TooMuchGreen

It’s hot here in Costa Rica, but you may expect it to be so, and although it’s all fine and dandy in the air conditioned JING office (whilst alternating between extremes of either marveling at the SQL scripting wizardry of James or watching the goats on my land out of the window) during the days I work from the Cabina in Tamarindo things haven’t been going well, the MacBook Air has been getting a bit toasty.

Much as I love all things Apple the Airs it seems are most definitely prone to quite serious (and potentially show stopping) heat issues in sunnier climes, with reported core shutdowns and lockups in anything above shorts weather. Yesterday things were so bad here I was getting the ‘type a line then sit and watch it appear letter by letter’ style of speed issues, as you can imagine not conducive to productivity (or confidence in ones laptop hardware). So, let’s have a look then……I’d already installed SMC Fan Control last week which displays CPU core temp alongside the option keep the internal fan wound up over 6000rpm in an attempt to disperse some of the heat from the internals of the super sexy and robust -  but badly designed – body of the Air, the temperature was hovering around the 65 degree C mark most of the time which, according to tech specs, is well within advised operating parameters (up to 95 degrees C), but, as mentioned, things weren’t at all well and on checking Activity Monitor the CPU usage for both cores was at 85% (system) with ‘kernel_task’ being the obvious culprit at a steady 150+  of CPU, totally unusable, especially as I only had Firefox and Mail open (with both literally hanging on by their fingernails), damn, I was getting a growing feeling I may have unwittingly purchased Apples first real lemon of the new age.
However, a few forums and a mere $10 Paypal payment later everything was cool, literally, I honestly couldn’t believe it. There’s a SUPERB (yes, deservedly in uppercase) little utility available for all Mac laptops called ‘Coolbook‘ from (what seems to be) a sole guy called Magnus Lundholm, his site is HERE.
Coolbook works brilliantly, basically it’s a CPU voltage stepping app which you self configure to lower delivered power to the main cores, it then dynamically alters the frequency as load dictates (it’s a form of ‘under-clocking’, combined with ‘under-volting‘), for example, if the unit’s only handling text input it hovers around the 800mhz range, for heftier stuff it ramps up accordingly (to a max of 1600mhz, on my Air).
I’m running things at 1.000v at the top end (from a default 1.1250v) with an 80 degrees C set limit and the little beast is quite happily flying along at 49 degrees C, system load at sub 10% with ‘kernel_task’ to CPU processing dropped to an amazing (and usable) 2.0 to 4.0 max…! Awesome…! Coolbook is now firmly ensconced in my start-up items list.

Some users have dropped to 0.9000v with apparently no issues however below is a screen-grab of my present settings and everything seems good (fingers crossed)

My only niggling thoughts  here (and vaguely concerned disappointment) is that how come some random guy on the net can bring out a $10 fix for the Air’s known (and serious) overheating issues when Apple themselves either haven’t or can’t, it’s only software, you’d think they could more than easily build something into a service pack release? As a staunch Mac fanboy, and much as I do love the innovative Air, for the first time I’m actually not impressed and do feel a little bit let down with support for the product.