MacBook Pro Mid 2012: Keyboard is really hot?

[heyyitssusan]

So I came home from work and plugged in my MacBook to the wall since it was at 18%.. I then notice that the keyboard was getting hot and it was running really slow. Any ideas what could be causing it? It's currently shut down for now to cool off but I'm starting to get concerned because my keyboard has never been that hot before. It was toward the aluminum at the top near the number keys and first row of letters. It's only about 3 years old since I bought it in 2013.

 

[treekram]

The area of the keyboard you're describing is where the heat vent is. Possibilities:
1) Do you have an Apple or non-Apple charger?
2) Battery - check the battery health.
The following only apply if the MBP was awake while this happened:
3) When it was hot, did you hear the fan? If not, maybe the fan isn't working.
4) Maybe there's dust/crud in your fan/vents.
5) Maybe there was a program running which was taking a lot of CPU.

 

[heyyitssusan]

The area of the keyboard you're describing is where the heat vent is. Possibilities:
1) Do you have an Apple or non-Apple charger?
2) Battery - check the battery health.
The following only apply if the MBP was awake while this happened:
3) When it was hot, did you hear the fan? If not, maybe the fan isn't working.
4) Maybe there's dust/crud in your fan/vents.
5) Maybe there was a program running which was taking a lot of CPU.

Battery is good and I'm using the official apple charger. So far after a restart it seemed to be working fine. There are instances when I do feel that the fan is running, and I can feel it too. I think maybe a RAM upgrade will help since I do have a lot of programs open at once.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"I think maybe a RAM upgrade will help since I do have a lot of programs open at once."

Very easy solution:
Quit the programs you don't need to have open to complete the tasks-at-hand ...

 

[DeltaMac]

How much RAM is installed now?
I'm guessing that you have the mid-2012 MBPro, non-retina, as the retina models can't be upgraded.

You can leave the Activity Monitor open, and watch CPU and Memory use when you feel more heat. You may find out it is completely normal, because of your use. The Memory tab should also help you decide if your memory use is significant. The Memory should be green, for example. Yellow indicates a good heavy use, and Red would likely mean a lot a memory swapping (page-outs) and may mean that more RAM may help for your needs.