Has Apple fixed the MacBook Pro ‘Hard Freezegate’?

Over on Apple’s support forum some owners of the new 2011 MacBook Pro have been complaining that their notebooks are locking up or ‘hard freezing’ under heavy load. Yesterday Apple released a Mac OS X update 10.6.7 which, amongst other things, improves graphics stability. But does the update fix the problem?

Well, if it does, Apple isn’t letting on. All we get from Apple is a bullet point in a knowledgebase article:

• Improve graphics stability and external display compatibility

That doesn’t help much.

Note: For people suffering from problems, Apple’s secrecy relating to what updates actually fix is annoying and creates a lot of uncertainty. There are times when things don’t ‘just work’ and Apple is not good at addressing these issues.

What I’m hearing from readers is split. Around 85% of those who have dropped me a note since the release of 10.6.7 say that it solves the problem, while some 15% say it doesn’t. What you seem to be saying with absolute confidence is that the update doesn’t fix the noisy fan issue that people are also complaining about. I don’t have a big dataset to work with, so it’s hard to be confident that the update fixes the problem or not.

What’s also unclear is what the update actually does. Is it a new set of thermal profiles for the system, or does it just throttle down the system when it’s under heavy load? We’ll have to wait for someone to do pre and post 10.6.7 benchmark of a MacBook Pro system to find out the answer to that question.

Calling MacBook Pro 2011 owners – Were you suffering from ‘hard freeze’? If so, has the 10.6.7 update fixed this for you?

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.