Macbook Air 2013 fan speed doesn't increase with temperature

I've been noticing this for the past few days now. Even with some minor CPU activity (browser, iTerm along with music playing in the background), temperature increases after some times (according to iStatMenus - CPU Core PECI). What's curious is that unless I use iStatMenus to increase the CPU speed, the default settings don't cause the fans to speed up in order to lower the temrerature. So if my temperature goes up to 50C or above - at the time of writing this, it went up to 55 - the exhaust speed remains around ~1200RPM. It even went as high as 70C once, and yet there was hardly any increase in fan speed.
I'm even more bothered that there doesn't even seem to be any real corelation b/w CPU consumption and the temperatures. At least not any that I have observed so far.
I use the Air on a flat wooden table. I even have the backside propped up so the laptop's backside is isn't even touching the surface.
So, what's the deal here? Any programs you guys recommend that I can use to customize the temperature/fan-speed curve (kinda like I can do with my PC using Afterburner) ? Not that I'm a fan of all the noise, but I'd rather have a noisy laptop than one with a degraded CPU life because of high temps).

Its not CPU use and temp but CPU/GPU temp and fan.
All such fan control are useless patches to correct either fundamental misuse or a flaw at some level.
What model Air do you have, 2013 Air runs much cooler.
Reset SMC
SMC reset
Shut down the computer.
Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
Press the power button to turn on the computer.
Note: The LED on the MagSafe power adapter may change states or temporarily turn off when you reset the SMC.
Do you have any actual evidence your Air IS running hot? If not, dont worry.
70C or 158F isnt that hot or "on the verge" of thermal shutdown.....212 F
no worries

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Cannot setup Mountain lion on Macbook air 2013 (Mountain lion is not compatible with this computer)

I just bought Macbook Air 11 inch, mid 2013 model.
after first setup, and restoring from another time machine, I discovered that the battery is poorly performing, so decided to install fresh mountain lion. using my previously prepared USB drive failed. so tried to download the mountain lion all over again from the store, where it said, mountain lion is not compatible.
as per the below picture
I want to reset my mac and install a fresh copy of mountain lion, Pleae help,
Thanks,
Fawzy

VikingOSX wrote:
The build of Mountain Lion (10.8.4) on your 2013 MBA is newer than what is currently available from the App Store. That accounts for the App Store blocking you. This will likely be resolved with the introduction of 10.8.5.
True, but even so, there is no need to re-purchase and download from the App Store (not to say you're implying this, but rather just for informational purposes). When OS X 10.8.5 is released, the Software Update service will be the way to install the update, and not the retail Mac App Store.
Hopefully, if mawy did re-purchase Mountain Lion, when Mavericks comes out then Apple will offer it to mawy for free (it's slated to be out soon).

I bought a macbook air yesterday and it doesn't come with mountain lion is this normal?

Other than that i have tried to update the software 3 times or more and it keeps telling me that an error has occured and it wouln't allow me. Anything i can do?

You need to request authorization first: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2784640?start=0&tstart=0

CPU heats up on file copy/backup and fan speed does not increase

Hi Friends,
I have been having issues with fan in my Dell Studio 1555. It has an ATI Radeon card and I had installed the proprietary catalyst driver as the open source driver is too noisy.
Recently, I noticed that on accessing my hard disk and copy files or running backup (luckybackup), the temperature shoots up from around 60 deg C (just using chrome) to 100 deg C when it would shut down itself. However, it seems like the fan speed does not increase with the increase in temperature to help it cool down.
I tried to get the fan speed details with "lm-sensors" but it would not show the fan speed. Here is the output of sensors:
[user@domain]$ sensors
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +60.0°C (crit = +100.0°C)
temp2: +59.0°C (crit = +100.0°C)
temp3: +66.0°C (crit = +100.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0: +58.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1: +58.0°C (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Following the Arch wiki, I added acpi_enforce_resources=lax to kernel parameters but it did not help as well.
Here is the main problem:
1. CPU temperature shoots on accessing hard drive but fan speed does not increase - Any guide/direction to investigate would be really helpful.
2. Sensors does not show the fan speed. Read about i8kutils, but couldn't figure out how to get it working with systemd. Any indicators here?
Last edited by ravisghosh (2013-07-01 05:22:01)

luuuciano wrote:Ravi, did you solved it?
Im having similar issue on a vostro 1710, fan never works... :-/
The fan was bad. I had to replace the fan. However, I have not been able to figure out how to see fan speed in sensors.
Last edited by ravisghosh (2013-09-08 15:57:37)

