Mid-2013 Macbook Air screen goes black?

Can you force the BSOD?

I agree with AceNeerav, it's Apple trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

My machine had it's memory wiped, new SSD, fresh install of Mavericks and crashed at the first attempt after turning it on.

Woke up just right, tried it just now. Haven't tried any other methods, as I've been happy with the machine. What other methods are there to cause it?

See my first post on page 53 on how to recreate the issue.

Yes, I think you are right, this is the second time, it isn't going black and working faster but connect the priinter. She said that I must have gone on a bad site, i always am careful with that, I was having issues, wonder if I should take it into a computer repair and just make sure it is ok. I will wait and see, she said if the problem continues to take it into the store, which I haven't normally found too pleasant, hear they only make minumuin pay so maybe that is why. When I mentioned the Console was showing a virus they didn't know what the console was and said we don't even look at that so why do you? Now I am not an expert but that is why I took it in to them. Then they said it is impossible for a apple product to be hacked, come on, nothing is impossible and it was after this last year I heard that their employees computers had been hacked but not customers, really???? Anyways, I hope it is ok, feel a bit paranoid that it still won't be fixed. She also said going black and slow and battery only lasting 4 hours is from it getting on, I said it is a year old....Anyways, we will see. She was nice enough.

Apple told you a £1,000 laptop less than a year old has an acceptable battery life of 4 hrs!?!? That's farcical. Under what circumstances is a customer to accept degradation to 30% of the original capacity is OK?

I use Coconut battery (free app) to monitor mine. My 17" MBP is nearly two years old and still has 96% of it's original capacity.

However, we're a little off-topic here. A dodgy file is not going to cause the BSOD failure.

I have friends who are serial downloaders with no anti-virus software whatsoever and their machines run perfectly.

Another uses Spotify, a dirty piece of software by a dirty company. Her battery life is poor and her machine is terribly slow until she uses it from a different location, then it works just as well as mine because Spotify stream music from your computer to others, so it uses up your bandwidth and battery.

Check your CPU activity with Activity Monitor to see hwat it's up to.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Take the machine in to Apple, quote the various case numbers quoted here and ask for a repair to eliminate the BSOD. THey'll replace all sorts of hardware, delte everything, do a fresh OSX install and it will still fail. You'll have the satisfaction of knowing it's cost them a fortune, then ask for a refund so it costs them even more :-)

Yes and they always seem to like to blame the customer....or the age of the product...a year is not old so battery problems at at year seems ridiculous, last year it was only 2 months old when started having issues...seems fine but we will see...😕

I am in Canada so it cost about $1000 or a bit more....so far it seems fine, we will see....not going black but if it does I will go into the store like you said.....

I did the cmd+alt power button combo five times. No black screen.

Did you immidiately after pressing the combo (thus making the screen to go black and the computer entering sleep mode) press random keys on the keyboard to try to wake it up?

If your screen is going black try the following, Go to system preferences, then Mission Control, at the bottom left corner is a box titled "Hot Corners", click on this to see what is set for the corners. My wife's was set to go to sleep when curser came to any one of the four corners. This could easily explain why the screen went dark while typing various documents. Any contact with the track pad with her hand would be working the curser to a eventual corner.

If your screen is going black try the following, Go to system preferences, then Mission Control, at the bottom left corner is a box titled "Hot Corners", click on this to see what is set for the corners. My wife's was set to go to sleep when curser came to any one of the four corners. This could easily explain why the screen went dark while typing various documents. Any contact with the track pad with her hand would be working the curser to a eventual corner.

Thanks for trying to help, but that's not the thing at all.

To repeat: the problem most of us are talking about in this thread is that when waking the computer ”at the wrong time” from sleep mode it doesn't always come back, i.e. the screen stays black and the computer might be responding to key input (for example caps-lock light can be turned on and off) but eventually the computer might freeze (no longer responding to caps-lock) and then restart and tell you it restarted because of a problem. Or you might need to force restart it yourself.

I've been able to reproduce this on two different MacBook Air 2013 units (one 11" and one 13") by doing the following (taken from my post on page 53):

REMEMBER, this will most likely hang your computer requiering a forced restart, while it should be fine I don't take any responsibiblity for any trouble that might cause you:

1. Have the MacBook Air (Mid 2013) running with the display/lid open.

2. Hold down the ”cmd alt/option” keys and press the power key (this will cause the MacBook Air to enter sleep mode)…

3. …then immediately after pressing the above key combo, press random keys on the keyboard in an attempt to wake up the computer.

If I do this it just takes me one or a few attampts for the problem to occour. If you can do the above a few times without the issue hapening to you, then congratulations. Maybe the problem isn't global as I first thought, (i.e. a problem with all MacBook Airs released 2013). But I still think is. At least there's many with at MacBook Air from 2013 that has this problem.

Acutally in Mavericks - since they decided to remove the dialogue window "Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now" - the easiest (I think) to reproduce the problem is to tap the power button twice within like 1 sec. This happens to me from time to time when typing whilst looking to a secondary screen (I try to hit the backspace).

In Poland no one in authorised resell stores (we do not have an official apple store here, just these autorised resellers) seems to be aware of this issue (on the costumer service end the same thing).

So I just make fun of them going occasionally into the stores and crashing all MBA in from of potential buyers - mayby that will call their attention :-)

The worst thing is that I still wouldn't change my MBA to any windows laptop because I am already used to the OSX workflow..

Aha, that's true. They've changed the behaviour when quickly pressing and releasing the powerbutton (before you got the dialog that now requires you to hold down ctrl and press powerbutton). But doing that only ”sleeps” (turns off) the display, it doesn't put the computer to sleep. But you say that's enough to reproduce the problem? Interesting… Will try to reproduce like that when I get the chance.

Yep - that works on mine and the MBA in the store :-)

isn't that the whole problem? Your try to prevent the computer from going to sleep and it crashes (freeze on black screen).

Initially this was a big problem for me, because my MBA after upgrading to Mavericks was going to sleep randomly without any action from my part - now I use caffeine to prevent it from going to sleep. But still I can force the BSOD as MDN64 calles it :-) by taping the power button twice. Works always - you just need to do it in the right interval of about 1 second.

So if anyone knows how to turn back on the dialogue window when typing the power button - that would be nice :-)