A friend at the office recounted the following story to me. He’d been having trouble with his 17″ MacBook Pro generating excessive heat. He measured the surface temperature on the laptop near the monitor at 125F and thought this was a tad too hot (just for reference, agencies who study these things apparently suggest the following maximum limits: 10 seconds of contact, no more than 131 degrees, 10 minutes of contact, 118 degrees for unpainted metal surfaces).
He called Apple’s CompletelyDontCare support line and was told that heat was “within spec”. When he asked what “spec” was, the agent replied that he couldn’t say.
He asked again, “So upper surface temperatures of 125F are within spec?” and was told, “Yes”.
For reference, we booted up my new Dell Latitude D620 (2.0GHz Core Duo as well) and let it run for a while. The entire upper surface never got so much as “warm” except in one area that was barely perceptably warmer than the rest. Oh yeah, and the Dell is plastic which is safer at higher temperatures anyway than the bare aluminum in the MacBook. Just for kicks, I’m downloading right now at a total of about 6MB/sec and just ran yes>/dev/null twice to totally crunch both cores at full speed (fun watching the speedstep graph slam through the roof when you do that). We’ll see if that even comes close to generating the same heat, but I doubt it as I’ve got a functional fan that kicks in before the processor gets to 177F (when his MacBook kicks on).
And that’s where the problem is. It is within spec, but that’s b/c Apple has the fans kick in at way high temperatures, far higher than any of their previous models.
Left by Dave on June 21st, 2006
Yeah, but when the spec allows the laptop to reach a temperature that can easily burn skin, there’s clearly a problem with the spec. And by problem, I mean “flaw deserving a massive recall”.
Left by Jordan on June 23rd, 2006