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

Hey i have a rmbp, and i am getting extremely horrible battery life and every now and then the cursor will freeze when i am doing anything. I tried to instal the EFI firmware but kept on getting a message saying that it is unavailble to me. Help? Went to genius today and they said nothing was wrong with battery...

Oli, so great to see you back here! Thanks for checking in.

Apparently, since this thread is still going and now 181 pages long, people are still having problems. I really find this unacceptable, and it's one of the reasons I never ended up buying one of the new rMBP (released last November). If the problems had really, truly been fixed, this thread (and the similar one about the 15" screens) would have long ago dried up.

Anyway, glad you check in here occasionally. You were always one of the best people and resources in this thread.

santranyc wrote:

 

Apparently, since this thread is still going and now 181 pages long, people are still having problems. I really find this unacceptable, and it's one of the reasons I never ended up buying one of the new rMBP (released last November). If the problems had really, truly been fixed, this thread (and the similar one about the 15" screens) would have long ago dried up.

 

To be honest, from my point of view, this thread has dried up.

Take into consideration, how many 13" Haswell rMBP have been sold by now. And then look how many people post here to report of problems. It's is almost none compared to the number of rMBP that are being used by now.

In the early days of this thread, when the EFI fix wasn't out, new people reporting problems showed up here almost every minute. (No joke) Now it dried up to what? One new person a day? I think even less than that.

Of course it's your decision, but I sure wouldn't wait from buying a 13" rMBP. The chances, that your device works flawless is around 99% I guess. With a mass consumer device you won't get beter than this.

Also, I read quite a few postings here lately that are obviously not connected to the original problem with keyboard/touchpad freezes, but "normal" crashes and hangs. Ask 50 Mac Users and you will always find one that has massive problems ... most of the times the system has simply been ... well ... "misconfigured" by the user. Or there actually is some hardware glitch.

So from my point of view, the whole topic is finished. Before the EFI update, 100% people were affected. (Not everybody knew, because of USB-devices plugged in, etc.)
These days, maybe 1 or 2% still have problems. That is a normal number for a mass-market device, I guess. From what I heard, Apple is always very fair if you want to return a device if it has issues.

The 13" Haswell rMBP is by now a really fine laptop. I use mine every day and wouldn't want to miss it anymore.

syntactic I have been noticing the same problems as you. I got the mac for the purpose of running traktor. There might be an issue with running traktor on the mac os. I am most def not a tech guy but I am going to see if I update the drivers on traktor if it helps.

I did all the mac updates. Luckily I only had mine for a week so I am going to return it for a new one if the problem presists I'll let you know.

It's been a great machine, but I'd have to echo others here that seem to have hangs that might be related to USB use (after the EFI update) because I've been having around 1 of these freezes a week in January doing development where I have a USB->Serial adapter connected and an iPhone I'm doing iOS development on.

What's especially irritating is that there doesn't seem to be a specific cause or specific amount of time involved and I never see something in the system logs that seems to correlate and it's not a kernel panic.  It might be that for the vast majority of workloads they've implemented a fix, but I did pretty much the same type of work before on a non-retina 13" before and never had this happen so I believe there is still some issue here they need to resolve.

Edit: I'm getting both temporary keyboard/trackpad freezes and screen freezes where the screen stops updating but there's no kernel panic.

Hi - I also have a mid 2010 17' that is freezing after Mavericks install. Did you find a solution? I've tried a PRAM, SMC & Finder reset, & deleted the wireless settings file from library - I couldn't find any other suggestions! Thanks, Richard in London

I agree, and after seeing the majority of people actually using this machine as it was intended...it's still a chronic issue.

This forum is FAR from "dried up" my friend, and if your machine is working as intended..I'd say congratulations, and please stay on topic. Thank you

I am still encountering system freezes after applying the EFI 1.3 albeit less frequently. They seem to happen to me when I have the screen locked, and upon coming backing to login, there is no response. The system is completely unresponsive both from the keyboard and from the network, so the ony means to recover is to power it off.

My MBPr 13" has been freeze free since I uninstalled Chrome. Over a two weeks now. I suspect that Chrome and flash was the reason. Have to wait for a new release of chrome or OSX 10.9.2 and give Chrome another try.

I returned a total of three late model MBP 15" machines for various problems, some of which were BootCamp related, but hangs where programs would run for ever with no indication of a problem were fairly frequent.  I really liked the general design of the MBP, but a $3K laptop should work reliably and none did.  It seems silly to suggest there are no more problems with all the posts on this topic to the contrary.  That said, I don't know whether the problems were Mavericks or hardware related but 100% of thge MBPs I purchsed were defective.

So, I went to the genius bar last week, and told them about my USB freezing issue. I wasn't able to let go of my computer for more than a day, so they REFORMATTED my mb pro retina 15 haswell. Ever since then, I haven't had a freeze up while using the USB! they said it could just be a corrupted OS install.

AND i forgot I had freezing issue with using Chrome. I talked to an apple specialist, and they told me to turn off app nap for Chrome.... **CROSSESS FINGERS** hope this works.

Same problem here: What really annoys me is, that the employees at the genius bar pretend to have never heard of that bug (Yes, even you geniuses in the Palo Alto). You cant miss 180 pages of complaints from customers.

Besides the random freezes my mac has the faulty airport hardware too, I'd advise to check your MBP for that, too.

Hello Oli and evreryone else,

I'm sad to say but this issue is far from dried up. In the last 3 weeks I have gone through two 13 inch rMBP after finally deciding to not get a thrid one but to return it and wait for Apple to sort the issue out. Both computers came with EFI 1.3 preinstalled, despite this, I would get random trackpad and keyboard freezes through out the day - regardless of what USB devices were plugged in or not. Also, to make sure that the issue wasn't linked to any software I might of had on my computer, I used these machines in completely stock configuration (I only used Safari for web browsing). I also formatted both in hope that the keyboard / trackpad freeze would stop, it didn't.

It blows my mind that when speaking to a senior Apple techy, he was not aware of this issue and would insist that this is not a widespread issue, I finally directed him to this thread with over quarter million replies, to which he had nothing to say..... I need this computers for work with Logic Studio and I simply can not afford it freezing randomly when I'm half way through working on a project. This is totally unacceptable and IS NOT NORMAL, I bet many people accept this thinking that it's normal in a course of using a computer IT ISN'T. I never, ever, had a computer which was this unreliable. I am a techy and have been working in IT all my life, so computers arent foreign to me. I dont mind problems that are fixable, but this issue simply isn't - for this reason, this is the most unreliable piece of garbage compurer that I ever used. And it pains me to admit that I will be coming back to buy it once the issue is fixed as I need it for Logic Pro. If not for this small fact, Apple would never see my money again . thanks for reading my vent, I jsut mainly wanted to underline the fact that this issue is NOT fixed, as I have gone through two rMPB in the last 3 weeks.

Well stated neopl. A lot of us are in the same boat and I'm flabbergasted in the fact that when these events occur there is no log depicting as such, and the machine reports running as "normal." Engineering supposedly is looking into the matter, but I'm going to have to follow up with them on a weekly basis.

That's good news that there's some acknowledgement and that someone is looking into the issue.

From a debugging perspective it sounds like this would be a pain to track down since there's no kernel panic, no log entries that correlate with it, nothing... That and at least so far, I haven't found a way to reliably repdroduce the issue even within a given window of time.

That said, if there are any logs or instrumentation I can sign up for to help them narrow down this issue, I'd be happy to do it.