Questions about macbook pro's fan speed

i'm using a macbook pro early 2008
and i use istatpro to monitor cpu gpu temp
1. do the fans work with a min rpm around 2000 all the time?
2. when i open quite a few apps, mbp get hot, and the gpu temp rises up to 80c degree also cpu temp rises to 60or70c degree. but the fan rpm is still around 2800.
some guys using macbook/pro confirm that with temp around 80c, their fan has a rpm around 3000or4000.
does someone else here have this situation above.
is it normal?
thanks a lot

Welcome!
1) Yes, the default fan speed is 2000 rpm. At that speed they are nearly silent. The speed will increase with temperature. Max revs possible are 6000 rpm.
2) Notebook computers get hot, regardless of make. The temps you see are reasonable for graphic-intensive applications. The MBP will automatically shut down if the temps get too high; I believe the cutoff point is just over 100°C.
There are third-party programs that allow you to customize fan settings but they must be used with care. It's possible to overwork the fans by manually setting their speeds too high.
The best approach is to insure that the MBP gets to use all its built-in cooling capacity. Using the computer on a pillow or blanket is bad; the case bottom dissipates heat but only if air can get under it. Use a lapboard if you must use the computer in your lap.
Exhaust air emits from the hinge area in the back of the case. make sure nothing blocks the case there or you'll get overheating.

Macbook Air 2013

I just got myself a new Macbook Air 2013 and while I realized I couldn't expect the smoothest experience, I never expected this much hassle with it. So many differnet issues. No need to have a sad face about it, though - let's get together and figure out how to make this work! At least we only have one graphics chip to worry about this time around
This is going to be a pretty long post but I figured it's good to have it all in one place. Please correct me if you think this is the wrong way to post these things.
Installing and booting
Booting from a normal 2013.6 USB key works fine, but I couldn't seem to get either GRUB or Syslinux working.
I was able to boot by first installing Arch Linux following the Macbook guide at the wiki (having a separate FAT32 /boot partition). Skip the bootloader installation.
Installing rEFInd from OS X (important!) and installing the EFI stub loader made me able to boot fine.
Separate thread.
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This is the big worry for me. Every now and then my system hangs for a brief moment and everything involving net or disk access just hangs there for a while and then it seems to work.
So far it only seems to happen when I run something disk- or CPU-intensive. Also had an occassion when I couldn't start X and just got this repeating all over my screen:
ata1.00: failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED
ata1.00: cmd 61/08:f0:10:8c:c2/00:00:0b:00:00/40 tag 30 ncq 4096 out res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
On the next attempt it worked fine.
I did SMART short and long tests on my disk and they returned fine:
smartctl -a
There are some messages in my boot that indicate this could be disk and/or ACPI related.
journalctl -b
dmesg
This was on a boot when my NIC was renamed from eth0 to wlp3s0 as noted under Wifi - this should hopefully not be a big deal to fix. Will update when I look more into it.
uname -a:
Linux temperance 3.9.7-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Jun 20 22:45:32 CEST 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux
WiFi
WiFi does not work out of the box. Installing wireless-bcm43142-dkms from AUR made me able to connect to my network. I haven't been able to get it stable yet -interface name changes randomly between wlp3s0 and eth0 between reboots and I get disconnected from my network every 30 minutes or so. Disconnects seem to correlate somewhat with the freezes mentioned above.
Separate thread.
Touchpad
Have only been able to get it to work like a one-button mouse using evdev for now. Looks like an upstream bug.
Separate thread
Audio
In order to get audio, I need to put the following in /etc/asound.conf:
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.card 1
I'm no ALSA pro, but I can only seem to get output from the headphone jack so far - no speakers yet.
Last edited by Legogris (2013-06-27 20:21:11)

