MBA 13 Mid 2013 crash Black screen

Hi,

been having similar problems, although not sure it is in exactly the same scenario.

I spoke to apple tech support today who advised me to do a software reset;

Power off

Power on

When you hear the first Apple Chime, press and hold cmd alt R P at the same time until you hear a further 2 apple chimes.

I dont know if it has fixed it but told that it doesnt affect anything just causes the software to reset, so worth a try - will monitor it over the next few days.

Zapping the PRAM does NOT eliminate the problem. I just moved my MBA two inches and the screen went black and iTunes stopped playing an Internet radio station. I am plugged in.

The tech in the Apple Store did that while I was there, but I was still able to reproduce the issue, even in their "clean" test environment. You can try the following to test your system:

When the display turns off, it goes through three stages: 1. the screen dims, 2. the screen goes black, 3. the keyboard backlight turns off. Tapping the spacebar or swiping the trackpad anytime during stage 1 will reset the timer. Tapping the keyboard or swiping the trackpad during stage 2 will freeze the black screen with the keyboard lit up. Waiting until stage three to tap the spacebar will wake up the display and everything is fine.

There is less than a one-second window between stages 2 and 3 while the screen is black but the keyboard is still fading that touching the input devices will hang the machine.

bjeez ur right. I am still not sure that this is the scenario the other times but will watch out for it now.

I will get back on to them.

Hi, exact same issue with my mid 2013 MBA !

Is this official that Apple is working on a software update or just what they told you in Apple store ?

Just asking because when I bring back my MBA in the Apple store, they were not aware of this issue...

It seems crazy that 6 months after the release of this product they are not trying to fix it, it only took 2 weeks for Apple to fix the trackpad/keyboard freeze on the new rMBP 13''.

Maybe they can't fix it with software update and that's why 6 months after the release we have no solution.

Since I don't work for Apple, nothing I say is official. But, yes, it is only from the guy in the store who told me they were working on it. It seemed they had reports of it before, but nobody at Apple had been able to reproduce it until I showed them how. It has been 12 days, and I have not heard from them. They said 7-10 days. I'll call them today to see what's happening.

hey all

been back on with apple tech.

did an SMC(?) reset, cleared caches, removed a .pfile, repaired disk permissions and disk. Cant remember exactly how to do this but anyway didnt resolve the issue.

Followed this up with a reinstall of the OSX;

Power off

Turn on whilst holding down cmd R until you see a screen that asks which language to use

select language

next screen gives option to reinstall OSX

Did this and just tested and seems to have worked Hallelujah!

tried it a few times and seems to have worked yippee

It didn't work for me. The guy at the genius bar had to sent an e-mail to Apple USA to find out what's going on. Still no answer from them

yoganinja, did you speak with Apple yesterday and what did Apple have to say?

I dont believe it.

Same problem happened again. I was able to recrreate it deliverately by the same method but then also when the MBA went in to sleep mode fully itself, it had crashed.

aaarrggh!

I called them, and it sounded like the "genius" took very poor notes at the store because they didn't seem to understand my issue at all on the phone. I explained it all again, and they were transferring me to a senior advisor when they accidentally hung up on me. I called again, re-explained the whole thing, and was successfully transferred to a senior advisor. I explained it to him, and he seemed very interested and sounded like he understood and was excited to advance it up to the engineers. He said when specific instructions to reproduce an issue come in like this, a fix is usually back in about three days. We'll see about that.

Doug1803,

Your experience reinstalling Mavericks didn't make much sense to me since I did this on Mountain Lion installs as well, but I was intrigued by your results, so I tried it myself. Right after the reinstall, I made a fresh backup. Before reinstalling any updates, I tried it and did not lock up! Yay! Then I installed one update at a time and tried to reproduce the problem after each and could not...until the RAW update. Grrr...

I did notice another pattern though. In my eagerness to press the space bar before the keyboard backlight completely faded, I was pressing it immediately after the screen went black, and it woke up. On the one that failed, I was a little slower, like 1/4 second, and it froze. I reinstalled from my fresh backup and tried again. This time, I waited that extra 1/4 second, and it froze!

The time window to make this happen is very small, but somehow perfectly timed to that instant when we all try to prevent our mid-2013 MBA's from going to sleep. I'm looking forward to Apple's response to my latest phone call...

Sadly, it seems that they are not caring at all about this issue. They did not call you back and told you that they were not aware of this issue again.

Thank you very much for everything you are doing to help the community !

Hopefully it'll lead to a fix but obviously I am not very confident.

Yes, mine too. My MBA is just 10 days old and I updated its os to Mavericks five days ago. Yesterday in eve it went just black without any screen flickering. Although I was trying skype on which sound was not going through and facetime worked excellent. In few moments of closing these apps force quit the screen said bye bye to me. After reading different post on web I tried to keep shift and power button pressed together for longer time and MBA came back. Please do guide me shoud I take it to authorised dealer in Pakistan or wait for a software update. OR should I try on my first book for PRAM or SMC resets. Thanks