My macbook air keeps freezing

Couple of things to add to the discussion:

• When mine freezes, I don't get the beach ball, I just can't interact with it at all. If I leave it long enough, the screen dims as it would usually. It never goes to sleep though.
• I've encountered the same issue when running Windows from my Boot Camp partition, so I'm pretty sure it's not a software issue (at least in my case).
• When it froze, I was copying files with Robocopy, and I spotted that it mentioned there was an I/O error just before it froze.

I think my issue is probably something to do with the SSD, so I'm going to be taking my MacBook Air into the Apple store. Hopefully they'll replace it, although demonstrating the issue might be hard.

My macbook air 2011, core i5 256GB also has the exactly problem.

It freezes when I use Chrome (watching videos especially.) and it happens one or two times per day.

Drives me crazy!!

However, this got solved after I get a cooling fan for it.

(But this competely againsts the feature of MBA, how come you need to use it with a cooling fan!!)

Anyway, I really disappointed by MBA.

DISLIKE!!!

Have had 2 of the 11" Macbook Air models. Both were the baseline configurations and the first was the 2010 model running Snow Lep and the 2nd is the 2011 model running Lion.

Regrettably, I lost the 2010 model to a water submursion incident and I miss it like crazy. That system was SOLID and ran cool and never beachballed or froze on me.

The 2011 model that I replaced it with (which ran Lion out of the box) is GARBAGE. I am averaging 5 to 7 freezes a week where I have to hold down the power button to get a hard reboot. Most notably, it happens while I am browsing the web, doesn't matter which browser...it is has froze under all the major ones.

Massively dissapointed in this product, especially Lion. Apple took a GREAT system in 10.6 and had made it unusable in 10.7. 😠

Update: I finally went to the genius bar. The guy at the bar asked me to do a full wipe and reinstall when I got home, and he went ahead and ordered a new SSD for me. The problem is very likely due to a bad SSD or bad RAM but he figured it was worth having me reinstall while we waited for the drive to arrive.

The machine has frozen up on me once since I wiped it, so I'll be taking it in for the new SSD. If *that* doesn't fix it, my machine will need a new logic board -- the memory is fused onto the board in these machines and can't just be swapped out.

Just a related comment...

Got an 11" Air a little over a couple weeks ago and I'm REALLY enjoying it (1st time Mac-user BTW). Anyway, I performed a little experiment to see how fast I could log into my e-mail account online after hitting the power button to turn on (1st computer with a SSD). At the log in screen, I manipulated the trackpad as soon as I could see the cursor and I noticed a slight stutter in the pointer tracking --> selected my user icon and logged in --> immediately hit the Safari icon from the Dock --> navigated to the e-mail website and started typing in the username, etc. when the system froze - no trackpad, keyboard or anything.

Had to do a hard reset with the power button and everything was fine. I tried to duplicate the problem but I haven't experienced another freeze since. I think it was just some happenstance quirk.

To the Original poster: Hope everything turns out fine. My 15" Sony VAIO (~5 yo) all of a sudden started having video issues that made the display unusable and I can't troubleshoot it because I'm just to busy with other matters...so it was a nice excuse to become a Mac-convert.

J

Hi,

Small remark.

My macbook start to Freeze and reboot when I started to use Google Chrome.

Ok an update:

I may have found the problem re: my Air 11...I think its feezes have only been happening when I have an external monitor hooked up to my Air. This is for:

- The new AOC 16" USB monitor (which requires its own driver to run)

- AND your standard flat screen monitor that is attached to the Thunderbolt port through the "Minidisplay port to VGA adapter"

Curiously, it has never frozen up when I have attached the above adapter to a video projector 😕 but then again, I am usually not leaving it attached to a video projector for hours at a time. Usually I am just attached to to one of those for a Keynote/Powerpoint presentation or a Propresenter presentation for like 30 minutes.

At any rate, since I unplugged it from all secondary monitors yesterday there have been no freezes. Will update accordingly if it begins to freeze up again.

