19 ms·

MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

411 points by electic 8y ago

mandioca 8y ago
Macbook “Pro”.
- mirimir 8y ago
  This! They ought to rename it, and actually sell a professional laptop.
  - walru 8y ago
    That would require a complete and total culture change. As it is, and I know Apple has a war chest, the clock is ticking on their survival.
    - sneak 8y ago
      Yes, they can only survive so long with their revenues shrinking like they have been...
      - walru 8y ago
        Nothing lasts forever. The bigger you are, the harder you'll fall. The clock and mindset and innovation of Apple products has been alluding to a sea change for years, these things don't happen overnight.
  - freetime2 8y ago
    "Pro" is a pretty broad term. I suspect the MacBook Pro is powerful enough for most professionals who need a computer to do their jobs. I use one professionally for software development, and it suits my needs just fine. Sure - there are some professions out there that require more power than a MacBook Pro can offer. But is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it can't meet the needs of 100% of all working professionals?
    - rubbingalcohol 8y ago
      Is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it doesn't deliver on the stock rated performance of the hardware it's spec'ed with? Yes, that's fair.
    - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      > But is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it can't meet the needs of 100% of all working professionals? Apparently it cannot even meet the needs of its own spec sheet. It gets throttle back below its base clock speed according to the video. That's the real issue. Apple claims this is "More Pro" but it turns out to be just more of the same from Apple lately. One issue after another.
- RyJones 8y ago
  It pains me how correct this feels. The MacBook Pro becomes an echo of itself every generation. Soon, the beat fades and we're left in the dells
  - theabacus 8y ago
    I’m sticking with my 2015 15” until it bites the dust and then probably getting something else if Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. Even there software is degrading. I feel like I’m doing better by not running updates (I know this is not so, for security reasons, but...)
    - wild_preference 8y ago
      My favorite is the latest Air (years old now) which doesn’t even have a retina screen yet, a perk in my book. I could watch Netflix on my bare stomach with my Air. Latest Pro is quickly too hot to handle. Of course not the only issue but the computer never bounced back from that first impression. The dedicated gfx card doesn’t even seem to run games like Civ 5 better than my Air which I’m guessing is due to all the extra screen pixels.
      - sneak 8y ago
        I do wish they would bring back the Air’s keyboard on higher end models.
      - jsjohnst 8y ago
        > I could watch Netflix on my bare stomach with my Air Don’t try that with a first gen Air. It had a very significant problem with thermal related issues. Several times a week it’d get so hot I could make pancakes off it, the rest of the time it was in a throttled state. Was a very common problem among folks I worked with (albeit mine was a personal, theirs was a work machine) too.
        lloeki 8y ago
        The Air story is incredible. It went from compromising, underpowered, overheating, pricey, loathed and ridiculed, to everyone's favorite laptop, with excellent performance across the board at a stupefyingly low price point.
- rado 8y ago
  PS4 "Pro".
ianamartin 8y ago
You know, I'm so beat down by the state of apple laptops, I don't even care. I was all ready to spring for a new machine the day these dropped. Until I found out that they max the 13" model at 16 gigs of ram. I'm so pissed. I don't want the 15". That's what external monitors are for. I like the portable to be fucking portable. Jesus. I give up.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Why do you need 32 GB of ram?
  - no1youknowz 8y ago
    Not the op, but I need 32 GB for:- - running virtual machines. - running MemSQL which requires a minimum of 8GB to be available. - running video editing software. There are probably other reasons, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
    - cs02rm0 8y ago
      Similar to VMs, I run a lot of docker containers, mostly with JVMs in them. I bought an Intel Hades Canyon with 32GB to run Linux on after the new MBPs didn't turn up at WWDC. Feeling somewhat relieved right now.
- yourapostasy 8y ago
  Who makes a 13" laptop with 32 GB RAM that is Thinkpad or the better models of Asus build quality? That much RAM in such a small form factor, regardless of thickness, also seems a hefty thermal challenge, but if someone out there is doing it, I'd like to take a look at them. I swung by the Lenovo and Dell sites, and only the Dell 14" will let you go up to 32 GB, but I've yet to see a 13" model.
slantyyz 8y ago
The heat off that MBP reminds me of how hot my early 2011 15" MBP got. I suspect that the heat was the culprit for the GPU failures that gave the 2011 model its notoriety.
- olliej 8y ago
  I thought that was gpu manufacturer issue? I recall Nvidia specifically had a lot of issues across many oems.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    Hard to say. Some people got temporary fixes by baking their logic boards and/or reballing the GPU. IIRC the "recall" involved replacing the logic boards with refurbs having the same GPUs. The CPUs on the boards seemed to be throttled after the replacement.
  - walru 8y ago
    It was likely a bit of both, but there's one thing that can't be denied, apple products are built for form over function.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      Apple was by no means the only manufacturer to have trouble with those Nvidia parts; it was an industry-wide problem.
  - neya 8y ago
    You are right, NVIDIA replaced the die for many OEMs, at the time my Vaio was affected and out of warranty, but Sony was nice enough to replace the motherboard for me and the laptop still works..roughly 10 years later..
jdhn 8y ago
I don't know a lot about heat dissipation, but could the slimness of the MBP be a factor in this? I would think that after a certain point, you wouldn't be able to get good airflow in such a small space.
