MacBook – Brand new MacBook Pro flagship behaving strangely

cpucrashgpuhangmacbook pro

Today i got the newest available MacBook Pro flagship model. After setting up some basics, installing Photoshop, JRE, XAMPP and NetBeans, i started to use the machine a bit, doing some basic coding.

While using Netbeans, the fans rev up in an abnormal fashion. Of course i checked the CPU usage in Activity Monitor, but nothing abnormal showed up – merely just 7%-10% usage varying. There was simply nothing running, that would use up the CPU. I have owned a 2014 model previously and it never showed such behaviour. In fact, unless NetBeans was scanning a huge project and the CPU usage went up to 100%+, the fans were not even noticeable at all.

What i tried

After some research, i reset the SMC, but the issue remained. Instead of working flawlessly, after resetting the SMC and rebooting the machine, then running it for a few minutes and then opening apple.stackexchange.com in Google Chrome, suddenly the entire screen turned white and the only thing that was still there was the mouse pointer, which i could move around, but otherwise the machine was unresponsive.

I rebooted and checked the log, which under System Diagnostic Reports now showed a file prefixed with Kernel which said:

Event: GPU Reset
Application: WindowServer
OS Version: Mac OS X Version 10.10.3 (Build 14D2134)
Graphics Hardware: AMD Radeon R9 M370X
Signature: 0

Followed by a huge chunk of dump data.

Sadness fills my being.

Could this be a hardware issue? Badly applied cooling paste? Would you send it back and buy a new one, or try to get it fixed?

Specs:

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), Core i7 2.8 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Intel Iris Pro 1.5 GB + AMD Radeon R9 M370X running Yosemite 10.10.3

Best Answer

If it is a hardware issue, you'll have CPU usage and issues with a stock OS. Back things up and wipe it. Then run the iLife apps like garage band and iMovie and Photos to soak the CPU.

Everything in my experience is you have some software issues that aren't ready for the new API and new CPU/GPU and will have occasional panics as the drivers get updated for non-apple users or the non-apple code gets patched to behave properly.

  • Adobe is notorious for needing a patch for new HW.
  • JRE, XAMPP, NetBeans - would depend heavily on your versions
  • Apple offer free hardware support - why not get them to check things and let you know. Run sysdiagnose each time you get a panic so you have all the diagnostic logs saved if you end up with some pattern of 10 or more KP so that engineering can analyze things. If you have less than a dozen crashes or can't make it happen, realize that you'll likely need to pay someone to analyze those diagnostics as it's time consuming and requires fairly specialized experience to make headway on non-reproducible core dumps and panics.
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