I am the owner of a MacBook Air as 4 of my colleagues (we bought these MBA over a few months interval with different configurations). This portable could be perfect for me.All in all, certain owners of MacBook Air meet this kind of problems and others do not; the proportion being difficult to establish, those affected tend to complain much more that others.
BUT he suffers from a very large bug which makes it quasi unusable at the daily level: it does not support a loaded CPU, in particular when the ambient temperature is hot. The 5 MBA in the office have all the same behavior and considering the number of contributions on this subject in the Apple forum (such as here http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387729&tstart=45 and here for example http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1445521&tstart=135) one can suppose that this problem is general.
The origin the problem appeared when one of the cores gets blocked at 0% while the other core is set at 100%, the mac then becomes quasi uncontrollable. Last week Apple updated a patch supposed to correct this problem. In fact it is nothing, since then in the event of request for the two cores are at 100%, the mac becomes also unusable. If the activity monitor is opened, one sees that the "kernel_task" is running at 120-150%.
Here are the cases in which the problem appears and/or is more frequent
- Room temperature higher than 27-28° without any active application
- Reading a video on youtube in Safari
- Play Flash in Safari
- Remote loading (!!) of a video from the iTunes Store
- playing a film bought or rented on the iTune Store with full screen (this goes with a video using less than 50% of the screen)
- Reading of a sequence avi under VLC in full screen
- Connection of a 23" screen
- Backup of TimeMachine on a DD USB
In other words this portable is unusable. What is astonishing is that few people seem to complain in a vehement way, apart from those at the Apple Forums. It is quite simply unacceptable that Apple is not able to regulate the problem 9 months after the launch of the product.
One can attribute this behavior of the machine, or rather of the processor to the fact that in the event of detecting overheating: it will radically lowers its voltage and its frequency in order to protect itself from the destruction, with the cutting of power of the machine related to the last level of alarm at the CPU; an event that will lead to a powerdown without notice.