- veryconfident 8y ago
  The slimness makes it more aerodynamic, which is actually a thermal benefit in some high-speed air tunnels. Apple knows what they’re doing.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  There are multiple factors, but slimness is probably not the only culprit. I don't think Apple (or most other PC vendors) use the best thermal compound on their CPUs. When my early 2011 MBP was having heat problems, I replaced the compound over the CPU and GPU and got noticeable although not spectacular reductions in heat. Of course, that's not something you can do on a "modern" Macbook Pro, since they're not intended to be user serviceable any more.
  - AmVess 8y ago
    They can use an okay quality thermal joint compound if it is applied well. My Dell's thermal joint compound looked like someone was trying to make a PBJ sandwich with the stuff. Applied too thickly, and it becomes an insulator. Mac used to have this problem in the past. I repasted my Dell and got 5F reduction at load right away. The problem with all high end mobile CPU's is that they are given a tiny heatsink and heatpipes which are simply not up to the job. They quickly become heat soaked and the fans are unable to reduce the heat, so the units throttle.
nodesocket 8y ago
That's seems to contradict a recent benchmark/post [1] which showed impressive CPU performance from the i9 MacBook Pro. [1] http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/
- mohaba 8y ago
  The only impressive one was single core. Otherwise it was in line with a laptop, and not a desktop.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  Depends on the workload and amount of time spent processing the workloads. Dave Lee ran some tests that took a half hour to complete with the CPU pretty much maxed out. I would imagine the CPU was running hot for most of that time.
- endorphone 8y ago
  They really do test different things. In this case he is testing video renders from Premiere Pro, which renders for tens of minutes at 100%. It's apparently an outrageously inefficient app as well as the Windows version of it renders the same output in a fraction of the time (which invalidates it as a test, really). All modern chips thermally throttle. Run a heavy AVX2 workload and you'll often go below the so-called "base" frequency. Run one or two threads and it can dramatically "overclock". It is the nature of all current chips. Eh. For the overwhelming majority of users I doubt this would ever be an issue. Compile a kernel. Apply a filter. Do some convolutions. Every normal thing will be ridiculously fast. Run a server or workstation style load and it won't be so good. That has been the case with laptops for time eternal.
  - Namesareapain 8y ago
    BS! All modern chips do not thermally throttle! Only ones in systems that have not been designed correctly! The fact that the Aero x15 he tested with the 2.2Ghz base clock 6 core i7 can all core boost to 3.1Ghz in the same workload that brings the macbook pro far below it's base clock speed proves that! P.S, it does not matter what program it is running, throttling is a hardware flaw!
theabacus 8y ago
Not surprised given how thin the thing is.
rasz 8y ago
Macs dont even start running fans until you hit >80C.
- lgvln 8y ago
  I think the correct terminology is “don’t start running the fans at high(audible) speeds till >80C.
  - mustaflex 8y ago
    Apparently they don't start at all until 80C here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU
    - sushid 8y ago
      Mine runs at >6k RPM after 50-something Celsius.
    - tedmiston 8y ago
      Mine are running at 2k RPM ~40 C.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Depends on the model. The MacBook Escape (non-touchbar Pro) doesn't run fans at all at low temperatures. I actually thought it was broken when I first got it, but it's intentional behaviour.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    It really depends on the model. My older MacBook Pros would idle at 2K RPM, while my new MacBook Pro can go all the way down to zero in the winter or with very few things open but generally stay at 1200 RPM during daily usage. All of these are silent, of course.
owenversteeg 8y ago
I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper thermal design can lead to some huge issues. For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is the thermal design. Anyone can slap a cheap, powerful chip in; good thermal design is much harder. I think people are going to start realizing this more and more, especially as powerful chips get extremely cheap.
- zengid 8y ago
  That's really interesting. Do you have any suggestions on some further reading?
- bri3d 8y ago
  Don't forget the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death, caused by incorrect thermal management causing balls on a BGA package to lift from the board underneath as it deflected.
  - Puer 8y ago
    Which is ironically also how you fixed it. I'll never forget the "magic" of wrapping my Xbox 360 in several towels and overheat for 30 minutes to supposedly resolder it back together. It worked for another 6 months after that until it completely and finally died.
    - lloeki 8y ago
      The problem was more precisely that thermal variations combined with the way the heatsink was attached and pushing on the middle of the CPU repeatedly warped the board due to thermal expansion, causing the balls to unseat. Heating the thing would help reseat the BGA thanks to thermal expansion but would certainly not reflow soldering (not enough heat). The proper fix was to try to reseat the BGA by whatever means and change the way the heatsink was attached so that pressure on the BGA/board was even. I did that on two units and they survived for years after their first RRoD, and on a third unit right from the get go, and that one never suffered of any issue.
lebrad 8y ago
Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received". Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do people really think he just got a lemon?
- slantyyz 8y ago
  In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.
  - gnufied 8y ago
    And thermals is real issue with race to making thinnest laptops possible. My Thinkpad T450s throttles just running Chrome and bunch of tabs. I don't see how a competitor having thermal problems exonerates Apple from having similar problems.
    - eropple 8y ago
      A big part of why I got the T480 instead of the T480s was to avoid the thermals issue. Seems okay so far, but who knows how long (I've only had it a couple days) that'll go.
