Oh, brother. We can already tell this one's going to be a fun, enjoyable journey to follow. Shortly after Apple's
17-inch unibody MacBook Pro began making its way out to early adopters, small legions of owners have reported all sorts of bizarre graphical glitches. While we first
assumed that it was NVIDIA's GeForce 9600M causing all the mayhem, further investigation has led us to believe that faulty fan controls could be the culprit. Granted, all of this is just speculatory at the moment, but it seems that some users have noticed that their fans aren't kicking into high gear when they should. 'Course, some folks
have seen those RPMs spin up while the funky lines and psychedelic colors remain, so it's still hard to pinpoint a definite root cause. We're told that folks from NVIDIA and Apple are spending their weekends working to figure it out, but we can't help but be reminded of an
eerily similar string of events with overheating MacBook Airs just last year. Hopefully a fix will be out soon; till then, just pretend those erratic colors are some new curative feature.
Read - Fan grumbling
Read - More discussions
posted Mar 8th 2009 6:41PM
Its not a bug, its an undisclosed feature!
Damn, you beat me to it.
What is sad is that there is someone I know who pesters me to death about buying a Mac (even after recently buying a ThinkPad) and actually does call things like overheating, bad screens, and bad logic boards "features".
I wonder.
Why after the messy 8600m GT thing, Apple didn't switch to ATi instead?
ATi has this PowerXpress thing too.
@Raymond because ati cards run even hotter
that's my first thought too!
Bug me not!
FACK!
S. Jobs has to go away and this is what happens?
Its like the arse hats running the place are Substitute teachers and all the little drones are having a free 4 all.
time to clear house...
This just proves that Steve Jobs IS APPLE!!!!, nothing like this happens when he is around.
bunch of clowns.
It'll buff right out.
Eh? That's not a feature, it's just testing brand loyalty.
@iHenchman#1: Now now, don't say that please. Otherwise my Apple stock will fall like a rock.
Anyone who paid for that $3000 aluminum toy deserves this kind've blowback. Seriously, they can;t even get switching between the chips without a reboot.
Commonly unadvertised feature.
Dear Valued Apple Customer,
We have it in our files that you're using the undocumented psychedelic colors feature. That feature is no longer offered for free, but it for now will cost only $3.99 a month. You have to accept this undisclosure agreement, the new EULA, and the new SLA. Your refusal to do so will restrict use of your machine to mirror mode. Our policy at Apple is to always nickel-and-dime our customers for their maximum experience. Thank you for your preference.
Steve
EULA: you will not use this feature to create WMDs
I REALLY want to use and enjoy a Mac, but Apple is making is very difficult. Between the high prices, underpowered GPUs, complete lack of options, removing firewire (and not including eSATA) on the MB, crappy iMac update, expensive Mini, and price gouging on the dual-Nehalem Mac Pro, and the ever present quality control issues, they are really losing points fast...
So, I took the plunge into the world of OSX86 on my (2.5 yr old) Dell e1705/9400 laptop. Amazingly, with a simple install of "iPC 10.5.5" and the "post install OSX86 Dell utilities", every single component is working fine. I would recommend it to anyone. (buy an OSX Leopard license please). So now I have a 17" "DellBook Pro" with 1920x1200 screen, C2D, Expresscard, Firewire 400, Nvidia Quadro 160M GPU, 320GB 7200RPM, etc.
Until Apple gets their shit together, they are not getting a dime from me for Mac hardware.
Apple should split into two companies:
1) Apple Computer, For Mac engineers who want to focus on Macintosh and raise the quality control back up to a high level. The way it should be for price Apple ask for their Macs.
2) And Apple Inc, For those inside the company who just want to make money selling music and videos at any cost.
early 08 MBP FTMFW!
I know that apple likes to cram a shitload of technology in a small package, but how can they not think that overheating will be an issue. makes me wonder if these products were put through its paces before they were released
Apple don't cram anymore technology into their cases that ANY other PC assembler. However, they pay peanuts, they get monkeys. It is very well known amongst Apple victims that they have very very poor quality assurance.
Recommendation: If you must buy an Apple product, then please buy the best warranty that you can. A good and expensive one. Then you are covered. You will still have to make lots of trips to the Genius Bar, but you will not be out of pocket too much... AND .... you may be tempted to buy more Apple products whilst you are there (if you wait around long enough to have forgotten why you came, or how many times you have been before).
