Categories
fixing your desktop

Apple laptop overheats when running iOS 5 on iPad or iPhone Simulator

Here’s ANOTHER overheating bug in Apple’s OS X.

This time, it’s the BlueTooth simulator built-in to the iOS Simulator (used every day by iPhone and iPad developers). The iOS5 version of the simulator has this crazy BT demon (process “BTServer”) that will sometimes – for no apparent reason – take up 100% CPU usage and melt your machine.

Solution:

  1. Open terminal
  2. Type: sudo vi “/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator5.0.sdk/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.BTServer.plist”
    • NOTE: the inverted commas are required, it seems
  3. Enter your admin password for the machine (the file is locked to all except admin)
  4. Use vi to change the 8th line to: <true/>
    • NOTE: the line immediately above should be: <key>Disabled</key>

3 replies on “Apple laptop overheats when running iOS 5 on iPad or iPhone Simulator”

Not with Apple hardware. It’s designed not to work unless the software / OS is running at less than 100% CPU most / all of the time. c.f. Apple’s complaints about Flash – a big part of Apple’s problem was just that Flash tends to run at 100% CPU, and their hardware can’t handle that.

So it’s an intentionally designed bottleneck? I can understand how an app that runs at 100% would be bad for battery life, but no combination of commands should cause physical damage to the device.

Comments are closed.