MacBook Pro: Near Disaster

If you haven’t had a chance to update the firmware of your MacBook Pro to version 1.2, don’t wait any longer. There seems to be numerous shutdown and sleep issues with this machine, and I nearly found out the hard way, which would have left me with a few “burning questions”.
I finished working for the day, put my laptop in it’s sleeve and into my backpack as I always do, and headed home. A few hours later, I walked past my backpack and heard the cooling fan, and it sounded like it was running at full tilt. I grabbed the sleeve and found it was very warm…and the laptop inside was HOT. I opened up the laptop but could not get it to wake up, but the fan continued running furiously. The entire surface of the machine was hot, not just the areas where it normally gets warm [that sleeve is a very good insulator!]. After forcing my MacBook Pro to shut down and then restarted it, I found that the battery [which had been fully charged] was down to 4% charge.

Perhaps the computer could have gotten hot enough to catch fire, but perhaps the battery would have run out of juice before that would have happened…who knows. Perhaps the fan itself was the culprit, but the rest of the computer was so hot that I think it was something else.

Anyway, I’ve heard that the firmware update is designed to fix shutdown and sleep issues, so I sure hope it fixes this one…I’ll give the machine some time to “cool off” and then let you know.