GREETINGS.
This was a one-time issue but I thought that I would mention it anyway.

My Macbook Air suddenly decided earlier today that it didn't want to wake up when I opened the lid. I didn't do anything to it, just put it back in its case and carried it in my pack as I usually do.

But for whatever reason, this afternoon, it decided not to respond. I closed the lid and reopened it and it did the same thing. No idea why. I had to hold the power button for 6 seconds, then push it again to boot it back up. It seems to work fine currently, but I'm panicking, just because of my past experiences with notebooks.

What happened?

[BLAZE_MkIV]

Applications/Utilities/Console will have a bunch of logs to look through. system is the main one I think, Isn't there a crash dump log too people?

Yes. What does this mean? (see below)

By the way all the keys seem to work fine and my battery life is great. Do you think it was just a freak thing caused by walking around with it?


This is when I opened the lid:
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: AirPort_Brcm43xx:: powerChange: System Wake - Full Wake/ Dark Wake / Maintenance wake
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: IOThunderboltSwitch(0x0)::listenerCallback - Thunderbolt HPD packet for route = 0x0 port = 11 unplug = 0
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: IOThunderboltSwitch(0x0)::listenerCallback - Thunderbolt HPD packet for route = 0x0 port = 12 unplug = 0
2/1/13 4:28:10.559 PM hidd[59]: MultitouchHID: device bootloaded
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: TBT W (2): 0x0100 [x]
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: Graphics suppressed 392 ms
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver::checkStatus - received Status Packet, Payload 2: device was reinitialized
2/1/13 4:28:10.574 PM configd[17]: network changed: v4(en0-:141.114.215.48) DNS- Proxy- SMB
2/1/13 4:28:10.588 PM configd[17]: setting hostname to "Andrejs-MacBook-Air.local"
2/1/13 4:28:10.598 PM com.apple.time[11]: Next maintenance wake [Backup Interval]: <date: 0x7fa8926122f0> Fri Feb 01 16:16:05 2013 EST (approx)
2/1/13 4:28:10.599 PM com.apple.time[11]: Requesting maintenance wake [Backup Interval]: <date: 0x7fa8926122f0> Fri Feb 01 16:16:05 2013 EST (approx)
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: hibernate image path: /var/vm/sleepimage
2/1/13 4:28:10.000 PM kernel[0]: AirPort_Brcm43xx:: powerChange: System Sleep


This is when the screen was supposed to turn on, but instead the screen remained blank.
2/1/13 4:28:12.000 PM kernel[0]: MacAuthEvent en0 Auth result for: 00:0e:83:31:05:00 MAC AUTH succeeded
2/1/13 4:28:12.000 PM kernel[0]: wlEvent: en0 en0 Link UP virtIf = 0
2/1/13 4:28:12.000 PM kernel[0]: AirPort: Link Up on en0
2/1/13 4:28:12.000 PM kernel[0]: en0: BSSID changed to 00:0e:83:31:05:00
2/1/13 4:28:12.000 PM kernel[0]: en0::IO80211Interface:: postMessage bssid changed
2/1/13 4:28:13.222 PM airportd[797]: _doAutoJoin: Already associated to “tempest”. Bailing on auto-join.
2/1/13 4:28:13.249 PM airportd[797]: _doAutoJoin: Already associated to “tempest”. Bailing on auto-join.



But again everything seems to work fine currently. I walked around with it outside again with the lid closed, came back inside, no issues turning on.
But I'm just extremely worried that whatever caused it that one time will develop into a repeated issue.
Or do you think it was just the SMC being weird (again, freak thing)?

By the way, mine is a 2012 summer MBA.

I saw a similar thread, but for a 2011 MBA:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1198785 (see their last post - I don't have an AutoWake preference file)



=
Verify Disk in Disk Utilities gave me errors:

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking file systemPerforming live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 15020619 instead of 14980817)
The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility.

Promising update:

I booted into the recovery partition, did Repair Disk, and that fixed the issues above.

I then booted back into my "normal" partition with all my files, did Verify Disk, and got no problems.


Maybe that was it.

[P]

If it's a single isolated issue, it was cosmic background radiation. Metaphorically.

Cosmic background radiation can cause a soft flip in RAM, which means that even if both the hardware and the software are perfect, computers will crash from time to time. When you have a single issue like this, blame it on the stars and go on. If it happens again, start digging.

Unfortunately there is a problem with your explanation. Cosmic background radiation is predominantly microwaves, most of which are blocked by Earth's atmosphere. Those that get through would compose much less than 1% of all microwave radiation in a "typical" wi-fi enabled household. So, if anything, wi-fi power would be a statistically far more likely contributor to microwave interference with Macbook Air electronics than the cosmic background (which, by the way, is one of those things in astronomy that I study for a living).

