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Macbook 13 pro" buying worries, beachball worries

sweet160

sweet160

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
133
3
Ecuador
I want to buy the basemodel Macbook pro 13"

But after some research it seems the model is plagued with the firmware 1.7 syndrome. Which may or may not make it beachball all the time.

I have a WD Scorpio black in my old blackbook that I want to transfer to the new machine. Because the 160 Gig is just to small for me. The Scorpio works excellent in the Blackbook.

Should I just take the plunge or wait to buy a new machine until Apple fixes the problem?

Oh yeah, I suppose its not possible to swap the HD's from the machines and reboot without problems right?
 
sweet160 said:
But after some research it seems the model is plagued with the firmware 1.7 syndrome. Which may or may not make it beachball all the time. Should I just take the plunge or wait to buy a new machine until Apple fixes the problem?
Click to expand...

I would wait for a week or so. If the problem is major one, Apple will fix as soon as possible.

I have a WD Scorpio black in my old blackbook that I want to transfer to the new machine. Because the 160 Gig is just to small for me. The Scorpio works excellent in the Blackbook. Oh yeah, I suppose its not possible to swap the HD's from the machines and reboot without problems right?
Click to expand...

No. You have to do clean install of OS X.
 
I have a 2.53 uMBP. have had it between 1-2 months, and haven't had any issues with it at all. I'm also currently running SL without any issues. Do some research, but based on my experience, I would suggest going ahead with the plan.
 
I am also about to buy a new 13" MBP; and like you I keep reading these posts about the dreaded beachball issue.

It only seems to occur in certain cases when the stock hard drive has been replaced with a third party drive that supports Sata 3gbps natively
(but I could be wrong!)
 
You know I used to remember a time where you could just go to an Applestore and do an impulsive buy in good faith, because you know your buying Apple and you would know things are going to be ok.

But now with the unresolved major issues that seem to occur on random bases. It puts me off putting down 1200 USDs.

Or am I being to bloody paranoid?
 
covertyows said:
I have a 2.53 uMBP. have had it between 1-2 months, and haven't had any issues with it at all. I'm also currently running SL without any issues. Do some research, but based on my experience, I would suggest going ahead with the plan.
Click to expand...

Are you using the stock HD? and what firmware do you have?

Thanks!
 
Actually it is possible to swap. Ignore what others have said. Mac OS X installs Kernel extensions for all Macs regardless of what machine you installed it on. I have swapped between MacBooks and MacBook Pros without issue.
 
See sig

I beach ball ALL THE TIME

I'm waiting until I install 10.6 to really complain, but in 10.5.8 it's incredibly annoying.
 
I am going to buy mine today... ill see if i can get them to downgrade to EFI 1.6 before i leave. Ill let you know how it goes :). I don't plan on swapping the drive (yet), 160gb should be fine for now. I figure that if it's a big issue, I have 14 days to return it, so whatever.
 
zw-gator said:
See sig

I beach ball ALL THE TIME

I'm waiting until I install 10.6 to really complain, but in 10.5.8 it's incredibly annoying.
Click to expand...

Did you leave the stock HD? What firmware are you on><??

I think its sad have to worry about these things as a Mac User
 
He said see his forum signature: 13" uMBP 2.26/2/160/10.5.8

That means its the stock $1200 machine, stock Hard disk and ram.
 
Hellhammer said:
I would wait for a week or so. If the problem is major one, Apple will fix as soon as possible.
Click to expand...
Right, except that these reports started in late June. There are dozens of threads about it on Apple's own discussion forum, one is a potentially record-breaking 125 pages long, but after over 2 months Apple still pretends like it's raining. Major? Well, yeah, the whole computer freezing up for 30 seconds several times an hour (in some severe cases at 2-3 minute intervals) might be considered major in the sense that it renders the computer useless for both work and entertainment.

The only sign of life from Apple is that they released a hard drive software update that removed the loud parking noise and beep that occured on stock Seagate 7200RPM drives every time the beachball freeze kicks in. They didn't fix the actual freezing, they just made it so that the hard drive doesn't sound like it's dying when it occurs. Who knows, maybe the next time they'll remove the spinning beachball cursor without fixing the freeze issue.
 
