My MacBook Pro has been crashing for months, at least once a day most days.
I blame it on overheating seeing as it reached 100°C on several occasions when it shut down.
Last time I took it to a repair shop, they were not able to reproduce the issue. They showed me some tests they ran that showed the laptop ran successfully for hours, despite the heavy number-crunching.
It seems to crash at random, e.g.:
- With only four tabs open in Firefox… I close one of them and the laptop shuts down! (Happens very often when I would close a tab.)
- While, on the contrary, with 10 YouTube videos open playing at the same time, and prime95 (a number-crunching program) running, the ventilation would be loud for sure, but the laptop would not crash.
Hence the question:
How can I cause the laptop to overheat on demand?
Any ideas of things to run?
I'd like to stress the different components. This would help me or a repair shop diagnose the issue.
Optional. More details for those interested.
- The laptop is a MacBook Pro 15" from 2014.
- I had a battery issue: macOS said the battery needed to be replaced. So I went to a shop (in Hungary) and got the battery replaced. In passing, I asked them to clean it up (dust + new thermal paste.)
- …the overheating problems started then. I took it back to the shop, but they could not get it to crash. They said it might be a software issue, which left me a bit dubious.
- Cmd-Option-P-R did not help.
- I finally reinstalled macOS (clean reinstall, formatted the drive, installed Mojave), and no difference.
- Running Apple Diagnostic (holding
Don reboot) did not help (zero issue detected.) - It usually crashes in the evening… (I don't think it ever crashed in the morning), as if the heat sort of accumulated.
- I have dual boot with Windows (thanks to Bootcamp.) I can play GTA V or Fallout 3 in it and it will NOT crash.
Thanks a bunch for the help.
I help
EDIT 1:
I brought it to another repair shop. They did not manage to make it crash either and were unable to find any issue with the laptop. They tested the RAM with some gear and it's fine. They ran a lot of tests and didn't find anything, so they're at a bit of a loss to help.
They suggested recording my next crash with a video camera to help them see what I was doing and spot the issue.
(They have a rating of 4.8 with over a thousand votes, and the previous shop had a rating of 4.9 with over a hundred votes.)
I've just spent 55 min running a lot of things on the laptop… Downloading huge files, running simultaneous connection tests, running RAM tests, CPU crunching programs, lots of YouTube videos open in two browsers… Copying files over the local wifi network… Running a graphics test… Running browser stress tests… All at once! And the temperature reached 97-99° a couple of times before going back down…
Yet I know it's gonna crash again at some point.
How am I supposed to diagnose an issue when I cannot trigger it on demand? Ideas/links welcome.
EDIT 2:
This is not an exact duplicate.
I tried stressing my Mac… (and the other thread, How to stress a MacBook Pro Retina did prove informative), but the issue is apparently not due to the load on the machine alone.
e.g.:
- Stress load type 1: running Heaven + Prime95 + dozens of videos open in two browsers.
- Stress load type 2: converting many videos at the same time with ffmpeg, for 50 min.
…and no crash.
While the Mac did crash (freeze for a few seconds then shutdown) during some basic operations. e.g.:
- Browsing the Web with just 4 tabs open;
- Editing a small text file in Sublime;
- Watching two episodes of a sitcom in VLC just fine, but then the laptop crashed when I quit VLC.
So stressing is not enough to make it crash.
It seems random, though it seems to crash more often when the system is "unloading" stuff. e.g.:
- Crashed once while I was closing a tab in the Terminal during an ffmpeg stress test;
- Crashed not during the ffmpeg stress test, but once I quit the Terminal;
- Crashed while I was closing a tab in Firefox (many, many times.)
…but this is just what happened at times, I cannot repeat the crash on demand and most stress tests turned out fine.
This is turning into a bit of a long-winded post. I'll update if/once I get more clarity.
EDIT 3:
I finally figured the issue.
This is the so called "macbook random shutdown syndrome", there's even a petition about it.
Disabling the Thunderbolt driver clearly fixed it for me, as per this answer: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/310048/93837
A brief timeline:
After 5 months of daily crashes…
- 2018-12-12: the shop replaced the battery, but it still crashes randomly.
- 2018-12-13: I disabled the Thunderbolt driver.
- 2018-12-27: crashed again, for the first time in 14 days, which is a huge improvement. Turns out the latest macOS update re-enabled the Thunderbolt driver. Re-disabled it.
