I recently bought the baseline 13'' Macbook Pro with i5 CPU and Lion preinstalled.
I mostly work with Firefox (without Flash), NetBeans IDE and iTerm running and the machine tends to get really hot at the bottom and in the upper left area of the keyboard after few hours of work.
I checked the Activity Monitor and no process is above the 5% CPU usage.
My friend who has the same MBP with Snow Leopard started to have the same issue after he upgraded to Lion yesterday. Lots of threads on Apple.com support forums report the same issue, but without any working solution.
What should I do? Should I bring it back to the shop? Should I try to take some steps to prevent the overheating?
Best Answer
Because you have a base unit, your machine has an integrated GPU. So just looking at CPU cycles can be a red herring.
You can test this behaviour by turning on Cover Flow in iTunes and scrolling through your entire library for a minute or two. Since it is quite GPU intensive, after some time, your fans will ramp up to bring your chips temperature down. Bt if you consult your CPU usage, it will be quite minimal.
It could be the case (very likely) that Lion is working as intended. Lion introduced much more animations and graphically intensive processes, such as swipe animations when navigating websites using the trackpad, pop-up animations on dialogue boxes, swipe animations when sending mail, etc. Even moving or re-organizing icons in Finder now has an animation attached to it
You are certainly free to take into an Apple Store and talk to a Genius about your concerns, but I'm fairly certain they will test the unit and report that it is very much within "spec."