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MacBook Air - Fans Whirl with OS X Lion

August 10, 2011 19:53 by: E. Werner Reschke   9 Comments

Categories: MacBook , Review

Tagged: MacBook Air , OS_X_Lion , OS_X_Snow_Leopard

Apple MacBook Air - Fan Noise

As an owner of a 13" MacBook Air, one of the surprising benefits of upgrading to OS X Lion was the speed difference. Snow Leopard was nice, but wow, Lion took opening windows, using spotlight, launching apps, to entirely new level. This was not something that Apple touted (a faster OS), but from my experience, it's one of the best things about Lion, especially for those with the older Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

That said, there is a price I seem to be paying for that speed improvement — fan noise.

With OS X Snow Leopard, my MacBook Air hardly ever used the fans to cool anything. That was one of the awesome things about the laptop — it was silent. No hard drive spinning and very seldom fans doing anything but standing by just in case there was some heat that needed to be dissipated. But with OS X Lion, it is a daily occurrence. You wouldn't think that would be such a big deal, but it really is. I've become spoiled with my computer being silent, but now once, twice, three times a day the fan will kick in and this background noise become annoying.

I've been able to narrow it down to certain tasks that seem to make the processor heat up, and so have altered the way I work. That said, that's not what I should have to do. Here's a quick list of what I think is the culprit

  • Speed: whatever Apple did to Lion to make it fast, seems to tax the CPU much more than previously
  • Adobe Flash: IMHO this is an evil plug-in. If I bring up Google Analytics and let it run for more than a half-hour, I can expect a warm breeze to be generated by my MBA. If I wanted a warm breeze I'll go to Hawaii or something.
  • Lots of Apps Open Simultaneously: I'm constantly having to monitor how many apps are open at the same time. When the fan kicks on, I look at the CPU monitor and see which ones are kicking into high gear and shut them down if I'm not using them

I checked Apple's message boards, and apparently I'm not the only one having this issue. Many other MBA/Lion owners are as well. It doesn't seem to be limited to the Core 2 Duo either. Folks with i5 or i7 Processors also are talking about their fans blowing more than with Snow Leopard.

Hopefully 10.7.1 will arrive soon and address this issue. Hopefully I can return to my simple, quite life I enjoyed under Snow Leopard.

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9 Comments

  1. Paula ~ August 11, 2011 21:03
    Helpful blog entry. Dismaying, though, to say the least. We were about to spring for a 13" 2011 with Lion, but wanted an iPad like experience (we are really spoiled by ours!). The new OS is cool, even magical (experience in the store), but at what a price! Hoping it's something that can be tweaked--maybe, just maybe something got through the code/hardware testing. However, it seems too widespread for that.
  2. smartie ~ August 13, 2011 06:09
    the answer is as simple : Leo and Snow booted the 32bit kernel by default but Lion boots the 64bit one. That is making the cpu so hot. Just revert it back to the 32bit boot and all is good. Plus you are more compatible to 3rd party drivers. 32bit boot lets you still run 64bit apps ( although running the most freqent used in 32bit mode will add more silence to Lion .. ) and lets you still use more then 4GB of Ram - because Apples Kernel makes use of PAE ( physical adress extension ). 64bit is faster and can adress all the ram in one layout, but the downside is the impact on the cpu. that's all.
  3. Alex ~ August 14, 2011 21:36
    Got my new Macbook Air 13" Core i7 and the first thing I noticed was fans going pretty much full blast (6000+ rpm) while transferring apps/data from my time machine backup entire time. It calms down after a while, but can get noisy even during mundane tasks like browsing the web if pages have some Flash in them. Full blast again when playing Civilization IV, a relatively old game that this graphics chip should be able to handle. Kind of frustrating because I like it otherwise, but the fan going 6,000 rpm with CPU around 50% usage is unacceptable. I hope Apple has some kind of fix for this in the pipeline.
  4. Plasmacartwheel ~ August 19, 2011 01:06
    Thanks for the post. I just bought a new MBA 13" i7/4GB/256SSD. Spins up loud, trails off; sometimes with reason, sometimes spontaneously. Really sad part is: this was my first Macbook EVER, and I bought it because my old Vaio (which I loved) had a fan that drove me nuts. Everyone's Macbooks have always seemed so sexy and so quiet. The ones in the store have always seemed quiet. The Universe is clearly laughing at me. So...I just sent it back. *sigh*
  5. Marchin ~ August 21, 2011 00:23
    Great news! In 10.7.2 this problem solved. No maximum rpm in fan [any]more.
  6. Alex ~ August 21, 2011 05:00
    10.7.2 Lion update did nothing for me. Still fan going full blast and noisy as CPU usage approaches 50%.
  7. Jason ~ August 28, 2011 19:17
    Alex: How do you update Lion to 10.7.2? Smartie: How do you revert back to 32bit boot? Love the form-factor, weight, performance, OS,etc but this fan performance is unsat. Sounds like I'm running a hair-dryer when watching movies on Netflix, via Silverlight. And that's the ONLY app running. This is my second system. I returned the first one on day 3 because of this problem. How do you go to market with such a high-priced laptop with such annoying noise. And a SMC reboot didn't work. Genius bar didn't have a solution.
  8. Jason Guest ~ August 28, 2011 19:22
    Alex - First time to own an Apple. Have this MacBook Air, love it, will return because of the very loud fan noises and 6496rpms, simply running Netflix in Chrome. So, how do I update Lion to 10.7.2?
  9. Plasma Cartwheel ~ September 24, 2011 04:55
    Well, we just decided to get my wife an i5 Macbook air 256GB SSD and voila: no fan noise after several hours of use. This thing is dead quiet, so far. I don't know what was happening with that i7 version I ordered. I guess i7 is Intel code for jet-engine-powered computing...

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