While I'm using Ubuntu and not Arch, I wanted to chip in with my experiences.
First, I am happy to tell you that I've found a fix for the ata errors/freezes (which for me were so bad I could hardly install) -- at least I think it's the same or related. I got udevd spitting errors about blkid timing out, and it couldn't find the disks. I found this in a Ubuntu forum -- sadly, I can't find the url now. Anyway, Pass
libata.force=1:noncq
to the linux kernel parameters (in Ubuntu you can add this to /etc/default/grub). This disables NCQ, which according to that post wasn't needed.
YMMV and I am not certain that it doesn't have bad side effects, but for me it made the laptop usable.
Other findings:
My Fn key, and thus delete, page up/down, media keys etc didn't work. That's because the keyboard has a new device id which isn't in usbhid. I added entries like the existing apple keyboards with the new device id (05ac:0291) and after recompiling, it works. I'm pretty sure this is fixable by passing the correct "quirks" flags to the usbhid module, e.g. "quirks=0x05ac:0x0291:0x00001248", but I'm not sure which flags should be set (I have an ISO keyboard layout which is yet another flag).
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My wifi works after installing bcmwl from Saucy (i.e. the upcoming Ubuntu 13.10 release), which was a relief because I feared this not being supported.
Sometimes after resuming from suspend, the screen is totally dark -- barely discernible in bright daylight. First I figured this was an issue with lightum (a daemon which monitors the lighting and adjusts keyboard and screen brightness), but after checking /sys/devices/pci0000\:00/0000\:00\:02.0/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness it turns out that when this happens, only the brightness levels 13, 14, and 15 (which is the brightest) have any brighness at all. 12 and under means no backlight. The only "fix" I've found so far is rebooting, which sucks. I hope this will get fixed (I will report a bug on Launchpad next time it happens).
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i915.i915_enable_rc6=1
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My Macbook Air 2013 battery life is sub 4 hours. How do I diagnose and resolve the issue?

Hi,
I have a 6 month old Macbook AIr 2013 and I am getting sub 4 hours of battery life against the 12 hrs advertised. I looked into the application monitor and found that Spotlight has been causing my battery to drain
Here is a brief snapshot of System information
Hardware Overview:
Model Name:          MacBook Air
Model Identifier:          MacBookAir6,2
Processor Name:          Intel Core i5
Processor Speed:          1.3 GHz
Number of Processors:          1
Total Number of Cores:          2
L2 Cache (per Core):          256 KB
L3 Cache:          3 MB
Memory:          4 GB
Boot ROM Version:          MBA61.0099.B07
SMC Version (system):          2.13f7
Battery Information:
Model Information:
Serial Number:          D86349701E7F90KAV
Manufacturer:          SMP
Device Name:          bq20z451
Pack Lot Code:          0
PCB Lot Code:          0
Firmware Version:          511
Hardware Revision:          000a
Cell Revision:          1200
Charge Information:
Charge Remaining (mAh):          6362
Fully Charged:          No
Charging:          No
Full Charge Capacity (mAh):          7023
Health Information:
Cycle Count:          16
Condition:          Normal
Battery Installed:          Yes
Amperage (mA):          -1727
Voltage (mV):          8266
System Power Settings:
AC Power:
System Sleep Timer (Minutes):          1
Disk Sleep Timer (Minutes):          10
Display Sleep Timer (Minutes):          10
Wake on AC Change:          No
Wake on Clamshell Open:          Yes
Wake on LAN:          Yes
AutoPowerOff Delay:          14400
AutoPowerOff Enabled:          1
DarkWakeBackgroundTasks:          1
Display Sleep Uses Dim:          Yes
PrioritizeNetworkReachabilityOverSleep:          0
Standby Delay:          10800
Standby Enabled:          1
Battery Power:
System Sleep Timer (Minutes):          1
Disk Sleep Timer (Minutes):          10
Display Sleep Timer (Minutes):          2
Wake on AC Change:          No
Wake on Clamshell Open:          Yes
AutoPowerOff Delay:          14400
AutoPowerOff Enabled:          1
Current Power Source:          Yes
DarkWakeBackgroundTasks:          0
Display Sleep Uses Dim:          Yes
Reduce Brightness:          Yes
Standby Delay:          10800
Standby Enabled:          1
Hardware Configuration:
UPS Installed:          No
AC Charger Information:
Connected:          No
Charging:          No
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Thanks
Nitin

1. Follow these instructions, or these for OS X 10.9 or later.
2. In the Energy Saver preference pane, uncheck the box marked
Enable Power Nap while on battery power
3. You can also try resetting the SMC.
4. Make sure your system is up to date in Software Update.
5. Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store, or go to another authorized service center.

