Aleen Mean

I’m going to document this here in the hope that maybe someone can help me figure out what the everloving heck is going on with my computer.

I have a mid-2012 15” MacBook Pro with retina display. It was one of the first retina MacBooks, purchased just a week or two after they were announced at WWDC in 2012. I sold the iMac and 13” MacBook combo I was using in order to fund the new purchase, and I never really looked back. I really love this computer.

Earlier this year, it started acting oddly when on battery power. It completely locks up. The cursor won’t move, hitting Command + Tab on the keyboard to switch apps doesn’t work. It takes what feels like forever, but is probably actually only 15-30 seconds, for the computer to decide that it’s going to restart entirely; then it takes a while for it to actually finish the business of restarting. There’s no commonality in the apps I’m using or how much battery is left when this happens and I’ve found no way to reproduce it. It even occurs while booted into different hard drives and after OS X has been reinstalled from scratch. Console logs are normal and don’t reveal anything after the restarts happen–it’s not kernel panicking.

When I was reaching the end of the Apple Care on the computer, I took it to the Genius Bar to resolve the issue. It was sent to a repair facility in Texas, where the logic board and heat sink were both replaced.¹

The issue persisted.

While not ideal, it was fine because I knew if I was doing something important, I had to use my computer when it was plugged in…until last week, when it shut down while I was in the middle of recording a podcast. Furthermore, the cursor started moving of its own volition (sometimes for minutes) and, even worse, it clicks on stuff all by itself. This means that files and folders get moved around. What a disaster.

I took the computer back to the Genius Bar, but they say nothing’s wrong. They ran stress tests and have sent logs to their engineers. They’ve advised me to use the MacBook and log the dates and time of incidents but I can’t trust the computer while I’m doing anything of importance, especially with the cursor issue.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Have you found a way to reproduce it? I’m totally grasping at straws here, but I’m not in a position to replace the computer right now and could use help figuring out what’s going on so that Apple will help me get this issue taken care of.