    - rz2k 8y ago
      In biology thin would imply a high surface area to volume ratio, and great performance if you're trying to get rid of internally generated heat. Here, I guess we're talking about room for cooling systems so as to avoid blistering users' skin or charring their pants?
      - lebrad 8y ago
cmurf 8y ago
Is this throttling in the chip itself? Or is it something that e.g. Linux (the kernel) needs to be taught specifically for make/model? Or some combination of the two? And is it possible that the in-chip limiter is more of an emergency limit, and hitting it regularly can result in long term consequences if the kernel doesn't do aggressive enough limiting? I just see really different behavior with heat, fans, and kernel behavior between XNU vs Linux, and Windows vs Linux on the same hardware.
- lykr0n 8y ago
  In the source video, it shows that the chip is downclocking to 2.2GHz under sustained load. There is nothing any software can do about that as that's hardware doing it. The OS can govern how the fans spin up, but all CPUs will throttle down when they hit a predetermined temperature.
- Namesareapain 8y ago
  I am not sure why you are referring to Linux (macos kernel is XNU), but the firmware of the chip is in charge of controlling the CPU clockspeed and the only reason it is hitting this limiter is because the CPU does not have correct cooling, nothing to do with the OS.
lgvln 8y ago
I’m not surprised. I’m hitting 90C avg, 95% CPU, fan maxed, 25C room temp, running W10 on a 2016 15in MBP.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  That... seems way too high? Are your vents clogged?
  - BigJ1211 8y ago
    This is pretty normal on laptops, my 6700HQ can go up to 95°C. These chips are rated for up to 100°C (TJunction).
TillE 8y ago
After seeing those benchmarks, I'm feeling even better about having just decided to go for an Aero 15. I quite like Mac laptops, but I've concluded that I don't really need one. I'll just grab one of the new (rumored) Mac minis to continue MacOS development as needed.
drngdds 8y ago
One of the many downsides of making all your computers like two millimeters thin.
- symfoniq 8y ago
  Indeed. What ever happened to product differentiation?
  - MBCook 8y ago
    To be fair they’ve always been bumping up against this since they don’t like to put tons of fans in their laptops. While this obviously shouldn’t happen, it seems like something you could easily predict might be a flaw if you knew that one had to exist.
    - white-flame 8y ago
      They've always been bumping up against this back in the Apple II days, and systems would overheat then, too. All in the name of Steve Jobs emphasizing case aesthetics & not wanting fan noise.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
        Eh, that reminded me of the paper chimneys some people advocated for better air flow on the original Mac or MacPlus. (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney , namely https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234 https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234 - some case aesthetics ;-)
    - amiga-workbench 8y ago
      Oh they put the fans in there, they just don't spin them up until components are half desoldering themselves off the board.
kalleboo 8y ago
It's summer now and as soon as I plug my MacBook Pro 2017 in to charge, it starts throttling itself due to the heat of the charging battery. Same thing happened to the 2012 I had before. These things just don't have adequate cooling.
- LyndsySimon 8y ago
  I often work outdoors, and merely being in sunlight makes my 13” MBP go to max fan speed after about ten minutes, and insufferably slow after a half hour or so.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    That doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy/unexpected.
    - LyndsySimon 8y ago
      You don’t think it’s unreasonable that a laptop should work in daylight?
      - reitzensteinm 8y ago
        A 15" laptop's body could easily be absorbing 75 watts of heat from the sun, equivalent to running both the CPU and GPU of a MacBook Pro pegged at 100%. I think throttling in this scenario is a reasonable tradeoff, much more so than overengineering the cooling solution to handle it and thereby increasing cost, weight and bulk. Sit in the shade.
        agentdrtran 8y ago
        "You're holding it wrong!" Other laptops work in the sun.
        ToFab123 8y ago
duxup 8y ago
I guess the key is that it under-performed vs last model's i7... not that it has thermal issues. I would think most laptops have some level of thermal trade offs.
- NoPicklez 8y ago
  The key is that the thermal issues are so bad that it causes it to underperform against the last models i7.
- symfoniq 8y ago
  I’d say that not even being able to maintain the advertised base clock is a pretty key issue. Being slower than last year’s model just adds insult to injury.
- komocode 8y ago
  My guess is Premier already had optimizations for the 2017 Macbook Pro to lessen the amount of hits to the throttle threshold temperature.
  - coldseattle 8y ago
    Premiere.
throw2016 8y ago
Apple it seems is happy to be known for iPhones and iPads but for many people Apple is really about a rich history in computing, computers, good engineering, design and well built products. Now especially with the mac business they are reducing the scope and value of their brand, and becoming purveyors of high value trinkets. This is nothing short of a tragedy. There is a difference between a small premium for good engineering, components choice and design, and profiteering to the point of becoming an extremely overpriced luxury product with more brand than real value.
shiburizu 8y ago
Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less insane prices. Granted, I don't see many with that much storage space and RAM but I'd love to hear how some of you have experienced the same workload on non-Apple devices and felt you should keep buying MacBook.
- abakker 8y ago
  OSX really. Loss of productivity from the little stuff in windows just isn’t manageable for me. OS X has problems, but I’m used to it and familiar with it and it works as expected.
