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Comment by modoc | Hacker News Reader

I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.

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Same here, it would appear Apple is a bit too aggressive with it's power management and it's confusing the living daylights out of the ATI driver when it's on automatic.

Switching manually works a treat sofar... http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/

Good to know, thanks. I'd only ever run it in manual mode anyway. How is the computer supposed to know whether power or speed is more important at any given time?

It doesn't really, anything using OpenGL / CoreGraphics triggers discrete graphics.

Even silly things like the mail client Sparrow. I had to use gfxCardStatus to get anything more than 2-3hrs of battery life because my mail client is trying to get "fancy" on me.

Oh, the legendary ATI drivers.

I've had this problem when playing sc2 as well, and if I play for any appreciable amount of time, even disabling automatic graphics switching doesn't help.

I've actually talked to Blizzard about this (I thought it was a problem confined to SC2), and they indicated that Apple was working on a fix for this.

About the speed: how can these laptops be getting twice the speed, twice the graphics performance, etc ? Didn't the previous model already had the i5 and i7?

They did have i5 and i7, but Sandy Bridge versions is new as well as Thunderbolt

Yes, but nothing uses Thunderbolt.

Yes, but it's a good buzzword bingo addition. Ok, yes, it's overrated, and Apple wants you to buy a new one. The main point was the new Sandy Bridge processors. Which are supposedly lots faster (and I have an original i7 in my Lenovo which is a monster, can't imagine how fast it would be)

The internal display is Thunderbolt bus connected.

No, not really.

Even where that true, why the shit should anybody care?

No, it's DisplayPort.

they are now with 4 cores with higher clock frequency

I guess that this doesn't occur on the 13" models then?

I can vouch for my 13" model. It's rock solid, but when the fan does kick in, it sounds like a turbine spinning up. No freezes though, as this is almost definitely the fault of the ATI drivers (which the 13" model doesn't have).

it would seem so even looking at the linked thread, at least I did not notice anyone reporting isues with the 13" models

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