Macbook Air 2012 freezing up

[claykin]

Which ssd is installed in new MBA? If its running faster I'm thinking you have samsung.

Can others report if they have samsung or toshiba? And whether you experience lockups.

Did the swap last eve.
Restored from backup, all is well.
All day, no page outs and is leaps quicker than my old one.
Running VMware all day, along with OSX; it's a dream.

i7 2.0, 8gb 512.
Good for another 2-3 years I imagine.

 

[tigres]

Which ssd is installed in new MBA? If its running faster I'm thinking you have samsung.

Can others report if they have samsung or toshiba? And whether you experience lockups.

Samsung SSD and Samsung screen.

 

[mixman]

Samsung SSD and Samsung screen.

LG + Toshiba. Just to quell the notion of SSD brand making any difference.

 

[cong]

LG + Toshiba. Just to quell the notion of SSD brand making any difference.

LG screen and Toshiba SSD

 

[mitty]

Mine froze this afternoon, I was in Chrome at the time. 13" 8GB i5 256GB SSD (Samsung) Samsung Screen.

With this problem and the brightness issue, I wonder if we might see another update sometime soon.

 

[slumpey326]

What's the brightness issue

 

[nylon]

My 2012 MBA has now kernel panicked 3 times. Each time Chrome was open and may or may not have been running flash video.

The logs seem to say the the video driver is crashing.

 

[Ratatapa]

go back to the apple store?

 

[nylon]

go back to the apple store?

No, I think this is software related issue. I'll wait for an update.

 

[mitty]

What's the brightness issue

If my auto brightness is switched on, the screen brightness changes up and down like a yo yo. I've turned it off and am just controlling it manually.

Meanwhile mine crashed again tonight, again using Chrome. I'd imagine that hopefully this will be fixed sooner rather than later, there is a thread about it on the apple discussion forums (no idea if that will do any good or not).

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4035924?start=0&tstart=0

 

[slumpey326]

saw this in one of the google chrome forums, anyone try this and see if the freezing stops....

"I called Apple Care and they had me delete the Chrome App and it's DMG file. They also had be go to the "Go" tab on the menu bar on the top of my computer (you can only see it when "Finder" is visible on the left side of the menu bar) and click on the "Library" tab (if it doesn't show up when you first look hold down the "alt/option" button and it should show up. Once you see "Library" open it up and go to the folder "Application Support." After doing that go to the folder labeled "Google." You should see a folder in there labeled "Chrome" if you go ahead and delete that then empty your trash so all Chrome files are completely deleted from your computer your problem should be solved after re-downloading. It worked for me let me know if it works for you."

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/chrome/mac/L4A3JS8asss

 

[darthpotato94]

If my auto brightness is switched on, the screen brightness changes up and down like a yo yo. I've turned it off and am just controlling it manually.

Meanwhile mine crashed again tonight, again using Chrome. I'd imagine that hopefully this will be fixed sooner rather than later, there is a thread about it on the apple discussion forums (no idea if that will do any good or not).

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4035924?start=0&tstart=0

I can confirm the brightness issue. It happens to me as well. I thought I was the only one who noticed that.

So, the general consensus is that all these issues are not hardware related and that we should wait for an update?

Does resetting cause any hardware problems?

 

[Bigmacduck]

If it freezes up, then it is not running hot enough!
Put Diablo as a background task and it will stay hot.

 

[pjosborne]

If my auto brightness is switched on, the screen brightness changes up and down like a yo yo. I've turned it off and am just controlling it manually.

Meanwhile mine crashed again tonight, again using Chrome. I'd imagine that hopefully this will be fixed sooner rather than later, there is a thread about it on the apple discussion forums (no idea if that will do any good or not).

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4035924?start=0&tstart=0

I've seen both issues. WRT the crashing if I click "send to apple" and look at the details Chrome is always present in the trace.

WRT to the brightness, my first unit (Core i7 / 8GB / 512GB) exhibited the same yoyo-like behaviour. The brightness would track up and down even in apparently constant lighting conditions and if the light dimmed brightness would shoot way down. I took it back to the Apple Store and compared it to the Airs on display. They were all significantly less sensitive and the genius swapped mine then and there. No issues with the replacement, brightness varies sensibly and slowly.

 

[tigres]

I've seen both issues. WRT the crashing if I click "send to apple" and look at the details Chrome is always present in the trace.

WRT to the brightness, my first unit (Core i7 / 8GB / 512GB) exhibited the same yoyo-like behaviour. The brightness would track up and down even in apparently constant lighting conditions and if the light dimmed brightness would shoot way down. I took it back to the Apple Store and compared it to the Airs on display. They were all significantly less sensitive and the genius swapped mine then and there. No issues with the replacement, brightness varies sensibly and slowly.

I have this dimming issue with my i7 13 unit. I hate to take it back, as it already a swapped unit. Does anyone know if this could be software related; or is it definately hardware?

Urgh. It goes from 3/4 bright and before I know it, it's at 1/4 and I am fighting to read the screen before I realize it has dimmed itself again. Happens every time I am using it without my external monitor.

 

[theSeb]

I have this dimming issue with my i7 13 unit. I hate to take it back, as it already a swapped unit. Does anyone know if this could be software related; or is it definately hardware?

Urgh. It goes from 3/4 bright and before I know it, it's at 1/4 and I am fighting to read the screen before I realize it has dimmed itself again. Happens every time I am using it without my external monitor.

Tough one. It could be either software or hardware or even both.

As for the crashing/freezing: could all of the people that are experiencing this please include your specifications?

