Future of the mid 2010 MBP

[steve217]

So were do we mid 2010 MBP owners stand with this Black Screen of Death issue?

Since I've upgraded to Lion, I've experienced all the symptoms.

When Lion was released, this model was not much over a year old. Now eight months after Lion there still seems to be no fix/relief in sight. Is there any history of Apple befouling such a current model?

How are the rest of you mid 2010 MBPers handling the NVIDIA driver issue?

- gfxCardStatus?
- sold it/moved on with life?
- downgraded to S/L?
- praying for the next update?

Wearily,
Steve

 

[rikscha]

what I dont understand is that I never experienced any problems when I was running SL. Only since I installed Lion, I am getting these problems. I had less problems since upgrading to 10.7.3 but now very rarely my mac restarts for no reason.

As soon as apple announces new macbooks with no optical drives, mine is going on ebay.

I will wait for the new macbooks and who knows? They might upgrade me to the new model if they cant fix it. I am still on AC, so I dont worry to much about that problem.

 

[/user/me]

what I dont understand is that I never experienced any problems when I was running SL. Only since I installed Lion, I am getting these problems. I had less problems since upgrading to 10.7.3 but now very rarely my mac restarts for no reason.

As soon as apple announces new macbooks with no optical drives, mine is going on ebay.

I will wait for the new macbooks and who knows? They might upgrade me to the new model if they cant fix it. I am still on AC, so I dont worry to much about that problem.

They might not get rid of the optical drives before your ac goes out....

 

[rocknblogger]

I can't complain. I did a clean install of Lion and haven't had any problems.

I had some minor memory annoyances in the beginning but now with the latest update it runs beautifully.

 

[ryannel2003]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I did a fresh install on a friends 2.66GHz 13" MBP and she has had no problems to report. To be honest I didn't know these issues existed until I read this post.

 

[Eithanius]

MBP 2010 with SL through thick and thin

I have a mid-2010 15" MBP. And my colleagues who've just got themselves newer models that comes pre-installed with Lion, they've been showing off on how good Lion is. So I took the liberty to test-drive Lion on an external drive for 2 hours, despite having reading online all the horror stories about Lion. Installed Lion, and performed a Migration Assistant off my primary drive without erasing SL off. This would enable a direct comparison of my applications running.

Unfortunately Lion is far from satisfactory. In the end, I rebooted back to my primary drive running SL, and planned to keep it as long as the MBP and SL is running. I don't plan to upgrade to Lion, nor would I buy any Macs for the time being as long as Lion is the de facto OS. I'll see what Mountain Lion has to offer, but from the looks of their DP, so far nothing's promising.

What I have found so far about problems in Lion:

1. Lion does not allow internal display off in clamshell mode with lid open. SL does. I need this so that I would not have my MBP trapping heat with the lid close when I BOINC or running resource-intensive apps.

2. Spaces no longer works, so I cannot assign my apps to certain desktop spaces. Mission control sucks.

3. Lion is a RAM hog. Launch the same number of apps on both Lion and SL, the former takes up half the memory (I have 8GB), whereas the latter takes up only 1/3 the RAM. I'm not running intensive apps. Just a few minor apps and 2 Safari windows with 10 tabs each.

4. Temperature rises to around 80ºC with fan speed on 3300 - 3600 rpm with the same amount of applications running. The fact that the open lid resulted in the dual screen takes up my resources on the graphics, hence pushing the temperature up. SL registered only between 65 - 70ºC with fans around 2000 - 2200 rpm with the lid open and internal display off.

5. Text Edit hanged while saving versions.

6. No Save-as function for Apple apps.

7. Auto-save and Versions have no OFF toggle. Since I rely heavily on large documents on Preview and Pages, I wouldn't want them to inundate my space-constrained SSD with redundant data.



While I have not experienced any Black Screen of Death issue on the graphics with Lion, the few problems listed above is already enough to push me away from Lion back to SL.

But I'm curious though... How would anyone play intensive games on an MBP with Lion on an external display, since Lion automatically set to extended display when the lid is opened....? If it's closed, the heat from the CPU and GPU will be trapped with maddening fan speed...

Regarding memory on the 2010 MBP with Lion, it can only support up to 8GB, and my not-so-intensive apps already hogs up half the RAM. Can't imagine the page-outs to the drive if I run memory-hungry apps on it. 2011 MBPs however supports up to 16GB RAM, so it's still pretty comfortable on that range.

Anyhow, there is not much future-proofing for mid-2010 MBPs to talk about when it comes to Lion, but as long as SL is still alive and kicking, that would probably be my last stable OS X.

PS: BOINC cannot take advantage of CUDA since they're running off AMD graphics on the 2011 15/17" MBPs...

 

[steve217]

To those of you who responded and said they had no problems, Eithanius, ryannel2003 and rocknblogger; do you often connect your mid-2010 MBP to an external monitor?

That is the chief source of my complaints. If I stay off the external monitor or boot with the external plugged in, then I'm steady as a rock.

If the external is connected, then I unplug it and work on the laptop from battery, then within 5 minutes, KP's and/or freeze ups.