  - garren 8y ago
    I agree with the loss of productivity in Windows. For me it started with Win7, really took hold with Win8/server 2012 "metro", and only got a little better in Win10. I don't understand why there are two significantly different ways to do simple things like connect to a network or configure an existing connection. The OS throws the pretty/flat metro inspired applet at you, but it has 10% of the actual functionality you're looking for, so you end up popping open the control panel anyway. The start menu ads are an insane addition. The apps in the app store are pretty much pointless and anything you actually need you can install via chocolatey. If MS were to produce an actual "pro" version of Windows that removed all of the fluffy inconsistent stuff, ripped out all vestiges of Win8, and put PowerShell front and center, it would appeal to a lot of people that just want to get stuff done.
- RussianCow 8y ago
  > justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned to the point that you can't find another laptop on the market that just feels anywhere as nice as a whole. The tight integration between the hardware and the software doesn't hurt, either. If all you need is a powerful laptop, or if you don't care about any of those details, you are probably better off getting a more cost effective machine, but you will always sacrifice some combination of things for it. (For me personally, the biggest one is the touchpad.) I say this as someone who doesn't own any other Apple products, but I will likely never buy a laptop other than a MacBook Pro.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
I develop on a macbook pro for 12 hours a day. Have a bajillion chrome tabs open, 2-3 ides open, sequel pro, photoshop, slack/skype, utorrent, spotify, and more.... My macbook pro 2016 i7/16G doesn't even skip a beat. Unless you're doing 3d graphics or Machine Learning or something...I think for 99.9999999% of POWER USERS a throttled i9 with 32 gigs of RAM is plenty for the year 2018. This throttle issue in my opinion is such a minor quibble it feels like demonization of Mac. You can focus on the very very very few negatives of Macbooks but in my opinion at the end of the day it's an incredible machine.
- wlll 8y ago
  I think the main quibble is that the laptop can't even hold it's base clock speed without throttling.
  - lykr0n 8y ago
    Under sustained load. That's the key part here.
  - nickthemagicman 8y ago
    Yeah but that's like buying a race car and being upset that it's throttled at 300 mph. 99.9999% of people will never go 300mph..unless you're using it in a very specialized way.
    - thatswrong0 8y ago
      But it's supposedly _slower_ than its predecessor in sustained situations like this. What's the point of having a "more powerful" 2018 machine over the 2017 if, when trying to use that power, you end up worse off?
      - wtallis 8y ago
        For most users, sacrificing some sustained performance for the sake of higher burst performance is absolutely the right choice if such a tradeoff is possible. People who keep the CPU at 100% with a multi-threaded workload for minutes on end have a workload that requires a desktop form factor. For the other 97% of users, the CPU will spend far more time idle than fully-loaded.
tedmiston 8y ago
All three 15-inch Mid 2018 MBP configurations benchmarked are at the top of Geekbench for multi-core, only behind iMac Pro and Mac Pro models [1]. Here they are in isolation compared to the 2017 and 2016 15-inch models sorted by score descending overall: | Model | Configuration | Score | |---------------------------------|------------------------------------------|-------| | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i9-8950HK @ 2.9 GHz (6 cores) | 22547 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i7-8850H @ 2.6 GHz (6 cores) | 21266 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i7-8750H @ 2.2 GHz (6 cores) | 21096 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7920HQ @ 3.1 GHz (4 cores) | 15550 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7820HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 15251 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.8 GHz (4 cores) | 14374 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6920HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 14134 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6820HQ @ 2.7 GHz (4 cores) | 13706 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz (4 cores) | 13008 | [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
- lykr0n 8y ago
  The Macbook Pro has a great 100m sprint, but it can't complete a 1km race without crawling across the finish line. Geekbench takes a few minutes to run. If you ran it back to back to back without letting the laptop cool down, you'd see different numbers.
- zzleeper 8y ago
  Were the benchmarks run on a cooled room? Some years ago, as a student, I paid $$$ for a Toshiba with 4 cores and hyperthreading, and I could only run them well on the winter or in a very cool room. In the summer it would reach 100C and constantly throttle, so I do think that temperature is a key issue, sp. now with slimmmer laptops
  - tedmiston 8y ago
    Not sure on an individual basis but the Geekbench numbers are aggregate across all users of the machine. I reached out to the video author to see if he'd be willing to run Geekbench on it in a freezer vs not. https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/1019420588467740673 https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/101942058846774067...
jillesvangurp 8y ago
I use smcfancontrol on my imac to force the fans to do their thing. The problem seems to be that osx prefers throttling over turning the machine into a vacuum cleaner. For me this is the only way to play games. Without smccontrol throttling kicks in and the fans never go on fully.
llekn 8y ago
Anybody knows if Apple's ARM chips (iPhone) have better thermal efficiency (watts/GFLOPs) than the chips in this latest gen? If this is the case, I think it's just a matter of time for Apple replacing Intel with their own custom ARM chips.