On the subject of Genius Bars: PLEASE PLEASE make an appointment well ahead. My many trips to the Genius bars have shown me that there are many many people waiting to complain about their defective products. The wait can be extensive.
A recent study showed that Apple along with Asus were the worst two companies for product failures.
BUY Apple warranties. Please.
Paul sadly is right. There's just so much crammed on that tiny, special MBP motherboard that it's a miracle they can cool it at all, given how small and thin the whole thing is.
There's a reason that the other 17", higher end GPU-sporting (and the 9600M isn't even really high-end, more around a generation old midrange part since the 260M replaced it, and the 280M is the new flagship) notebooks have bigger packages and fans+heatsinks galore; they run hot.
The cooling system is obviously under engineered and will likely never (in its current design) totally dissipate all the 8600M's heat. It just can't. Forcing fans to max all the time isn't really a good fix if it isn't working for everyone. More than likely, apple will release a firmware update or .kext which underclocks the 8600M and applies the fan tweaks as well. Then we will see more robust cooling solution packing 17" MBPs roll out.
Did anyone even test these things with the better graphics turned on? I mean, sheesh apple. This reminds me of the whole we-applied-about-20-times-more-thermal-paste-than-necessary-because-more-is-better debacle. Anyone remember that one?
Here's a link to the report that kccboy2004 mentioned in case anyone's interested: http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Squaretrade-888128.html.
@jakem,
you beat me to it. I was looking for that for ages. thanks chap.
@nerdtalker,
are you saying that Apple products are badly designed ? it certainly sounds like it.
All Apple do, is to design the box that components fit into. You are saying that they put the wrong components into the wrong box. True ?
That is all they had to do. And they got that wrong.
@kccboy2004
I laughed a bit at the notion of designing a laptop being as simple as designing a box, and then chucking parts in it.
Take a look at the MBP '08 mobo on iFixit. The ICs themselves are reference design chips (for example, the CPU, northbridge-GPU combo, dedicated 8600M GPU, e.t.c. are all reference designs), but the motherboard and packaging itself, their placement, as well as ports, cooling, and whatever other modular components apple throws in there are all apple's own design.
If, by badly designed, you mean insufficiently designed to cool the thing (read through the forum, some people have their CPUs running up at 200 degrees F! That's way beyond what the TM2 thermal throttling built into the Core 2 Duo is designed to even throttle to, the GPU is running at almost 180+ in some peoples posts too), then yes, they're craptacularly designed.
@nertalker,
I like the cut of your jib.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cut%20of%20your%20jib
@kccboy2004
"A recent study showed that Apple along with Asus were the worst two companies for product failures. "
Apple is one of the worst, yes, but the other one is not Asus, that's Acer, I think.
@kccboy2004
I can haz link to study? I'd be really interested to see how specwise-identical laptops stack up against each other.
Actually, the problem isn't that they put a bunch into a small package, its that they try to increase the quality of the product in such ways as reducing fan noise/speed and using quieter hard drives. Hard drives have nothing to do with this, but reducing fan noise does. I have a MBP17, and the stock settings for the fan are on the edge! I run them up 1k faster all the time then stock, and I've never had a problem since... but i do hear the machine more. Just like a Dell. So, there is a trade off... performance and quality. they try to do both, and it doen't always work. So stop your bitching, get a fan speed controller and up the speeds. you wont have a problem.
I wonder how many of those Apple failures were from the fragile white MacBook case.
My guess is that Steve Jobs, being an obsessive perfectionist who also greatly enjoys style (as totally not evident by his fashion choices) pushes the boundaries of design very far and the result is laptops that are just too close to their thermal envelope for comfort, but very, very stylish and quite feature laden. (and expensive, etc, etc, but let's not turn this into another long, never-ending PC vs Mac debate)
@ kccboy2004 It's ACER, not ASUS, named in that study. The ASUS products I've had experience with have all been VERY reliable. Slander where slander is due...
@mo,
lmao
Why are you all making such a big deal about the results of just one study?
Hardware reliability studies are themselves notoriously prone to unreliability - if you search you will find it easy to locate independent studies done in the last year and a half that have named Sony, Dell, Lenovo and (yes) Apple as having "most reliable laptop", among many other brands!