 

[lamboman]

While this might not be the response that you are really looking for, if you have tried multiple reinstalls and are still getting the problems, I'd honestly consider going to your local Apple Store and complaining about it. They have swapped systems in the past, and it isn't fair on you that your year old machine (yes, you might have bought it earlier, but some of the last models will still be under warranty) doesn't run the latest update that Apple claim to provide compatibility with, and you paid for.

I know that isn't exactly a simple fix or solution, but it is what I would personally do, and is what I'd recommend people with the same issue doing. I didn't know about the issue before, but it clearly isn't a small issue; the only reason I don't know is simply because it doesn't apply to me.

 

[steve217]

While this might not be the response that you are really looking for, if you have tried multiple reinstalls and are still getting the problems, I'd honestly consider going to your local Apple Store and complaining about it. They have swapped systems in the past, and it isn't fair on you that your year old machine (yes, you might have bought it earlier, but some of the last models will still be under warranty) doesn't run the latest update that Apple claim to provide compatibility with, and you paid for.

I know that isn't exactly a simple fix or solution, but it is what I would personally do, and is what I'd recommend people with the same issue doing.

This is good advice, Lamboman. What have I got to lose?

 

[Eithanius]

To those of you who responded and said they had no problems, Eithanius, ryannel2003 and rocknblogger; do you often connect your mid-2010 MBP to an external monitor?

That is the chief source of my complaints. If I stay off the external monitor or boot with the external plugged in, then I'm steady as a rock.

If the external is connected, then I unplug it and work on the laptop from battery, then within 5 minutes, KP's and/or freeze ups.

Yes, in fact most of the time my MBP is plugged and unplugged from my Dell 24"... All I can say is hardly any issue, but then again I might have not used Lion long enough to experience the Black Screen of Death. My only complaint on the display is on my post earlier regarding clamshell mode, but I've found a trick to keep the internal display off while having the lid open by means of a magnet - playing with the internal-external display transition is super smooth, no issue at all.

However I did read up some complaints elsewhere that nVidia did screw up their drivers that were bundled together with Lion, so much that the only solution to the problem was to downgrade back to Snow Leopard. That was early into Lion release. Have you upgraded to 10.7.3 yet..?

On a personal note, this came up 2 days after running BOINC CUDA on Lion, I kept getting error messages which I couldn't narrow them down. However I suspect it may have something to do with nVidia drivers being screwy after reading that the Windows counterpart are having the same issue with the latest release of nVidia drivers. I have since remained on Snow Leopard while keeping Lion on the external hard drive for the time being until nVidia fix the issue.

Anyone here have any ideas of porting Snow Leopard-bundled nVidia drivers into Lion without putting Lion into a boot-loop...?

 

[Prhymeate]

I wasn't aware of the issue where the screen stays on in clamshell mode. I was looking to upgrade to Lion because the mouse jump bug is fixed for my Logitech, but it looks like I'll just have a different problem to deal with if I do.

 

[ryannel2003]

To those of you who responded and said they had no problems, Eithanius, ryannel2003 and rocknblogger; do you often connect your mid-2010 MBP to an external monitor?

That is the chief source of my complaints. If I stay off the external monitor or boot with the external plugged in, then I'm steady as a rock.

If the external is connected, then I unplug it and work on the laptop from battery, then within 5 minutes, KP's and/or freeze ups.

No she doesn't connect to an external monitor. I will get ahold of hers one day and check it out and see if it does that or not.

 

[Eithanius]

I wasn't aware of the issue where the screen stays on in clamshell mode. I was looking to upgrade to Lion because the mouse jump bug is fixed for my Logitech, but it looks like I'll just have a different problem to deal with if I do.

Sorry for the confusion... I meant having the internal display off while keeping the lid open, or rather the "opened clamshell mode"... Snow Leopard allows that, but on Lion, as soon as the lid is open, the internal display comes back to life even after plugging onto an external display.

 

[rocknblogger]

My MBP is always connected to an external 27" via mini hdmi port. The only complaint I have is that it takes a bit longer for me to either boot or wake. But I think that's mostly due to the monitor being slow when it wakes.

When I hook it up to my gaming rig the monitor screen doesn't come on until after post.

Also just because I may not have problems I do believe when others say they do.

 

[Delighted]

So were do we mid 2010 MBP owners stand with this Black Screen of Death issue?

Since I've upgraded to Lion, I've experienced all the symptoms.

When Lion was released, this model was not much over a year old. Now eight months after Lion there still seems to be no fix/relief in sight. Is there any history of Apple befouling such a current model?

How are the rest of you mid 2010 MBPers handling the NVIDIA driver issue?

- gfxCardStatus?
- sold it/moved on with life?
- downgraded to S/L?
- praying for the next update?

Wearily,
Steve

I am on the same boat as you good sir. Unfortunately, I have searched around for months and have found no solutions. When I would bring up the topic majority of people seem to say that they have not had any issues with their upgrade. So with that in mind I believe only the few of us are affected. Either it is from our hardware or our software, I dont see Apple addressing this issue anytime soon(or ever). I came to the resolution that it will be $30 down the drain so just downgraded back to Snow Leopard. That seems to be the only solution for me. I've found that others have found solutions that worked for them, but my MBP seems to have the same symptoms regardless. I hope that after some goole searches you would be able to find some solutions that work for you. Good Luck.