Apart from some possible issues with the cooling system itself (firmware, sensors or fan curve) or SSDs or whatever, I find it quite telling that some people really complain about "fan issues" on such thin laptops like the Macbook Pro Retinas that have a powerful dual-core CPU/GPU and on the 15" models, they even have a discrete Nvidia GPU in them.
Guys. You bought a Macbook Pro
Retina where the screen alone needs a lot of constant GPU power to feed it and thus the cooling system needs to work a lot harder than in a conventional Macbook Pro. Second, you bought a Macbook that is so thin that there´s even more compromises involved into cooling them.
It seems no one really cares or questions WHY this may be a bad thing for a Pro laptop. But because everyone always wants to have the newest and best marketed products from Apple, they are bought without afterthought, and after some usage heat issues arise where everyone suddenly wakes up and realizes that heat still has to be dissipated out of the casing and with laptops that are as thin as the Retinas are, the fans and cooling system can barely keep up to the job.
Yes, for Apple and a lot of customers it may be acceptable to sell such thin Pro laptops because they look good and are fast and almost non-repairable, but do they really work as good as a thicker and old Macbook Pro? No, because everything that is thinner still needs to dissipate the same amount of heat at the same wattage out of the casing, just like older Macbook Pros. And the old ones had a lot more room for a cooling system and thus potentially more quiet fans, because they didn´t need to rotate as fast. The thinner laptop will always be the one that is louder. That´s just how it is.
And if the next time Apple makes you believe in their keynotes that their new cooling system is "optimized and great and even the fans have been adjusted to be quieter" you should think about what I just said. Apart from liquid cooling systems, which take a bit more space and are typically used in server rooms, where there´s a need to dissipate a lot of heat out fast, a typical radial fan or fans are not able to dissipate endless amounts of heat, there are limits.
This may not be related to the fan issues some people have, but if I read posts like "yes, my Retina Macbook Pro is quite noisy, my old Macbook Pro was better" I get a little like "Oh, really?".
I think I should stop lusting for latest and greatest and stick with my cherry picked iPhone 5 (almost gave up, thought I had one with hardware-stability issues that turned out to be a quirky <6.0.2 respring bug, this one has the best screen I've seen of any, same with my iPad3 that was the biggest nightmare.
Same here. If I buy something that is as expensive as $800 or more, I want a product that works and doesn´t annoy me. Apple doesn´t seem to care about QA, because QA costs a lot of money, they rather let you return the products a couple of times, because some people are actually satisfied with a faulty product, believe it or not. Good thing is that I can do the same thing as Apple does, I can simply return it until I get the product that works as advertised or I ask for my money back.
My iPad 3 is perfect and I would never trade it for anything. The iPad 4s didn´t interest me a bit, but I could be tempted to buy an iPad 5 if it´s worth it. But I am pretty sure that I will not give up on my iPad 3 if there´s nothing as high-quality as my iPad 3, the screen is just breathtakingly awesome.