- lykr0n 8y ago
  You can't really compare ARM and x86_64 chips. I'm going to use a crude example. Think of the ARM chip being one of those USPS Trucks (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_USPS_Truck.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_US...) while the x86_64 is a F150 pickup. Both can drive around and transport things, but the USPS Truck is purpose build to deliver mail, stop and start frequently, and be reliable. It does a few things well. On the other hand the F150 is widely produced, can be customized in many different ways, and is general purpose vehical. Could it do the function of the USPS Truck? Sure, but it would be slower, cost more to run, and be less efficient. Could the USPS Truck haul a trailer? Maybe, but it wouldn't be very good at it. Both are a truck, but both are designed to different things and excel at different things. That crude comparison is ARM vs x86_64. ARM is getting there, and for the specific ARM functions it's more performant than the equivalent x86_64 functions. But once you go outside of what the ARM chip has been specifically designed for, your performance takes a massive hit. Will ARM be able to take off in a Macbook? Maybe in a few years, but Apple would need to dump a massive amount of R&D into their designs before I would think they would consider it (but who knows?)
  - shub 8y ago
    What? They're CPUs. They're designed to run instructions. Intel's chips spend more energy on the really fancy stuff like huge reorder buffers and extensive speculation. They get higher IPC at lower MIPS/watt. An i7 isn't going to run iOS more slowly than whatever Apple calls their latest ARM SoC. It _is_ going to blow its lid without a big ole heatsink brick on there and a fan too, which is why smartphones use ARM cores designed for efficiency. P.S. if anything, ARM is the "general purpose vehicle" in your analogy. x64 is all about high throughput and high power on a chip you buy and plug in. ARM is the one where you can get an architecture license and customize the shit out of it.
chx 8y ago
This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for. It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air. Today the entire Mac revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... is below 10%. See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a thin laptop. There's no advantage to it whatsoever. People do need lightweight laptops and well before the Macbook Air we had shockingly lightweight ones, my Panasonic CF-Y5 was 1.5kg including a DVD ROM more than ten years ago. It had a protrusion on the lid to create a cushion which made a review to call "the exterior design of the machine's casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon". It made it 45mm thick at the thickest point. Still, it was 1.5kg and undestructible. So, instead of focusing on materials science and building lightweight laptops in whatever thickness a good cooling system would require everyone is falling over themselves to produce a thin laptop. Which, of course, can't be properly cooled. It's just physics. In this case, the Macbook "Pro" is 0.61" high where the Lenovo P52 (which is Pro for real) is 0.96”. This thinness craze killed off the convenient bottom dock ports from the business laptops creating these awkward side docks. Fantastic trick, Mr Jobs, well played.
- komocode 8y ago
  That's a serious tin-foil hat you got there.
  - chx 8y ago
    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-an...
- Shank 8y ago
  > But noone needs a thin laptop. There's no advantage to it whatsoever. I own an Air, and it's been my go to machine in university. Yes, the weight does a lot to help me just pick it up and grab it, but the thinness does help a ton too. Thin means that I can throw it in a bag and still fit textbooks, notebooks, hoodies, and whatever else inside. I've had bags packed fully and needed every inch of space. The Air does that. It's not a huge market, and I think only the Air models should focus on it, but it does exist. A bigger but equally light laptop wouldn't make nearly the difference that the Air does in how it fits ends up being the smallest thing in many of my bags.
Tloewald 8y ago
Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA: http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere. The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  Well the single-core test is unlikely to max out the thermal loading on the CPU. You can see how the scaling from 4-6 cores provides severely diminishing returns, perhaps due to throttling.
  - StillBored 8y ago
    Uh, it turbos in the 4+Ghz range. That is by itself probably going to blow the 45W thermal rating the entire chip has. My gut instinct says that macbook probably can't even dissipate that over a long period of time. The linked test seems to indicate the truth of that, and its not unusual for a mac product, the last one that could probably continuously dissipate the combined cpu+gpu heat was that crazy ugly mac pro. Intel didn't invent some new physics to get "high" performance cores crammed into a laptop, they are just pulling the same stuff the phone market has been doing for the past few years. Put enough thermal capacitance against the chip itself to absorb a few multiples of the chips dissipation, allow it to get really hot, and then throttle it hard. Hope, people keep their benchmark runs short. There is a difference between socket 2011/2270 based i7/i9s and their insufficiently cooled, memory and IO bandwidth starved cousins found in laptops. Even a fairly low end desktop is going to stomp the most expensive laptop you can find simply due to physics. Being able to dissipate more heat means higher performance. Its possible to move the curve up/down depending on fab processes, or micro-arch, but these days there aren't any miracle cures. More power equals more performance.
    - n1000 8y ago
      Isn't the 4 GHz meant as a boost frequency as thermals allow? The more CPUs are active the rarer this happens. It becomes problematic when the CPU can't maintain its base clock speed anymore.
meesterdude 8y ago
Well I guess my next machine has to be a PC running linux now. Been waiting to replace my aging MBP with this latest gen, but this is the the last straw for me. Charging such a premium and being too lazy (or thin-focused) that it can't meet it's base clock outside of a freezer is ridiculous. I just wish I could run OSX in a VM. Linux as a primary desktop isn't quite there yet.
- abvdasker 8y ago
  I've been thinking the same for some time. Razer makes supposedly quite good premium laptops with some degree of linux compatibility. They also seem to have a community of enthusiasts behind them so I will likely try that or the Surface Pro.
