Outstanding Apple Service

Hi,

Well, after running like a top since I bought it my MBP this morning suddenly decided to generate heat like a thermonuclear bomb. This was especially unfortunate as I had walked away for a moment and when I came back I picked up the MBP (as a consequence I am typing one handed right now - fortunately it was my right hand I burned and I am a southpaw but the bandages on the fingers of my right hand make typing clumsy).

After yowling and putting the MBP back down, I called Apple Care (whilst my hand was under cold water). To say they took care of the situation does not describe what happened adequately.

First, they understood that I was going to have a problem running tests on a machine I had just burned my hand on. So, what they did was call the closest Apple Store and alert the Genius Bar to take me as soon as I could get there. As bandages on my fingers does not affect driving, I drove to the Apple Store.

When I arrived, the Genius was waiting at the door, and approached me asking if I was Joel. I affirmed this, and we went right to work. He ran quick diagnostics and used a temperature probe to see what was going on. The MBP was temping up around 98 celsius running just Safari. He then decided to do a replacement of the MBP. They replaced my 2Ghz with a 2.16Ghz, put my extra RAM in and did all the migrations, and wiped the HDD from the previous MBP. Then all applications were tested to make sure the migration did not break anything (it didn't). Finally, we performed the adminstrative part of the process.

All in all, I was back in my car 90 minutes after arrival with a shiny new MBP. And at that they kept apologizing about the time and the inconvienence.

This is what I call standing behind your product!

Mountainking,

No suit. I burned three fingers, not badly (the cold water and some bactine kept them from blistering. I've burnt myself worse making coffee in the morning). Besides, I am not angry or vindictive.

The MacBook Pro is a great machine. My first one was a trooper until it went nuclear, and when it did Apple was nothing but classy in how they handled it.

The difference between my first MBP and this one is interesting.

The thermonuclear bomb was trucking up near 90 C and also showing 50-55% utilization and current frequency sat at 2 Ghz no matter what I did to the power settings.

This one is hovering mostly between 20-25 C with 3% utilization and frequency hovering around 1.7 Ghz.

In both scenarios I am running Safari and Entourage. I did give it a tougher workout earlier this evening by ripping a video DVD. Then the frequency went up to 2-2.1 Ghz, utilization to 65-70% and temp to 45-50 C.

I find this very interesting, and it makes me wonder if perhaps the issue with some of the early MBPs regarding heat is not thermal grease as some have supposed but rather defective motherboards. Let me explain.

Defective motherboard prevents Enhanced Speed Step from operating, keeping the Core Duo (and possibly the GPU as well) at continuous full throttle. If the defect also involved inaccurate temp readings from the heat sensors the fans would not turn on, resulting in the Death Star.

It's a theory, that's all, and as I am not a motherboard expert it could be not feasible, but I am otherwise stumped at the massive difference in both overall speed (and this one is only .16Ghz faster than da bomb) and thermal performance.

Bit of an update.

The new MBP is still trucking right along, and still at radically lower CPU utilization and temps than I had previously seen. I have tried two different temperature monitors just to be sure, and both show the same thing.

This makes me think that possibly my logic board theory could have some legs.

Well, the new MBP just did a week in PA which included two stretches of over 11 hours of continuous operation each. The temp never rose any higher than 90F.