“Apple Computer issued a software update Thursday to fix a problem that caused hundreds of newer MacBook laptops to shut down suddenly — but one longtime industry analyst suspects Apple’s solution might force the computers to run more slowly,” Jon Fortt blogs for Business 2.0.
Fortt reports, “Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, said that based on user comments in Apple’s online support forums he suspects the laptops have been shutting down because of overheating problems with the main logic board and ‘heat sink,’ a device that’s meant to cool the machine. ‘What they appear to be doing is doing a firmware update to step down the processor,’ Enderle said. ‘If you can step down the processor, say, 5 or 10 percent, you can lower heat dramatically.'”
Fortt reports, “But if indeed Apple is doing that, another result is decreased laptop performance. Enderle likened it to throttling back a V8 engine to make it behave like a V6. It won’t get as hot, but it won’t go as fast either. ‘It would be really good to see if we can find someone who’s gotten the problem and measure the performance before and after the firmware update,’ Enderle said. Unless support forum users are misinformed about the logic board and heat sink being the issue, ‘the only way you can fix a problem like this without physically taking the machine apart is to step down the processor.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Darkness” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Anyone who uses Rob Enderle, principal analyst (and only analyst, unless, for some reason, you count his wife Mary) with Enderle Group, as an expert in basically anything except the act of talking out of one’s ass is seriously unwise. You’d get sounder advice asking Rob Glaser how to finish a marathon than you would asking Rob Enderle what a specific Mac firmware update accomplishes. Our sources tell us that the firmware update issued by Apple yesterday does not step down the MacBook processor, it corrects an issue with the MacBook’s temperature sensor that caused some MacBooks to shut down too early when protecting against thermal damage.
If Rob Enderle isn’t on a mission to spoof the term “tech analyst” in an effort to expose the total lack of qualifications necessary to become one, he should be.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple releases MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.1, addresses issues with random shutdowns – October 26, 2006
What is Apple doing about MacBooks suffering from ‘Random Shutdown Syndrome?’ – October 21, 2006
Apple to repair ‘random shutdown MacBooks’ free of charge – September 08, 2006
Enderle: ‘4th quarter will be Apple’s hardest since the first iPod Christmas’ – September 18, 2006
Enderle spouts some incredible nonsense about Apple iPod+iTunes – July 07, 2006
Enderle: If Apple can’t double market share it will abandon Macs – May 02, 2006
Big surprise: Enderle was wrong about Apple’s holiday quarter Mac sales – January 19, 2006
Tech pundit Enderle: ‘Microsoft wrote the first Mac OS’ – September 28, 2005
Tech Pundit Enderle: ‘fourth quarter should be ugly for Apple’ – August 09, 2005
Enderle: ‘Surveys indicate demand for Apple’s products is dropping like a rock’ due to Intel switch – August 01, 2005
Tech Pundit Enderle: ‘This year will be more difficult for Apple Computer’ and iMacs in earthquakes – January 24, 2005
Enderle likened it to throttling back a V8 engine to make it behave like a V6. It won’t get as hot, but it won’t go as fast either.
I thought that V6 or V8 referred to the power of the car. The number of cylinders may affect the acceleration of the car, but will it really affect a difference in the speed? Or is this just another presumption of Capt. E’s based in “oh, I thought…” and nothing more?
“The performance of the car would improve greatly. Your acceleration from every green traffic light would be at it’s max and you could travel around town at the car’s maximum speed (albeit to the detriment to your clutch, transmission and traffic citations”
Methinks you drive an automatic and don’t really understand cars very well.
In any case, if we accept the premise that the problem is largely due to the temperature sensors overheating, melting and failing then there’s only a couple of things the new firmware can be doing:
1) ignoring sensors when they go bad.
2) Changing the power management to better control heat buildup and avoid melting down the sensor.
3) Both of the above.
The fact that this needs to be done on repaired units as well as non repaired ones suggests that the repair doesn’t fully fix the hardware issue, just replaces a defective sensor for now with one which could melt down again in the future given the right circumstances (i.e heavy usage with a lot of heat production).
If you knew the sensors were melting down at X degrees, a logical way to solve the problem in software would be to make sure the processor doesn’t get that hot and melt them.
Clearly the temperature sensor melts down at a level lower than the processor can handle, or the unit would have already shut down to protect the processor and thereby the temperature sensor as well.
So the solution, if this is indeed the problem can only be to run the processor at a slower speed than it could be run in order to keep it’s operating temperature within the thermal tolerance of the temperature sensor.
By necessity this means less performance for ongoing computationally intensive tasks than letting the processor get hotter before throttling back the CPU speed.
In the case that a failed sensor is detected, the system would have to use some heuristic to very conservatively manage CPU performance to avoid the possibility of overheating.
Therefore logic dictates that if melted temperature sensors are the problem, then a software only fix almost certainly involves a hit to system performance.
Of course if you spend all your time surfing the web and reading emails, you CPU usage is probably on average only a few percent anyway, so you’re not going to notice any difference. It’s when you do sustained computing intensive tasks that a difference would show up.