- tpaschalis 8y ago
  You could run an OSX VM in either Windows or Linux (I'm doing fullscreen Linux VM on Windows with a Thinkpad, and it's quite good/fast). Idk if there are issues with licensing, though. Also, give Linux as a primary desktop a try! What do you believe that's lacking, from your perspective? Granted, it's not great out of the box, and some software isn't available, but if you have a couple of weekends to spare/invest with tinkering, you can have a pretty and solid desktop workstation setup.
- gaius 8y ago
  Been waiting to replace my aging MBP I replaced my MBP with a Surface and I’m very happy with it, so add that to your list. WSL beats my previous setup of VirtualBox easily for Linux stuff.
ColinWielga 8y ago
I have been watching Dave2D videos for years. He is one of the best laptop reviewers on YouTube.
tjpnz 8y ago
The biggest shock for me with these laptops came when I tried to do some light gaming. I'm not talking about recent titles either, my 2017 MBP gets bought to the brink by KSP at minimum settings with no mods. I understand that I would be quite rightly criticised for trying to run something like Fortnite but we're talking about a game here with roots in 2013. The hardware they put inside the later models has no hope in hell of running normally with all the thermal issues.
- slededit 8y ago
  KSP can lag on my desktop with a 1080ti. Don't feel too bad.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    KSP is largely CPU intensive, the GPU barely matters (You can run KSP on maximum settings on a RX460 very comfortably with low parts numbers)
- StapleHorse 8y ago
  KSP is CPU constrained and IIRC uses only one thread beacause of Unity 3d. Try lesr boosters :)
  - isostatic 8y ago
    More struts!
komocode 8y ago
So far the last several Macbooks have throttled after X minutes of rendering. The only real surprise is that the 2018 Macbooks ended up with worse rendering time. But it does make sense since the i9 is a hotter chip and combine that with the same thin design...you'll reach the threshold faster...which will throttle faster.
matte_black 8y ago
This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook, and only when you are doing some heavy tasks. In normal day to day use most people will not do enough processing to be affected by thermal issues. Keeping the form factor of a MacBook is much more important than eliminating every thermal edge case. People take for granted how much we’ve improved on old big and heavy laptops (with worse performance even).
- gaius 8y ago
  This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook So, making it an inch or two thicker?
pasta 8y ago
This is why the pro desktop market is not dead. Rendering real time path tracing while designing a house, visualising point clouds, video editing, sound design, you can do it on a laptop but the pro market will buy a desktop because it's 'cheaper', more reliable and upgradeable
jbb67 8y ago
So... they discovered that there is a reaason that desktop computers have a large heatsink with a fan many times larger attached... Don't buy a laptop and expect it's sustained performance to be anywhere near that of a proper desktop computer. It simply won't be
- lebski88 8y ago
  That's not really it at all. His point is that this laptop is significantly worse than other laptops in terms of throttling. To the point where the i9 renders slower than the i7 in his testing. That's pretty damning for a $300 upgrade.
- Const-me 8y ago
  Not just desktops. A few years ago we had thick laptops with good cooling, too. Unlike newer thin laptops, they were, and still are, viable desktop replacements. Some of them even allowed upgrading the CPU. I once inserted i7-3612QM in 13” HP ProBook 4340s of a family member (it had an i3-3110M initially) also replacing fan assembly. It runs well under sustained loads, and the performance with the i7 is very close to much newer 15W mobile CPUs such as i7-8550U found in the current 13” macbook pros. It’s a shame we no longer have these, not Apple, not Windows, nobody.
- alluro2 8y ago
  Imagine someone selling you a 4K monitor (for 50% more than other 4K monitors) without ever mentioning that you can only actually have 4K for 5 min max, then it falls to QHD.
aparashk 8y ago
The i9 CPU is a K part, therefore, I would think one could conceivably undervolt/underclock in order to change the thermals on the machine to their liking. Is there such a tool for Mac OS X?
- cdmckay 8y ago
  What’s a K part?
  - aparashk 8y ago
    The Intel processors that have the suffix “K” are unlocked, and can be under or overclocked: https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocking-intel-processors.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocki...
- asloma 8y ago
  We're talking about a laptop here, which most definitely doesn't contain an overclockable i9 K processor.
  - aparashk 8y ago
    It is according to Intel (otherwise it would not be labeled as i9-8950HK): https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocking-intel-processors.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocki...
  - paulmd 8y ago
    And you would be wrong there. There are mobile K SKUs that can be overclocked.
- nickflood 8y ago
  You can actually undervolt and underclock any Intel CPU, Unlocked ones are just unlocked in the "up" direction.
izacus 8y ago
Every MacBook Pro I've ever owned locked it self down to low frequency after running a CPU intensive task for a minute or so. I thought that was common knowledge? There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). This is why desktop workstations are still so much faster even though they carry same frequency chips.
- deaddodo 8y ago
  Sure, but the amount of throttling his tested configuration was running at was fairly significant. Most laptops can at least run their base clock most of the time, his MacBook couldn't even do that (2.2 GHz vs 2.9ghz). The XPS 15 is considered a PC laptop with subpar thermals and even those issues only crop up during turbo, not baseclock (same CPU).
- aparashk 8y ago
  That, and also battery life (and the extrapolated time left until empty) takes a severe hit when doing CPU intensive task for more than a minute. Does anyone know if thermal throttling is so much of an issue for iPads?
