MacBook Pros Reporting Freezing Under Heavy Load

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A bit of a surprise in the Apple laptop community: seems some owners of the new 2011 lineup of 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro laptops are having some issues with the computer abruptly seizing up while in the middle of processor-intensive activities.

We’ve all had this happen to us at some point: fire up your laptop or your PC, get really neck-deep in multitasking and, while you’re downloading stuff from iTunes or what have you and sending an instant message and checking your email while you’ve got a dozen or so browser windows open and boom! your computer suddenly realizes it’s carrying the computer equivalent of a fully-grown cow on its back and just says, hey, whoa–give me a minute here, huh? And then it slows to a stuttery crawl while it tries to resolve your many, many demands, or crashes outright.

But in this case, the reports are downright disturbing in that it’s not just one or two machines, or one or two heavy users–one user reported trouble simply playing Starcraft II, or accessing Time Machine. In fact, a second user reported being able to replicate the crash effect on three separate MacBook Pros. And another reportedly went into an Apple Store and proceeded to crash every MacBook Pro on display. There’s even a Wiki entry out there detailing how, you too, can crash your MacBook Pro, making it seem pretty clear that there’s something going on in the system itself, because the problem is so easily repeatable.

For its part, Apple seems aware of the problem and is working on it, and some have suggested that the fix is likely to be as simple as using only the integrated graphics chip of the MacBook Pro via a software workaround. But conclusive fixes are still as yet unavailable.

Have you had a problem with your MacBook Pro? If you don’t already have one, would you buy one even after hearing about this? Let us know down in the comments section!