HEAT = Intermittent freezing or complete crash requiring a hard reboot

Question

I have a stock Macbook Air 1.6ghz with the hard drive and I'm on my second machine. Both have done the same thing leading me to believe there is a serious defect in the Macbook Air. What happens is that after about a half hour of using the machine and running it with some apps like Parallels, video, whatever, it will get really hot. Especially in the upper left region of the computer. It feels hot to the point that you can't really hold on to it as it's too uncomfortable.
iStat claims the case temperature is: 108 degrees fahrenheit. This is prior to it getting really slow and crashing, since I can't really get to iStat when that happens anyway. The whole process of the Macbook Air getting to this point seems to correlate with using the disk and pushing the CPU. What always seems to be true is that the upper left region of the base of the computer is really hot.
The intermittent freezing is quite annoying as the trackpad will completely become non-responsive and you can't type or do anything. Although if a USB mouse is plugged in you can move that and it will move the mouse cursor on the screen, but clicking or doing anything doesn't work. One time we were in a video chat through iChat and it worked fine for about 20 minutes or so and then suddenly started doing the intermittent freezing. The video and audio would freeze, then it would suddenly come back and play the missed portion in fast forward or just skip it altogether.
So my question is how do we get this fixed, I love my Macbook Air, but being able to actually use it is even more important. The minute I try to do anything more compute intensive it just seems to seize up and die. From my experience and reading about other peoples experiences this appears to be a fundamental defect in the Macbook Air. I would like to actually get some support for this instead of the usual we don't know anything about it and blah, blah. Hopefully Apple will just own up to it and work to quickly fix it.

Answer 1

Yes I've considered what I do on the machine, and no it doesn't matter what I'm doing specifically. What does seem to matter is whether what I'm doing is taxing the machine. If I'm compiling software, running a video, running Parallels with Windows, copying large files, etc. then it will cause the machine to heat up and then start failing. I don't have to do very many things at the same time either, if I watch a video on it and compile some software it will heat it up and cause it to start failing. It seems to be a combination of using the processor and hard drive to where it can't handle things.
Right now for example I'm doing a Macports port install of Apache 2 and then typing this message into Safari. That's it. The machine is right now at 113 degrees F according to iStat. That seems to be the magic temperature where at that level and up it starts failing. It's hot enough that touching it is too uncomfortable. It's sitting on a Targus cool pad, clear open access for the vents below. It's simply not designed properly to handle doing anything that pushes the hardware, in my opinion and from my experience with it. I do really like the form factor though so I wish it did work properly. I'm writing about my experiences with it so hopefully Apple will pick up on what users are experiencing and fix the design of the machine. Clearly it has design issues.
The other thing that bothers me about the Macbook Air is that everyone acts like the users are somehow causing the problem. Things like oh you are blocking the fans and putting it on your lap, or you set it on something that causes it to heat up, or it's the software you are using. Well I've got news for you, these things should work in those environments, it shouldn't be a problem to put the thing on my lap, if I wanted a computer that I could only put on a table or something similar I would have just stuck with my Macbook Pro or bought an iMac. This thing is built to carry around and throw on your lap to get stuff done. At least that's why I wanted it.
I guess for now I'll just have to use it for only 20 - 30 minutes at a time and give it breaks to cool down, ugh!