Many people ask the question.. “Does the 11″ MacBook Air actually have a fan?”. Well, as if a teardown wasn’t enough to prove that it has. I had to find out the scary way, and this is exactly what happened!
Woke up this morning having left my MacBook open and downloading all night. Got ready for work, shut the MacBook lid and slipped it into my Waterfield sleeve (snug fit). Come lunchtime (aprrox 5hrs later), I go to get it out to practice a bit of coding only to find the back of my rucksack to be VERY warm (to say the least). At first I thought maybe there was a hot water pipe running where my bag was stowed. Wrong. Take the sleeve out and it too was hot hot. The poor Air was suffocating inside, the fan immediately coming on full blast. For some reason (unknown to me), it hadn’t gone into sleep mode when I shut the lid. The poor bastard had been stuck in my bag all morning running as hot as a the sun.
My immediate concern, after five hours in the material oven, was whether my pride and joy was now just a paperweight. I let it cool down then turned it on….. nothing. Held down the power button down for 10 seconds, then retried the power…. BOOOOOM. That reassuring tone. It was all working fine, but for the fact it had only 4% battery left. So I got no coding done after all. Goodnight.
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Yikes, that’s scary stuff. For future reference, if that happens again, open the lid and let the computer run that fan for a few minutes straight away. It will cool much faster with the fan actually going. Shutting it down and stopping the fan will leave that heat in the casing.
Not quite sure what you mean? I opened the lid as soon as I took it out the sleeve? Is that what you meant?
Ah I think I get you now. I did let it cool down first before fiddling….
Anyway, I think it’s Transmission that’s causing the problem.
God, scary times, Tom! Glad it’s all okay. Just when I was wondering if the Air actually DID have a fan as I still haven’t heard mine fire up in 3 months.
I can also confirm that the MacBook Air 11″ has a fan, it seems to spin at around 1500rpm all the time so it’s very quiet. Oddly, I never hear it in Mac OS X 10.6.6, but it comes on with some regularity when working in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Preview (you can guarantee it’ll turn on with a lengthy QuickTime movie). Not too surprising with a beta OS, but interesting how the fan management must be different.