- leni536 8y ago
  >There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). My 10 years old HP nc6400 doesn't do that. It requires occasional (once a year) cleaning of the fan assembly though (not that hard to access). The fan is loud, the laptop is bulky but it never ever throttles. The CPU has 34W TDP, I do not think that's on the low side.
- lloeki 8y ago
  I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. Thermal design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick in only when load requires it. Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various issues in the realm of thermal paste gone bad, busted fans, or clogged airducts, and certainly not on intrinsic bad design because I have personal counterexamples of dozens of various Apple laptops from 2008 to 2016 being perfectly fine out of the box. Obviously though, a desktop will beat a laptop's thermal performance any day but I think this is missing the point.
andromeduck 8y ago
It's probably because Toronto, where he lives, has been around 27 degrees and 70% humidity the last few days. That's around 7 degrees and 20% humidity above the typical office climate of around 20 degrees and 50% humidity. That difference can result in roughly 20% lower dissipation power if the temperature at the heatsink is around 50-60 degrees which it appears to have been historically. That 20% extra dissipation power might be enough to get it from 2.2 to 3 GHz considering the base clocks are usually where processors have the most efficient marginal frequency scaling. IMO, designing the thermal solution + chip combination to reach base clocks at typical office climates seems reasonably smart/defensible because most places will be cooler than that most of the year even before AC.
- akmarinov 8y ago
  He wasn’t testing it outside in the sun, though …
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    But if his place has no AC, it's even worse than outside (in the shadow)
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  What’s to say he didn’t perform the benchmarking in a room with AC?
  - andromeduck 8y ago
    I'm guessing here because he appears to be in a house/apartment, didn't show ambient temperatures and because Toronto is surrounded by the great lakes which should make it more temperature than Montreal and Quebec city which recently experienced a spade of heat deaths and heat induced early mortality due to lack of widespread AC adoption.
- Improvotter 8y ago
  The i7 was tested in the same circumstances I assume. So it shouldn't matter how hot or humid it was. The comparison should be valid.
jakecopp 8y ago
"...'this degree' of thermal throttling..." Very impressive!
rehemiau 8y ago
Louis Rossmann made a video[1] a while ago presenting how badly optimized is the cooling on new MacBooks. In short: Apple prefers their MacBook CPU and GPU to run hot and thermally throttle so that the user is happy because the machine is quiet, and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU edit: Bear in mind these videos are about new MacBooks so there's no way to predict their usual lifespan. And I'm not saying all of them die after 2-3 years. Apple is simply optimizing for the 90% of users here, people doing mostly web browsing and using Microsoft Office. This does not put a sustained load on the CPU/GPU so these users will be fine.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. Conspiracy theory BS. MacBooks don't die after "2-3 years", and they retain much better resale value than Wintel laptops too. That said, Apple could very well prioritise quiet over full-speed.
- skgoa 8y ago
  > more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. And yet, MacBooks tend to be extremely reliable for many years.
- fyfy18 8y ago
  I switched from a MacBook Air to a similarly spec’ed (4260U vs 5200U) Thinkpad a couple of months ago, and noticed a vast performance difference when playing games. When playing games the processor gets up to 85C, but doesn’t throttle. It’s either that or Linux is a lot better for gaming than macOS.
- andromeduck 8y ago
  Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your device especially for longer sustained periods unless there's some glaring design defect as happened to Nvidia. So that's actually pretty well optimized.
sgloutnikov 8y ago
There is another video [1], in which a 2017 i7 outperforms a 2018 i9 in video compression due to its severe throttling. Sure the benchmarks look great and are better on the i9, but as someone mentioned, that's like looking at sprint compared to a longer race. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s
satysin 8y ago
I suspected as much which is why I didn't bother with the ~£300 upgrade from the default 2.6Ghz i7 to the 2.9Ghz i9. The MBP already struggled with the old i7 and with no redesign I couldn't see how they could handle the i9 without extreme thermal throttling. Turns out they can't but ship it anyway!
ryzvonusef 8y ago
When the heading said Youtuber, I thought for sure it would be Louis Rossmann
vivan 8y ago
This isn't a problem solely with the MacBook Pro - it affects most of the "ultralight" laptops these days. My XPS 13 (lovely machine, thermal issues aside) has been RMA'd 3 times because it overheated. It still gets far too hot and throttles itself so I've had to underclock it and turn off "turbo" mode. Other users have mentioned that simply repasting the CPU has caused massive improvements in temps, but I'm personally not comfortable with messing around inside a $2000 laptop. Users shouldn't have to cripple their hardware or actually fix components to make it work properly.
- daemin 8y ago
  I'm only comfortable doing that after I've got at least 3 years of value out of it. My current laptop is an aging Zenbook Pro where I've replaced the custom SSD with an adapter plus an m.2 board. So maybe if you still want to use the laptop after a few years you can open it up and give it a bit of a facelift. Maybe applying a whole bunch of thermal paste will give it a slightly new lease of life?
  - vivan 8y ago
    Absolutely - once it is out of warranty and starting to lose performance I'm happy to mess around. But less so just a few months after I've bought it!
- Tepix 8y ago
  Which generation of XPS 13 is that?