The results continually change based on the geographical area under study, and particularly the methodology involved. No one study has ever been accepted as providing a conclusive answery. SquareTrade themselves released a report (Nov 08) that said iPhones were *twice* as reliable as BlackBerries, and to be frank, I don't really buy that, either.
The one thing that does arise from most hardware reliability studies, is that the gap between the top brands is usually quite small, and is constantly changing as companies adopt newer practices. So relying on one study will get you nowhere, irrespective of which study it is.
btw does anyone have a link to the actual SquareTrade Aug '08 study (not a press release) because all the reports I can find only say that Apple is in the bottom three, not where they actually ended up or what the results for all companies were.
@kccboy2004
I had to laugh when i read the article, since they say informed buyers will go after the best combo of reliability, features, and price... all of which apple seems to lose out on, moreso according to this study. In truth, good marketing will sell ALMOST any product.
It just works, right?
yeh bro, it just works. i'm gonna go get one of these tomorrow cause its so nice and shiny, and only $3000.
$4,500 here in Australia
Of course it works.... The question is, does it work well? Now THAT is a different story!
The overheating is a new feature. A heater for those cold winter nights. :P
um how hard would it of been for Apple to test this first? If its a fan issue i find it hard to believe it it would of not been noticed in testing.
QA Tester: Our displays are failing!
QA Manager: Yeah, and othe laptops don't? You typical anti-apple troll. Don't forget this is first gen, you should expect these teething issues / growing pains when you get cutting edge hardware.
QA Tester: So we ship?
QA Manager: Yeah. Then we fix.
Your comment is a little unfair. It is staed and firm Apple policy to test all products within one year after release. The testers are all volunteers, referred to in broader circles as "EA's", or "Early Adopters". For the privilege we charge them full retail and then tend to discount around one month after release. Inside Apple we tend to refer to them in code as SJ's ( a tribute to Samuel Johnson, who wrote on the subject of Second Marriages;
89. Marriage
On second marriages: "The triumph of hope over experience."
http://www.samueljohnson.com/marriage.html#89
HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE. (maybe next time it'll be better !). (fingers crossed).
Yeah it's unfair, I'll concede I'm a cheap stirrer.
But WTF was the rest of that meandering post?
@Decoy
It was clever, that's what it was. Although that Second Marriage thing was a tad bizarre...
There's one thing i learned from my 2006 Macbook Pro, you know the first Macbook Pro with an Intel chip. Never.. NEVER buy REV-A apple products.
they usually get it right by REV-C, iPhone 3.0 is going to be the phone I want it to be... I really hope so.
What a surprise. Not only is it Apple's fault but it's more heating issues.
my little sister, who is only eight, keeps on saying that Apple is "Full of Hot Air". does this prove it ?
Kccboy
Stop bringing you little sister in to be a puppet for you.
@kccboy2004
Bag of heat...I mean hurt..?
good evening engadget... still tryna recover from my loss of an hour (7:00 never looked so bright ya digg?)
id go crazy if i had to go thru all these issues after spending $2000+ for one of these things... geez hope apple looks out for you guys who took the plunge
Hhahaha.... I hate MAc so haha,..
Wow, good for you. I guess glitches never hit other laptops so you can rest assured that your petty hatred is reinforced. GAL.
Looks like you have a glitch with your keyboard.
Also can you hate a company, especially one with a good ethical record and good green credentials?
@Oli: That's a joke right?
http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5079590.stm
@ Oli,
My main man,
Apple is eco friendly ? You are joking !!
Steve Jobs: "you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year"
http://www.engadget.com/2006/05/26/jobs-you-have-to-buy-a-new-ipod-at-least-once-a-year/
@Jakem
You gotta be kidding me, right?
Greenpeace are just a bunch of hippies.
Patricks7:
Which begs the question of why Apple is trying so hard to please them. And advertising the fact quite prominently
From this point on, any other notebook with video glitches is just trying to rip off Apple.
Yeah, well, Apple has the prettiest glitches.
Apple is totally ripping off any notebook sold with a Geforce 8 mobile series card. Seriously, still waiting on that recall.
Mwahaha! And they're going to file a patent to it. A GLITCH patent.
Crap.
