Saturday
Aug232008
Apple Fix MacBook Air Core Shutdown Issue
Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 10:10AM 
Apple have finally released a fix for the core shutdown issues plaguing MacBook Air owners. The support notes warns third party apps that alter the voltage or characteristics of the CPU are incompatible with the patch and that they should be removed before the update is applied. Although not mentioned by name, this warning is an obvious reference to Coolbook; a third party app that I covered in an earlier post that lowers the voltage fed to the CPU. I have been running a newly patched MacBook Air for a few hours now. During that time I have had three flash videos running simultaneously along with Activity Monitor. I have yet to see a CPU core shutdown leading me to believe, that after a six month wait, the Apple update resolves this issue once and for all.
The MacBook Air update 1.0 is available through Software Update.
Reader Comments (5)
you should download and apply this
does coolbook still work applying this patch?
The support notes warn that the official Apple patch is incompatible with apps like Coolbook. For this reason I removed Coolbook from my system before applying the Apple update.
Anyone have any idea what exactly the update does? From my (scarce) research the issue was caused by the gpu being to close to the cpu and the transfer of heat from the heatsink causing the system to shutdown a core to alleviate heat. So, does this update just flash settings into the firmware that raise the max acceptable temp? If so, is this a good idea?
fyi, coolbook still works after applying the update. so if you are already a coolbook user, you don't really need to apply the update. but if you do install the update, you can continue to use coolbook to control the voltage.