Q: New Retina Macbook pro 13 Haswell system hang/unresponsive

Hi Oli, welcome back, what about console errors?

My late2013 rMBP 15" 2.6 512 2GBgfx crashed about 5 times on the first day of purchase until i reset my apple ID password and signed into the app store again, this may or may not help anyone but I thought would just let you know that anyway. It seems the crashes only happened while the app store was open as it must of had the wrong password. Since I reset my Apple ID password, signed in again and restarted, 1 month later not one crash.

Kroduction

[Music Producer]

Oli.S72 wrote:

 

Supreem wrote:

 

I used mine for 12 days solid without an issue, but then on the 13th day I experienced 2 of the keyboard and trackpad lock-ups pretty much within minutes of each other (closing the lid for a minute works as a temporary solution), I've not had any freeze ups for the last few days though.

Quite strange. You are sure the keyboard/touchpad froze and otherwise the system was running?

 

I did start to use my rMBP on November 19th, don't get me wrong. But due to little time I had, it was often sitting next to me for hours doing nothing but either showing the screensaver or falling into sleep mode, from which I woke it up whenever I noticed.

 

I sure will let you know, if mine will experience problems in the future.

Due to the number of people reporting problems after the EFI update compared to the number reporting the initial problem, I still have the feeling that the EFI update fixed the problem for some 80 or 90 % of the people. We had many new people reporting this every day. Compared to this, it has gotten a whole lot more quiet here.

 

Time will tell.

I assume the system was running, I couldn't really check that without being able to move the cursor or type anything but yes the screen was still lit up, think I was typing an e-mail at the time, closed the lid for a minute and then I was back in action.

Oh for sure the number of reported freeze-ups has diminished massively compared to the first 2 weeks of release, that was crazy.

Yeah just let me know, I'm hoping that was a one-off event for me, but even a one-off makes me feel slightly paranoid at this stage.

I keep seeing people talking about re-installing Mavericks, but I don't feel right having to do that on a brand new mac to be honest, if it comes to it though and the freeze ups happen again I might be tempted to go for the re-install and see what happens.

Supreem wrote:

 

Hey Oli,

 

I got mine about the same time as you got your second-attempt. I did the firmware update on first boot-up. I used mine for 12 days solid without an issue, but then on the 13th day I experienced 2 of the keyboard and trackpad lock-ups pretty much within minutes of each other (closing the lid for a minute works as a temporary solution), I've not had any freeze ups for the last few days though. Point being that the issue can spring up later rather than sooner, a weeks use really isn't enough time for a test on it in my opinion (probably a month of solid use is a good period to say it's gone or not).

 

Also I'm experiencing the machine not being able to wake-up from sleep after it has been asleep overnight i.e. a long period of time. On short sleeps it wakes up every time.

 

So not too impressed with the firmware update as of right now, but I can't send mine back at this point as I don't have time to be without my laptop and will be traveling for a few months very soon so I'll have to ride it out and hope that these kinks get ironed out in a future update.

Well that's not good to hear at all. I ran the EFI update last night and it seemed to fix the freezing issue for now? Reading the updated Apple Return Policy normally a 14 day period is enforced on normal purchases, but in my case Items purchased at the Apple Online Store that are received between November 1, 2013 and December 25, 2013, may be returned through January 7, 2014.

If I so much experience one Freeze, or Hang this Machine is going back, and I employ all to do the same if applicable.

I installed the EFI update yesterday after experiencing occasional freezes with the keyboard and trackpad. However I am still experiencing the same freezing, the update hasn't really appeared to do anything. Very dissapointed.

Yeah it's not not killed the bug off cold that's for sure.

Like Oli mentioned though, the fix is probably set to work within certain parameters and if a MacBook steps outside those given parameters on the 'odd occassion' then we get a the odd freeze still, but nothing on the level that it was before the EFI update in terms of occurrence.

Frankly, this idea seems improbable. If a Macbook "steps outside those given paremeters", it apparently implies that the issue is either hardware or otherwise related to some measurable paremeters. But I cannot believe that a keyboard/IO controller is defective in an extremely specific way that allows it to work 100% fine in recovery mode but fail at random instances during normal state. This just screams software bug. It would help to know the content of EFI fix from Apple, to understand Apple's own hypothesis about the nature of an issue. But as far as guesswork goes, based on my experience (with keyboard being blocked on wake up and login) and others' posts, I'd say it's compatibility problem. Maybe Apple didn't find "clean" solution and just made a workaround for some processes so now they don't crash/interrupt/block waking the controller; some others are still at large.

Admittedly I don't know the first thing about programming, just have some experience with malfunctioning devices.

Will they fix it ever? Safari crash on iPad1 (with iOS5) is 3 years old and no fix, see complains here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3379861?start=600&tstart=0

Jon Bo wrote:

 

Will they fix it ever? Safari crash on iPad1 (with iOS5) is 3 years old and no fix, see complains here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3379861?start=600&tstart=0

They'll probably fix it when they release the new OS X a year or so from now, fix the old bugs and introduce a few new ones.

Hey, folks, I've been watching this thread nearly from the beginning. I've postponed buying 13" because of this freeze problem, and buying the 15" because of its screen problems.

You may have noticed a few people posted in this thread with older MacBook Pros; they explained that they started experiencing freeze-ups recently.

The same thing is now happening to me on a 2008 MacBook Pro. This machine has run great for years; it gets used every day and I don't ever recall it having a trackpad/keyboard freeze problem related to mice, USB ports, and trackpad.

Over the weekend I reformatted the hard drive and upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion. Yesterday and today there were OS X updates to Mountain Lion. Sometime yesterday or today I started getting the freezing problem. Plug in a wired mouse, wired mouse works immediately, reboot machine.

So it's not only the Fall 2013 rMBP 13" machines...it's older MBPs that aren't even running Mavericks!

I wish I could install the MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update v1.3, but I don't know that it will run as an update on an older MBP.

Will try the Permanent USB dongle later this week as a fix to see if that works.

I too had same problem with MACBOOK PRO 13 inches bought in 2012 Oct.

same here.

Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013

2.4 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024 MB

OS X 10.9 (13A603)

No sign of response - except the power button - hold it for 5s, and its powered off.

happended several times after upgrading to Mavericks - something must be wrong with the new Safari that causes system freeze.

vijay_neelam, wangyb,

thank you for your contributions and confirmation that it is happening to you, and also for posting hardware details.

vijay_neelam, are you running Mavericks or something earlier?

I have seen trackpad issues on my Macbook Air 13" starting today.  This is a brand new laptop with Mavericks.  I can still use it to swipe but clicking no longer worked.  Oddly enough when I reboot without the power plug, the track pad seemed to work fine.  When I rebook witht the power plug in, the trackpad stopped working.  There is also sluggishness in the trackpad tracking.  This is really a huge disappointment in my first switch to an Apple laptop.  Guess it's better to go back to a Windows machine...

I got my macbook pro 13'' retina i5/8/256 3 days ago. Fix to the issue reported in this topic has been pre installed. No freezes so far but there're rare messages in console.

No image retention (did test from www.marco.org).

I confirm scrolling lags in itunes and app store.

Anyway, absolutely happy with my new laptop. Battery life is 10+hrs.

A-w-e-s-o-m-e.