From Tragedy To Farce

I spoke with AppleCare this evening to initiate the return of my MacBook Air Vinyamar. As a bonus I received the results of Apple Engineering’s analysis of my core shutdown crash data: the system is behaving as designed.

These past few weeks troubleshooting, reinstalling (twice, over Remote Disk, no less, which I can assure you is not speedy), waiting for replacements, talking with technical support — and dropping a core under load is expected system behavior.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Dropping a core under load is a feature, not a bug.

Therefore, since I’ve gotten so good at it, here’s my guide to shutting down one of your MacBook Air’s cores.

The Unfair Version

1. Begin with a clean, fresh MacBook Air.
2. Place it on your bed, a pillow, or lap.
3. Sign on to your network, and start downloading a nice big movie file from your NAS.
4. Open Activity Monitor, and make sure the CPU monitor is visible.
5. Open Safari. Watch a movie trailer or two, and then browse YouTube while waiting for the movie to download.
6. Play the movie with Quicktime or iTunes. Keep opening tabs in Safari. You won’t need more than 10, especially if they’re AJAX-heavy sites.
7. Turn on Time Machine and start a backup.
8. When the video starts stuttering or your UI getting sluggish, check Activity Monitor.

Voila! One of your cores has dropped. You’ve halved your processing speed.

Now, the activities described seem harsh, but they’re really relatively normal for someone futzing about on the internet. File transfers in addition to video seem to speed up a core drop, which presents a problem for anyone using Time Machine.

But there are those who will cry foul entirely because of #2. The Air requires some ventilation, and if you place it on a soft surface (even with the vents unblocked) the computer will heat up quickly.

Okay, fair. Try this one on, then:

The Fair Version

1. Begin with a clean, fresh MacBook Air.
2. Place it on a flat desk or marble floor.
3. Sign on to your network and open Activity Monitor.
4. Fire up a feature-length movie or two, either over the net or from the local disk.
5. If you’re feeling adventurous, open XCode and do a little hacking.
6. Read some documentation on Safari or Preview.
7. Work for about an hour or so.
8. Wait for the stuttering video and UI lockups. They’ll come.

Heat speeds up the process, but if you keep the CPU under a certain amount of load (doesn’t need to be pegged) it will eventually shut down one of the cores. After an hour or two of a big H.264 file playing in Quicktime, I could get the Air to drop its core under theoretically ideal conditions — on the marble floor of a cool bathroom.

Now, there are users on the Apple support forums who never experience the core dropping. I’m really happy that they don’t. I don’t know what to say to them, other than that whatever their MacBook Airs have, I wish mine would have caught it.

For me, this just hasn’t been worth it. It doesn’t matter how nice the Air is.

This will likely be the last post in my MacBook Air Log. I will ship the computer back to Apple tomorrow to return it classified not as a defective unit, but instead as buyer’s remorse. So shipping’s on my dime, naturally.

My only remorse is that I wasted so much time with it, wanting it to work one way, with those fancy dual cores, when all the while?

Behaving as designed.

Moving on now.