensive. Any sites that load flash player, you will notice this. Might be a good time to check the Adobe site and see if you have the most recent version:

http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about

If flash player is taking many CPU cycles, quit and restart Safari and see if that makes a difference. Once flash player is loaded in memory, it isn't usually unloaded until the browser is restarted.

Same problem here. Ventilator keeps rotating at high speed (and noise) on my late 2010 MBA 13'. Its certianly not FLash as I havent even ectivated that. It is either Safari or Excel '11 that seme to cause these isuues

This is a serious issue as one cannot really work with such heavy noise in the background!

Totally agreed. My pro is experiencing an enormous heating problem. Please we need an update urgently. I can not touch to the left side. Why they donot check this before they start to sell? I cannot understand that. A company like Apple should think these kind of possible errors before they invite their clients to use any kind of product.

The only thing that I noticed that heats up my MBP with Lion real fast is when I open a certain (500+ page PDF) in Preview. Once that is done, my Macbook heats up fast and the fans run continuously.

I had to go to Activity monitor app to find out which application was causing all the CPU activity and once I found that, I went to Preview and closed the file (CMD+W). Now if I open that PDF, it still overheats if I use Preview. Other PDF files do not have that problem. I wonder if it is DRM or something?

i have installed 2 updates a few minutes ago.

and now the temperature fell down for 10°C...

Have you tried resetting the SMC (System Management Controller)?

I know for my MacBook Pro, when I reset the SMC, my temps went down by 10-12 degrees C and fans run at normal speeds (less than 2000rpm).

Do you remember what the updates were for, firmware or Lion?

I cant see any firmware or Lion update so far to fix this.