Hey everyone -
I'm an architecture student with a 15" retina Macbook Pro (specs: 2.6 i7, 512 SSD, 16GB RAM) that I bought last August (although it was completely replaced in November for a different issue) that has recently been shutting down randomly on its own. Being the way these things go, it's doing this at precisely the worst time of the year with my final reviews this upcoming week, at a time when I need my computer most to finish my project (the school computers are hard to get a hold of and often significantly slower than mine). It's gotten to the point where it'll shut itself down sometimes every minute or so, making it almost completely unusable.
Here's what happens: I'll be in the middle of doing something on it (or now that think about it, I don't even have to be using it) and the standard shut down dialog box will pop up (as seen on the first screenshot below and no, I'm not accidentally pressing the power button). Then, if I don't select cancel, roughly 10 seconds later it will turn itself off. Curiously enough, if I do select the cancel button, it won't shut down on its own, but more often than not the dialog box will just pop again sometimes almost immediately after I cancel it. If I don't get to the cancel button it time, it just shuts down, which is extremely frustrating.
Now my first thought was that it was overheating and was shutting itself off as designed - but that's not the case as it has shut itself off almost immediately after being turned on. I thought a run away process might be the cause, helping to drive up temps, but it shut itself off right after I took the second screen cap below of Activity Monitor (when the processes were completely normal and it was practically at idle). The temperatures are often times completely normal when it does this too. After doing some research online, I thought it could be because of a bug in the automatic graphics switching (since I was driving an external monitor and running 3D modeling software) but disabling that in System Preferences changed absolutely nothing. I also thought it might be a bug in the 3D modeling software I was using, Rhino, since the Mac version is currently in beta, but it now shuts itself off even when no applications are open so that's not it. My last resort thought was that somehow the power button was stuck in the depressed position (which wouldn't explain it since even after the dialog box pops up, pressing the power button again wouldn't make the computer shut down). So I popped the key off and tried cleaning the mechanism, but as expected, that didn't do anything.
I'm really at a loss of what this could be and I don't have the time to reinstall Mountain Lion to see if it's a software issue. I plan on going to the Apple Store, but I'm in crunch time for my studio project, so I won't have time to do that until after Wednesday and likely not until next weekend. Curiously enough, it doesn't happen when I'm logged into my bootcamp Windows 8 partition which is what lends me to think it could be a software issue, but I can't use Windows for school since I don't have all of the software I need on that side and plus, Windows sucks at dealing with the retina display. It was doing this a few weeks ago, and also started spazzing on its own as if someone was going crazy with multi-touch gestures on the trackpad, but then it reverted to normal and I haven't experienced this since.
Any thoughts on what could be causing it?
I'm an architecture student with a 15" retina Macbook Pro (specs: 2.6 i7, 512 SSD, 16GB RAM) that I bought last August (although it was completely replaced in November for a different issue) that has recently been shutting down randomly on its own. Being the way these things go, it's doing this at precisely the worst time of the year with my final reviews this upcoming week, at a time when I need my computer most to finish my project (the school computers are hard to get a hold of and often significantly slower than mine). It's gotten to the point where it'll shut itself down sometimes every minute or so, making it almost completely unusable.
Here's what happens: I'll be in the middle of doing something on it (or now that think about it, I don't even have to be using it) and the standard shut down dialog box will pop up (as seen on the first screenshot below and no, I'm not accidentally pressing the power button). Then, if I don't select cancel, roughly 10 seconds later it will turn itself off. Curiously enough, if I do select the cancel button, it won't shut down on its own, but more often than not the dialog box will just pop again sometimes almost immediately after I cancel it. If I don't get to the cancel button it time, it just shuts down, which is extremely frustrating.
Now my first thought was that it was overheating and was shutting itself off as designed - but that's not the case as it has shut itself off almost immediately after being turned on. I thought a run away process might be the cause, helping to drive up temps, but it shut itself off right after I took the second screen cap below of Activity Monitor (when the processes were completely normal and it was practically at idle). The temperatures are often times completely normal when it does this too. After doing some research online, I thought it could be because of a bug in the automatic graphics switching (since I was driving an external monitor and running 3D modeling software) but disabling that in System Preferences changed absolutely nothing. I also thought it might be a bug in the 3D modeling software I was using, Rhino, since the Mac version is currently in beta, but it now shuts itself off even when no applications are open so that's not it. My last resort thought was that somehow the power button was stuck in the depressed position (which wouldn't explain it since even after the dialog box pops up, pressing the power button again wouldn't make the computer shut down). So I popped the key off and tried cleaning the mechanism, but as expected, that didn't do anything.
I'm really at a loss of what this could be and I don't have the time to reinstall Mountain Lion to see if it's a software issue. I plan on going to the Apple Store, but I'm in crunch time for my studio project, so I won't have time to do that until after Wednesday and likely not until next weekend. Curiously enough, it doesn't happen when I'm logged into my bootcamp Windows 8 partition which is what lends me to think it could be a software issue, but I can't use Windows for school since I don't have all of the software I need on that side and plus, Windows sucks at dealing with the retina display. It was doing this a few weeks ago, and also started spazzing on its own as if someone was going crazy with multi-touch gestures on the trackpad, but then it reverted to normal and I haven't experienced this since.
Any thoughts on what could be causing it?
