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MacBook Firmware Updates: double-plus good

Apple seems to be batting 1000 with Firmware updates for my trusty little MacBook. I bought this little machine in the first couple of weeks after they became available, and because that earns me ‘early adopter’ status, I’ve had a front row seat for all the problems with the MacBooks.

First up was the Discoloured Palmrest: The plastic composition of the palmrest was such that it absorbs dirt, oil, and such like a sponge. This rapidly turns the off-white colour of the palmrest to a dark, dingy grey. The same problem likely affected the plastic composition of the black MacBooks, but is not visible on the black. Apple has since changed the composition of the plastic and is replacing affected palmrests under warranty. I haven’t taken mine in yet because I can’t afford to be without it for a week at the moment.

The next problem was ‘Mooing MacBooks’. The fan in the MacBook is temperature controlled, and there was a temperature zone that caused it to cycle on and off endlessly. The sound of the fan spinning up and down was a soft, gentle rising and falling whir which bore a slight resemblance to the sound of a cow mooing in the distance. The first MacBook Firmware Update solved this problem by preventing the fan from turning off completely. Instead it is constantly running, but at a very low speed that is practically inaudible. A side-effect of this is that the idling temperature of the MacBook went down by about 5°C.

The big problem, however, was Random Shutdowns. Due to a problem in the temperature monitoring system the computer would think it was overheating and perform an emergency powerdown. Thus, the MacBook would randomly turn itself off for no apparent reason. A very frustrating experience. In my case, it seemed to be tied to raised internal temperatures (but not so high that the machine would actually be in danger of overheating). For example, if I had a podcast or two downloading in iTunes at the same time the battery was charging, trying to play a video had a better than fifty percent chance of causing a powerdown. I could trigger them very easily by opening a Terminal window and running the command yes > /dev/null, this incredibly pointless command (generate an endless stream of the letter ‘y’ and throw them all away) will eat up all the idle time on one of the cores of the MacBook’s processor. Once idle time is removed, the temperature of the core increases quickly. The cooling system in the MacBook is designed to handle the load, however, and when I received the machine I could happily run it with both cores at 100% utilization. Once the random shutdowns began, it would powerdown very quickly with only one core fully loaded.

Today, Apple released MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.1, which “improves the MacBook’s internal monitoring system and addresses issues with unexpected shutdowns.” And, so far as I can tell, it does just that. I installed the update and as soon as the machine finished booting, I launched Terminal and opened two windows, each running yes > /dev/null. And left it like that for 10 minutes. The fan revved up to full speed, the core temperatures plateaued around 85°C, but that was it. The machine kept running and when I closed the Terminal windows the temperature dropped, the fan slowed and everything behaved exactly as it should. It’ll be a couple of weeks before I can declare the truly random poweroffs fixed, but the predictable ‘incorrect assessment of thermal overload’ problem certainly seems cleared up.

I hadn’t actually realized it, but for the last few weeks I have been tensing up and compulsively saving documents every time the fan kicked up a notch. Sitting here watching the machine watching th machine run as hard as it could for ten minutes without a hiccup was probably the most relaxing and stress-reducing experience I’ve had in a while. Which is a pretty good ROI for an update that took 45 seconds to download and 2 minutes to install.

This entry was posted on 26 October 2006 at 19:22 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.