For what it's worth! 😟

I own a mid-2011 13" 128GB MBA (running OS X Lion) and I've been having the same problem since day 1. One of the Lion updates Apple pushed out seemed to help so now I usually only experience freezes when I 1) sync and use my bluetooth headphones or 2) when I run Quicken 2011 via Parallels. I don't seem to have any problems relating specifically to Chrome.

Case in point: this morning I've been listening to iTunes on my MBA via my bluetooth headphones. In the two hours I've done so, it's frozen up and required a hard shutdown/restart twice.

So much for "It just works"...

Another update:

The full wipe and reinstall did not solve the freezing problem, so I went back to the genius bar. They replaced the SSD while I waited (I made back-to-back appointments at the end of the day). I haven't had a freeze since I got the new drive, which was 6 days ago.

In short: get thee to your local genius bar! Let them fix your shiny computer for you!

Alirayl,

Problem is I typically can't get my MBA to freeze or act up; it does it randomly if/when it wants to. Were you able to actually make your MBA freeze while at the genius bar? If not, did it in any way make the folks at the Genius Bar hesitant to assist you?

Thanks for the feedback!

An update: The freezes have continued sporadically (although not as much). Finally I did a clean wipe and install and within 30 seconds after booting it up, it froze again! At that point, I was pretty sure I was dealing with a hardware issue,

Took it in to a Apple Certified repair shop and although they couldn't get it to replicate the frezzing, when they started running higher level diagnostics on it, all kinds of errors starting popping up.

Solution: they are installing a new logic board for me. Thankful that I am still under AppleCare!

WCR

Hi there,

There is something definetly going on with time machine / the SSD as I only started encountering this issue when I finally got around to getting a new external drive and implementing time machine about a week ago. This morning after the umteenth crash in a few days I found this post and immediately disabled time machine and there hasn't been a crash since.

Model: MBA, i7, 4Gb, 256SSD running Lion & Win 7 through VM Fusion 4 (all software patched to the latest versions)

Apple - you need to stand over this issue and replace all hard drives when it occurs.

I got my first Mac last Fall for my birthday, and after transferring everything onto it, it froze and was inoperable. They had to wipe it clean at the Mac store and refused to replace it. For a long time I just didn't use it, because I was scared of it. Now I'm working again after having a baby, and it keeps freezing constantly with the beach ball while I'm in Word. I keep losing text in documents I'm working on. My PC was slow, but I never had this level of problem with it. I'm thinking I made a huge mistake. This thing cost almost $2500 with all the bells and whistles, and I constantly have problems with it. Something so expensive should not cause me so much grief.

Well I have been having freezes as well on my 11.6 Macbook Air i5. It would happen when I had a web browser open. I use Chrome for my Browser, not all sites would cause this as I noticed when I was in hotmail and sites that use Adobe Flash. When I went to sites with heavy flash content my CPU temps would jump from 50C up to 80C or 90C. When I killed the tab that had flash on it the temps went back down. If I stayed on that site long enough it would either crash Chrome or if I was running something else it would freeze the MAcbook Air.

There are plenty of stories out there about Flash ,Apple and OSX. Funny thing is I can go to these sites on my Windows Laptop (of course it is a gaming Laptop with huge exhaust vents on the back) and I never have these problems but then again I do not normally run a fan temp program on that Laptop as it rarely locks up.

Don't know if this is helpful but figured I would share my experience. I actually went so far as to disable the flash add-on in Chrome because if I went to site with flash and did not realize it, especially if I left the browser open I would come back to a locked up Macbook.

Message was edited by: krassh

The story continues ...

Our MBA 13" freezes soon after (re)start. The whole story above I've read (including all the tips) and also (+ SMC reset PRAM, reinstall OS, etc) neatly followed and the result is that we still enjoy frozen moments. I stake my search, this amazing device will be tomorrow at the Apple doctor.