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Apple says MacBook Air 2013 mid 2013... Comes with bootcamp 5.
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Bootcamp 4 which ships with Lion doesn't support XP or Vista, only 7. Try using Parallels or VMWare instead.

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Hi Guys,
Two days ago I changed my macbook's hard drive to a bigger one and did a fresh install of Snow Leopard.
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Hi there... i have the same problem. my temperature gets up to 75C with just one window open in safari or google chrome. I have downloaded smc Fancontrol but ...its not enough. have u solved this problem yet? i'm going in to the Genius Bar tomorrow to see if they can help.

Macbook Air 2013 battery problem

Hi all,
I just got my brand new Macbook Air 2013 model today, I can't power it up until the AC Adapter is connected. When I finished all the setups, login into the system, I found out the battery shows 0%. This is my first Mac, would like to know if this is normal. Cause from my experience with windows laptop, they all comes with pre-charged battery. Thank you very much for your assistance in advance.

That's not normal, & if it doesn't begin to work as expected after say, 15 minutes, try
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Hey all,
Currently I have no sound (either through speakers or headphone jack) on my macbook air 2013.
Card: HDA intel audio controller
Chip: Cirrus logic CS4208
when I boot up alsamixer, it says everything is unmuted and everything is at 100% volume, everything looks like its working fine but still no sound.
Things that I have already done but no effect:
blacklisted snd_intel8x0m (as per ALSA page)
added options snd-hda-intel model=intel-mac-auto to both my sound.conf and modprobe.conf files.
I am running the most up to date version of everything, including kernel version 3.12.8 which is supposed to have out of the box support for the card.
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Thanks!
Last edited by derekArch (2014-01-27 03:21:58)

I pretty sure its not that. I use ratpoison as a WM (I like a minimal arrangement for my laptop) which doesn't use pulseaudio. Even when I had Gnome with pulseaudio. I still had the same issue.
So I ran speaker-test -c 2 on my computer and this is the output:
>>> speaker-test -c 2
speaker-test 1.0.27.2
Playback device is default
Stream parameters are 48000Hz, S16_LE, 2 channels
Using 16 octaves of pink noise
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:1022:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave
Playback open error: -2,No such file or directory
Which file/directory do I not have?
I have also checked amixer and none of the channels are set to 'off

HP 23xi / 25xi compatibility with Macbook Air 2013?

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I'm looking to buy an external monitor (HP 23xi or 25xi) for my Macbook Air 2013 (10.9.1).
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I've gone through several forums, and many guys seem to have problems relating to blurry displays on their HP monitors -- when hooked up using DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters
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Many Thanks
Piyush

Hi Piyush90.
I found information on Apple.com about a "Thunderbolt" connector that enables you to connect your Mac Book Air with other monitors. It doesn't state specifically what monitors it will work with but it looks promising that it will be a viable solution to your question.
I've included a link below to the webpage about Thunderbolt.
http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt/
-- Chauntain
I work on behalf of HP.
Please click “Accept as Solution ” on the post that solves your issue to help others find the solution.
Click the KUDOS THUMBS UP on the left to say “Thanks” for helping! .

On 11in Macbook Air (10.10), how do I increase resolution of built-in display to 2560 by 1600 pixels?

On 11in Macbook Air (10.10), how do I increase resolution of built-in display to 2560 by 1600 pixels?
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You're getting full native resolution 1366 x 768 on your internal display, nothing more.
http://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs.html
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DISPLAY: 11.6-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with support for millions of colors
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Can you go back and post the web page and actual details (drivers, versions, etc)?
Are you trying to update in Windows and from the Apple Software Update application? manually downloading in Windows? you can use either.
Yes, very fishy. Use to be even worse I think with just how well they are ready to answer and help with Windows on Mac topic.
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Wasn't clear which method was used.
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookair
http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp
http://support.apple.com/downloads/

Help bootcamp windows 8.1 Macbook Air 2013

I have a Macbook Air 2013 running Mavericks and I want to install windows 8.1 on it but first im getting a message saying that the iso is not 64-bit and im so confused because it partitoned my harddrive aswell so how do i get that back.

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Macbook Air 2013 fan speed doesn't increase with temperature

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