CPU:
RAM:
SSD Size:
SSD Model

Maybe we can track it down to a particular configuration

 

[KPOM]

I've got a brand new Macbook Air 2012 with 8GB ram, 512 GB SSD, Core i7. I transfered all my files, apps, etc from my old Macbook Air. And last night it froze twice in an hour. I wasn't doing anything fancy, CPU load was very low. The freeze was full: no beachball, no crash screen, nothing, just everything stopped working and what was on the screen stayed there, frozen in time.

It was a bit warm in my home, 85 F or so, but I wouldn't expect that to freeze my brand spanking new machine. But, it hasn't happened since I've been using it in a cooler environment (70 F) as yet.

No issues so far (11.6" i7/8GB/256GB model here - Samsung SSD), and I've put it through some pretty serious heat-generating tasks (e.g. installation of virtual machine, transferring of massive amounts of content from a Thunderbolt drive to a USB 3.0 drive - the fans were spinning like crazy during the entire operation).

Did you figure out what was happening?

 

[slumpey326]

Tough one. It could be either software or hardware or even both.

As for the crashing/freezing: could all of the people that are experiencing this please include your specifications?

CPU:
RAM:
SSD Size:
SSD Model

Maybe we can track it down to a particular configuration

I think we have come to a mass consensus that majority of the crashing is the result of Chrome. There might be one off situations but the problem keeper is good old Chrome browser.

 

[theSeb]

I think we have come to a mass consensus that majority of the crashing is the result of Chrome. There might be one off situations but the problem keeper is good old Chrome browser.

That might be anecdotal since it's such a wide used piece of software. I see some people are saying it happens whether they are using Chrome or not.

 

[slumpey326]

That might be anecdotal since it's such a wide used piece of software. I see some people are saying it happens whether they are using Chrome or not.

that was what I was talking about as the one offs, but if you look on this forum, apple support community forum and google chrome forum there is alot of talk about chrome being a big factor in the 2012 macbook air freezes.

I was just throwing in my 2 cents, I am also upset that my new 2012 macbook air keeps on freezing, and the only justification is when I am using chrome. When I dont use it, my macbook air sales smoothly. I am hoping and I assume others as well, that there is some sort of update for this problem ASAP.

 

[dbrewster]

How are your units? Any positive updates? Unfortunately, I have the same problem as well. In a span of 1 week I had 3 freezes. Not the beach ball type, but complete freezes wherein the only thing I could do was to press the power button.

I did some basic hardware checks, all seem to be good.

I reinstalled Mountain Lion recently, and the problem significantly improved. With the same workflow, I've had 3 freezes in a span of ~1 month.

I am quite certain the problem is with Mountain Lion. At present, I turned off "put hard disk to sleep" and BT, which hastens wake up from sleep.

 

[Ibamac]

Mine froze last night, too. I just got a refurbished 11.6" i7/8GB/256GB model (Samsung SSD) and have no documents, no music, no videos. ML, Pages, iBooksAuthor, iStatPro; nothing else installed. In a cool house with only Safari (4 tabs - was researching how to make the email messages I'm writing larger), and Mail open, the MBA heated up and the fans spun at 6500. In activity monitor, I saw that Safari content was the culprit and I ended the process (or whatever you call it in the OS) and everything went back to normal. I wasn't able to exit mail, however, even after clicking quit. It was still up but quit was grayed out. At first I wasn't able to shut it down either. I'm still in the two week grace period and am wondering if I should return it for a new one or if this was a software issue, as others have surmised. fwiw.

 

[KPOM]

I did some basic hardware checks, all seem to be good.

I reinstalled Mountain Lion recently, and the problem significantly improved. With the same workflow, I've had 3 freezes in a span of ~1 month.

I am quite certain the problem is with Mountain Lion. At present, I turned off "put hard disk to sleep" and BT, which hastens wake up from sleep.

Mine froze last night, too. I just got a refurbished 11.6" i7/8GB/256GB model (Samsung SSD) and have no documents, no music, no videos. ML, Pages, iBooksAuthor, iStatPro; nothing else installed. In a cool house with only Safari (4 tabs - was researching how to make the email messages I'm writing larger), and Mail open, the MBA heated up and the fans spun at 6500. In activity monitor, I saw that Safari content was the culprit and I ended the process (or whatever you call it in the OS) and everything went back to normal. I wasn't able to exit mail, however, even after clicking quit. It was still up but quit was grayed out. At first I wasn't able to shut it down either. I'm still in the two week grace period and am wondering if I should return it for a new one or if this was a software issue, as others have surmised. fwiw.

Did you migrate from an older Mac (using Migration Assistant)? If so, perhaps something carried over. One solution may be to try a clean installation. I don't think the issues you are experiencing are very common. I agree with dbrewster that it is probably something with the Mountain Lion installation. Be sure you have updated to 10.8.1. If the problems persist and you have an external hard drive, I'd consider cloning your SSD to it, performing a clean installation using the restore partition (reboot and hold down CMD-R, go into Disk Utility and format the drive, and reinstall OS X). Then see if it works, and try migrating from your backup.

 

[Ibamac]

Thanks, KPOM. New (to me) MBA (refurbished). First Mac so nothing migrated and nothing on it (other than what I mentioned above). Downloaded 10.8 and 10.8.1 when I got it. Dell once gave me a refurbished computer under warranty that ended up having registry problems due to the past owner(s). Hoping this isn't a similar case. But I do have access to the educational discount and the identical computer new is only $45 more. I'll see how it is today (haven't turned that one on yet). Still have a week to return it if I want.

Thanks.

 

[m.demian]

I've actually had one freeze since I got the machine five days ago. Not sure if it was coincidence, but it was when I was connecting the thunderbolt to gig-ethernet adapter. It's been fine since. I really hope the 10.8.2 update fixes things, including the battery consumption issues.