One of those lovely "features" of macs. I remember being called out for a customer who had bought a new iMac, it would not connect to his wifi with leopard, it was had just launched and it took til 10.5.3 until a fix for airport sorted it out.
Another iMac i set up for a customer that would just turn off randomly, another feature with was bug fixed with an update months later.
Apple doesn't admit to these things so you are left with a product with a defect and no timetable for a fix, pretty disgraceful customer support but then Apple don't even do onsite support.
Mac it usually works and if it doesn't we'll fix it eventually......maybe.
APPLE APOLOGISTS ASSEMBLE!
OVERJOYED FANBOY TROLLS ASSEMBLE!
These problems are clearly caused by "all the apple-haters on Engadget".
OVERZEALOUS CAPSLOCK USERS ASSEMBLE!
DEY TUKK ARR (Stevet) JAWBS!
So lame article...
IT IS OBVIOUSLY SABOTAGE!
Some rogue disgruntled employee is just trying to make Apple look bad.
"i" say get a search warrant for all employees who have access to the line, then search their banking record and record of family members who have recently purchased stock in competing brand laptop makers.
There you will find the problem with the MBP's
__________________________________________________________________________
17-inch SABOTAGED! MBP fan / overheating issues causing GeForce 9600M to bug out?
I guess Apple is cutting costs now and taking shortcuts...I'll be damned... iXbox
OR it could be that they are using an entirely new chipset with an entirely new graphics card on an entirely new motherboard and that there are some growing pains.
We'll see how this pans out but that's why I got the 3 year warranty for mine. BTW the laptop is otherwise perfect, I am enjoying the 7 hours real-life battery life every day. Didn't see the above issue b/c I am never running on the discrete graphics card. The machine barely gets warm.
PS: If past performance is any indication, Apple will provide a fix for this. They always do.
To summarise nikster's post:
- Apple don't perform any QA and release faulty products to unsuspecting customers.
- The only way to guard against this is to pay Apple more money for an additional warranty (i.e. a protection racquet)
- Customers have to hope that Apple will provide a fix which will eventually come (although there's no guarantee that the issue will be fixed in the current version.)
Sounds like great value for money.
@Nikster: "Apple will fix this". You mean like an $800 broken hinge fix that happens from normal use.
Apple, it just works... as long as you don't lay a finger on it
If I just bought a Four-and-a-half THOUSAND DOLLAR laptop, the only kind of growing pains I wanna see are: The (VERY) occasional shutdown, perhaps some driver issues.
What growing pains I DON'T want to see are: Heat from the motherboard causing the screen to break.
Hasta la Macbook Pro!
You would think that after all the advances we have done with laptops making them faster and more powerful that manufacturers would atleast fix one of the biggest issues thats been plagueing laptops since the very start,,, heat.
I have yet bought one laptop that has not got to the point of burning up during regular use for over an hour.
APPLE HW IS CRAP!
I will NEVER buy another computer from Apple again. I bought a
MacBook Pro last year (Early 2008), "JUST" to see what all the hype
was about, and since then I've made about 20 trips to the Apple
store to get various things replaced. I've had the optical drive,
both fans, the screen, and the HDD (still having issues) replaced
already and the Laptop isn't even 1yr old yet.
The "geniuses" at the Genius Bar always want to keep my laptop for
days to run diagnostics, which sometimes makes no sense - - when they
can clearly hear the fan(s), optical drive and HDD either making weird
noises or not working at all.
If they replaced all that stuff in spite of your attitude, I'd say that makes them a damn good company, wouldn't you?
They are fixing all that because they have to.
Any company is going to repair what's broke free of charge for the first year. Just sucks you paid so much to only be let down.
I don't plan to buy Apple stuff. Just because it may look cool does not mean the quality is any good.
A pretty good company wouldn't have those sorts of problems with their products. I think he's entitled to his "attitude" given the money he forked out and the hassle he's had to endure. I've never had to take a computer in for repairs but it seems to be a common occurrence for Apple owners.
I am sorry that you had to go through that. I should have told you beforehand that you would have to do that. I am afraid that your experience is pretty much the standard.
How did you find the expereince. It is a nice store isn't it ? Nice people.
I am surprised however, most people are too embarrassed to tell their story. You are brave.
How do you feel now about buying another Apple product ?
