The Official "My MacBook/Air/Pro is overheating, what do I do?" Guide.

[TattooedMac]

I do not agree with the comment that it is safe as long as the temp auto shut off doesn't kick in. That is like relying on your car's idiot lights to indicate when to top up the oil.

I hate car analogy's

But in 99.9997% of times, this does apply. Apple have done well with the implementation of this Auto #TooHot Shutoff. As Nick has said, it does sound like you have had a individual lemon, and remember as the years go on, the heating problems that i have seen, come from too much GUNK inside the workings of either the NoiteBooks or Desktops, where a quick removal of covers and a good blow out from around fans, air inlets and the such usually fix the situation.
Glad the Air is to your liking

 

[drazic2012]

I've haven't checked this entire thread to see if someone else has addressed this, but seeing as the post above has failed to mention it, I thought I should go on a little rant.

I'm not sure about the older CPUs, but the new i7s etc are designed to slow down if they hit their max temp. This is called throttling and means that unless something is drastically wrong, the computer should never exceed max temps and wont shut down.

This doesn't mean that something isn't wrong, as you may find that any time you try to run a CPU intensive task on your computer ends up throttling itself to avoid overheating. In the case of a Macbook Pro, providing you're operating it in an environment with a safe temperature and with adequate ventilation for the machine, this isn't acceptable, as it means your machine will never really be operating at it's max speed. If you were doing a CPU intensive task like video encoding where you really want to get the max out of your machine, you would be throttled and it would perform the task slower than a comparable machine that isn't overheating.

Anyway - just thought I'd mention it for anyone who may have read this thread and thought that everything was OK even though they could still be having issues with their machine.