Sweet160, I totally understand. I dropped about 2400$ on a macbook 15" as I wanted to get the system I really wanted instead of settling...specially on a mac, lol. So here's what happened...my first one overheated and blew the HD on the first night...thank god I was smart enough to have a time machine backup as soon as I set up my files, LOL!

Second macbook's hard drive began to blow out on the first day as well, grinding noises and beeping at me.

Third one in as many days, haven't had a problem since, been three weeks. I think they have hard drive and hard drive firmware quality control issues. Having said that, it's a testament to how good Macs are that I put up with it long enough to get a good machine. All computers can have problems and at least it was hardware problems, though worrisome ones, the software is amazing. I won't use another windows laptop, it's like going from a Corvette to a Kia.
 
btw, I do get the awesome beach ball "dont know what the F it's doing" effect sometimes, purely random. Have had to do one hard reboot. About on par with most computer issues, though highly irritating and shouldn't happen. Kinda like the new MS Vista update makes your laptop blue screen when you remove anything from the USB slots, lol
 
stormborn said:
btw, I do get the awesome beach ball "dont know what the F it's doing" effect sometimes, purely random. Have had to do one hard reboot. About on par with most computer issues, though highly irritating and shouldn't happen. Kinda like the new MS Vista update makes your laptop blue screen when you remove anything from the USB slots, lol
Click to expand...
Even though I am craving a new MBPro 13"

Ill probably sticking with my trusty old Blackbook the even though I have the opertunity to buy new passing trough NYC.

They are loosing business with these issues. Unbelievable
 
Ok now I am worried!

What firmware comes as stock on the new MBP 13"? 1.6 or 1.7?

Surely if this issue was as bad as everyone makes out, they would stop selling them or roll out a hotfix?

1 more question - does this issue affect other operating systems on the mac (windows with bootcamp, or linux)? or is it just a MacOS thing?
 
I have a new stock MBP 2.23 and it does beach ball a lot but for me it usually seems to happen on Safari. It is pretty annoyning so hopefully it will get fixed soon!
 
There's a lot of brouhaha about this 1.7 EFI firmware update, but I don't think that's the culprit. The 17" model never received that update and it still has the beachball syndrome with the accompanying 30-second I/O freeze and hard drive parking. And there was one user who reported that even though he had the 1.7 EFI firmware installed, he had no beachball syndrome after installing 10.5.6, a version that never existed on the June '09 MBPs because 10.5.7 was released in May.

All the 1.7 update did was enable 3.0 Gbit/s SATA, which the 17" model already had. There's of course the odd chance that these MBPs can't actually handle 3.0 Gbit/s... there was this Lenovo Thinkpad model for which the engineers limited the SATA bus to 1.5 Gbit/s (just like Apple did with the 13"/15", it's unclear whether this was by design or mistake), Lenovo said it was because there was a SATA-to-PATA bridge chip for the optical drive that wouldn't perform reliably if the SATA bus was running at full speed. If I'm not mistaken, the MBP has a similar bridge chip for the Superdrive. If that's the issue, Apple is in a real fix because if they don't cripple the SATA bus the beachball syndrome will continue, and if they do cripple it people will be even more barking mad than the last time.
 
I'm not getting the 30 second beachball, I'm getting a 5sec BB

And most of the time it's with Safari. God forbid I load a .gif or the whole browser locks up for at least 15 seconds.

This was occurring before and after the firmware update
 
zw-gator said:
I'm not getting the 30 second beachball, I'm getting a 5sec BB

And most of the time it's with Safari. God forbid I load a .gif or the whole browser locks up for at least 15 seconds.

This was occurring before and after the firmware update
Click to expand...

Same here. On a 13" as well and I get the beachball on Safari but not much anywhere else. Happened both before and after the firmware upgrade.
 
Well, i am doing a clean install of snow leopard on my brand new uMBP 13in 2.26ghz

I am first zeroing the disk, then checking with spinrite, then doing a clean install of Snow Leopard
 
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