Well, that does indeed suck. However, I will say that I'm on my 2nd Apple laptop and so far the only has been a hard drive that died after 5-years. Given this I just think you were unlucky but don't blame you for having a bad impression of the company since bad experiences will always do that.
It's gotten to the point where I can predict all the responses to Engadget posts these days.
Yeah, it's sad. One or two iTrolls vs 20 or so "haters".... it's.... really boring.
Look, its a simple as this..... You get what you pay for right? As we have to pay such a premium for Apple products, shouldnt we recieve premium products? Just asking
I've said it before, implement an auditioning system like gizmodo, and use the banhammer more freely.
Awww, boohoo. Up until recently Engadget was the biggest Apple circle-jerk imaginable. Now as more people buy Apple products you get people who aren't prepared to put up with the crap that you fanboys have been accepting for years and it's starting to spill out onto the internet. Now we get a whole lot of apologists here and at Digg complaining about all the negative publicity that Apple are generating.
Some of us know that this is typical of the sort of crap that Apple have been pulling for the last 30 years and we smell the sweet sent of vindication. Suck it up fanboys.
I was talking about both the Apple haters and the Apple fanboys, but thank you for filling the first quota, Jakem. :)
Apple products are not perfect, but then, no technology products are. It's time we all grew up and moved on to something more important.
As I learned never buy the first gen of anything Apple makes. My first gen Intel MBP has multiple issues that Apple refused to fix... Sad that I do like it, but itll be both my first and last Mac because Apple sadly cant treat their customers right.
I second that. I bought a first gen MacBook Pro right when they first came out and I had numerous failures including a problem with the built-in wireless antenna and frequent read errors with the optical drive. Apple fixed both of those problems, but the laptop also made a maddening whining noise from under the left side of the keyboard, and the display lid latch kept popping open when you'd carry the laptop closed. Also, some of the keys on the keyboard were seated unevenly (i.e., not level). Apple never fixed those problems.
I sold that laptop and bought a new MacBook Pro about a year-and-a-half later and the difference is like night and day. That new laptop hasn't had a single problem in over a year since I've had it. And its build quality feels top-notch.
So, that's the lesson I learned too. Never buy a first gen product from Apple. They seem to release products a bit prematurely and then learn the design/manufacturing flaws while the product is out in the market and then correct them in subsequent releases.
(This is coming from someone who is a big fan of OS X. I would never go back to Windows.)
I have an early '08 MBP and my fans don't kick in quick enough either when running on the 9600M. If I fire up a game without launching SMCFanControl to bump up the fan RPM first, I almost always get the black screen. No system updates or firmware updates have fixed this problem. There aren't any hardware defects as far as I can tell, everything runs and looks great once I put the fans into high-speed mode.
I would consider myself a fan of Apple (not a fanboy! there is a difference!), but the build quality of their laptops has declined considerably since the days of the Powerbook G4. For the amount of money I paid for this I would expect everything to be absolutely perfect -- its not. I will definitely wait until the kinks are worked out of future products before I buy. That said I still think it's an amazing piece of hardware. Hopefully Apple can improve in the future.
I meant late '08 MBP (unibody).
Engadget are a bunch of AppleFanBoys! If this were any other manufactures product they would have slated them for this error, instead they "just pretend those erratic colors are some new curative feature." basically telling everyone there is no problem, all is still rosy. They should be telling you to stay the hell away from one of these.
kccboy2004 says that you should buy a warranty. If this happened to me and I was told I wasn't getting my money back, the cashier would have 17" worth of Crapbook shoved up his arse and I would be walking out with the cash regiser under my arm. If it's a manufacturing fault I want my money back.
On a side note, I'm just thinking that I have read more than a few of these type of stories involving apple, yet people still flock to apple. At least the advertising department is doing a good job.
@Muddy,
You are sound as a pound.
you're a moron
it's microsoft's fault
Damn, how could we all not see that!
:O
Damn I missed this one!
Can't stop laughing!
Pfft... way to play catch up, Apple. My 7950GX2 in my desktop was doing this over a year ago!
BUT THEY NEVER BREAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So much finger pointing at Apple and not enough at Nvidia. Coming from a Dell M1330 with a notoriously volatile 8400 chip and two motherboard replacements, I'd say Nvidia need to get their act together and build chips that can handle heat.