I'm curious, did you give your new hardware time to settle? The reason for this is serious - at certain points in the release of OSX over the last few generati

I'm curious, did you give your new hardware time to settle? The reason for this is serious - at certain points in the release of OSX over the last few generations of hardware, they've turned on a lot of stuff that will burn the system up on first boot .. for potentially up to a few days .. while the indexes get built. It sounds like you would have allowed a burn-in period, but it has to be said: Rendezvous, et al., and a lot of other things in the OSX consumer package, need to be turned off - if you want a Pro config, out of the box-like .. (PS; I followed the same path as you, albeit a more SGI/Mips/Linux-oriented, and you can have my rMBP when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Or, when its battery dies, or something like that.. Can you imagine if SGI had made a laptop?)