[P]

Soft flips aren't caused by microwaves, they're caused by high energy particles from interactions with cosmic radiation. Wikipedia has a good piece on this:

Cosmic rays creating energetic neutrons and protons
Once the electronics industry had determined how to control package contaminants, it became clear that other causes were also at work. James F. Ziegler led a program of work at IBM which culminated in the publication of a number of papers (Ziegler and Lanford, 1979) demonstrating that cosmic rays also could cause soft errors. Indeed, in modern devices, cosmic rays may be the predominant cause. Although the primary particle of the cosmic ray does not generally reach the Earth's surface, it creates a shower of energetic secondary particles. At the Earth's surface approximately 95% of the particles capable of causing soft errors are energetic neutrons with the remainder composed of protons and pions (Ziegler, 1996).[2] IBM estimated in 1996 that one error per month per 256 MiB of ram was expected for a desktop computer.[3] This flux of energetic neutrons is typically referred to as "cosmic rays" in the soft error literature. Neutrons are uncharged and cannot disturb a circuit on their own, but undergo neutron capture by the nucleus of an atom in a chip. This process may result in the production of charged secondaries, such as alpha particles and oxygen nuclei, which can then cause soft errors.

Also: I didn't mean radiation literally, I meant it in the sense of "sometimes things crash for no reason".

Guys this isn't an isolated issue anymore...
My Macbook Air just totally froze up on me today.

I was downloading a bunch of videos on YouTube and playing iTunes... and as I was scrolling through my library, my whole entire computer froze solid, and the track started skipping. I had to hold the power button to shut down the computer.

The other thing is that, sometimes when I am browsing a webpage, my Macbook Air will totally become unresponsive for like 7 seconds (can't even use the trackpad), and then everything will be normal again. I think this might have to do with how Firefox 20a2 interacts with some webpages that are poorly programmed and/or interacts with Flash-based pages, but I'm not sure yet. Before last month, this never happened. But I'd say this problem has been popping up once every two days for the past month. (If Firefox 20a2 is causing this, then how can that be? and should I go back to an earlier version?)

I did Verify Disk, and I got no problems this time around.

And I already had Apple replace the hard drive back in September.


Now what? If you want I can post the console log again but it's long.



iTunes 11.0.1 (12)
Firefox 20a2

Are all these problems that I'm experiencing associated with a hardware problem or a software problem?

Also: When I have to hold the power button down for 6 seconds, what "maintenance" am I supposed to perform with this newer machine? Is it the same maintenance with the older Macs?

[P]

Time to run a hardware test.

Killing the computer is not as dangerous anymore as it used to be, mainly because the file system is journalled now and because with SSDs, you are much less likely to be pending writes that have not completed.

Hardware test says "No trouble found."

Maybe it's the "alpha" build of Firefox that I'm using that's causing this.
So I'll scrap the alpha and the profile and start fresh, with a stable release like version 18, and see what happens.

[P]

This actually sounds like the lookupd bug. Only trouble is that that bug was fixed with the release of Leopard.

For reference: The lookupd daemon was responsible for doing all sorts of... well, lookups...including DNS. It could become overloaded and stop responding. Killing it would solve the problem, but with lookupd hung, you couldn't even start a terminal window, because the login procedure also relied on lookupd. This was actually caused by a regular application in userspace, but when it happened, it was plastered all over the log files as the system clearly noticed something going wrong.

P... I have no idea what you just said

If you had a Macbook Air that started doing this, how would you fix the problem so you could use the Macbook Air "normally" again?

[P]

I would start investigating. What happens if you try to use a fresh user account? Is it correlated to the use of a specific program? (That FF alpha would be the first thing I dumped, I think). If it gets truly annoying, does a reinstall fix it?

I dumped Firefox 20 alpha 2 and went back to stable release 18.0.2.

I'll let you know if this problem pops up again. I'm just glad to know it's (likely not) defective hardware because then I wouldn't be able to fix it myself. If I need to do an erase/reinstall that's no biggie; I can do that in a day.

I'm definitely noticing other random issues, sometimes, when the computer sleeps for a longer time, it is more likely to have weird behavior for the first few seconds after I wake it up. (The lid could be closed, or I could use the Sleep option from the Apple menu and keep the computer lid up.) As examples, TextEdit may be slow to respond for a few seconds, I will get a gray screen for 4 seconds, or my regular screen but no ability to move the on-screen cursor for 3-4 seconds. Or sometimes the screen will not turn on for 3-4 seconds. This doesn't seem to happen if I have the computer sleeping for less than, say, 25-30 minutes. I've also noticed others having this "longer sleep duration causing delayed responses" issue with the Macbook Air, so when is Apple going to come out with a firmware fix, or is there something wrong with a bunch of our computers and not a firmware issue? To be safe, I've started to do restarts after long sleep duration.

By the way, I always shut the computer down overnight, so it's not like it's always in sleep mode.

[Spheric Harlot]

Sounds normal to me.

Is there a reason why you insist on shutting down the computer every night? It's completely unnecessary under normal circumstances.

No reason in particular... but I've heard stories about how some people never shut their Mac down and they let it sleep all the time (with all sorts of apps open) and it causes long-term slowness until they restart the Mac, or other weird issues with the apps later on, until a restart.