  - vivan 8y ago
    9360 so the previous generation. Made the mistake of going with the higher res screen - apparently they have more issues.
wareotie 8y ago
I bought the MacBook Pro 2017 13" without touch bar with an i7. I pretty happy with it, but, the only thing that bothers me is it gets hot. Hot as hell. Skype sharing the screen and JetBrains CLion and you get a beautiful roaster.
- pentae 8y ago
  FYI, I went through the same experience as you and returned it after discovering the non-touchbar model has one less fan. Apple clearly hates the customers who don't want to buy the touch bar model.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    The non-touchbar laptop uses a lower-TDP part (15W vs 27W or something).
  - wareotie 8y ago
    Too late. It's been a while since I have it. The temperature is something that bothers me but is usable, I guess.
- bluedino 8y ago
  I have a 2016 Touchbar 13", doing anything Eclipse gets it hot. And I also have a 2016 15" that gets hot once you plug a monitor in. Not unusable or super hot, but just hot.
seba_dos1 8y ago
Is this a news? MacBooks aren't particularly known for their excellent thermal design...
- bluedino 8y ago
  The Retina model is pretty good, actually. A huge improvement over the original unibody. And the Touchbar models are even better (when comparing 2015 vs 2016) https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/perfovertime.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/pe...
yread 8y ago
Notebookcheck also lookedinto it in the recent review https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2018-Touch-Bar-i5-Laptop-Review.316648.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2018-Touc...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
sniglom 8y ago
This is not a first for Apple. I remember buying the 2006 Macbook with a CPU upgrade. A Core 2 Duo with 2GHz instead of 1.83. Due to heat, the CPU throttled under load and ended up with the same speed as the standard model.
bischofs 8y ago
At this point, people in the Mac hardware engineering leadership need to start submitting their resignations or being forced out. This kind of sloppy engineering and lack of product focus is the antithesis of what Apple has stood for. If I were Tim Cook I would fire Dan Riccio, and then resign myself and hand the company over to someone who cares about products and not supply chain optimization. Also the whole executive Memoji thing is incredibly stupid and childish. Please take your jobs more seriously -> https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/
- dewski 8y ago
  The Executive team had nothing to do with the Memoji’s. It was probably someone from marketing or their web team. Why even bring that up? It doesn’t help your argument at all.
  - 0xJRS 8y ago
    Actually I agree with him, it's fairly unprofessional, and i'm usually one for casual but it just feels immature.
    - aaron695 8y ago
      It's for World Emoji Day, one day, what's with the hate? (Emoji are probably the biggest/quickest language change ever seen. They are important. You might make a case Memoji aren't Emoji's but then people were dismissive of Emoji's when they came out There are also political, corporations now have control how we write, at the alphabet level.... - https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-redesign/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-... )
  - protomyth 8y ago
    > The Executive team had nothing to do with the Memoji’s. I think Steve Job's own philosophy would override that assertion: Steve Jobs On The Difference Between A Vice President And A Janitor https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Steve-Jobs-On-The-Difference-Between-A-Vice-2361444.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Steve-Jobs-On-The-Differ...
gnrlbzik 8y ago
Is this due to their focus on iphone and ipad? Probably and very likely, if I remember, most of their hardware talent had been pulled at some point to work on things that bring more money, these products get less attention. Looks like mac line upgrade cycles suffers due to that, don't quote me though.... But on the other hand this is good that it a came out, should be fixed in next upgrade I would assume, no wonder we got huge bump spec, people voiced their concerns loudly.
- roryisok 8y ago
  I think it was the software team. MacOS dev team was inexplicably merged with the IOS dev team and that's when quality of macOS really plummeted, with laughable security issues every other week
garyrob 8y ago
Isn't it the case that access to 32GB currently requires more power use (hence the larger battery), and that more power use necessarily means more thermal stress? In which case there may be nothing wrong with the thermal paste or the engineering; it may simply be that Apple came to the conclusion that the 32GB was more important than the issue of thermal throttling. For my use, I would readily take computer a little slower than the 2017 model for extremely compute-intensive, long-running tasks, but that let me use 32GB of memory. Whether they are dishonestly marketing the machine as being faster is another.
mrsteveman1 8y ago
The 2018 MacBook Pro having thermal issues doesn't surprise me after seeing what my 2015 model does under load, but it's really disappointing since I've been anxiously waiting for Apple to release new laptops. This 2015 MacBook Pro will avoid turning the fan on at any cost. I frequently watch the CPU package heat up to about 190F while the fan is still at 0RPM. Further, the SMC chip and/or kernel are set to use fairly slow fan speeds compared to the amount of heat being produced, so even when it does come on, the system remains hotter than necessary. But, here's the major problem: it's also become clear that there is a thermal window where the system is hot enough to cause it to throttle itself, perhaps somewhere between 140F and 180F, but not hot enough for the SMC to turn the fan on fast enough or at all, even though it could and should. So in addition to being really hot and not using the fan to get the heat away from your lap, it gets slow at the same time, right when it's being used. The system becomes faster soon after the fan is turned up to the max. And to top it off, there appear to be two different throttling mechanisms, the CPU speed can adjust up or down (you can see this with the Intel Power Gadget), and Apple has some kernel system that will use CPU cycles for idling instead of scheduling threads that are waiting, which reduces overall CPU usage, and therefore also heat production. All combined, it looks like the system is constantly bouncing between ramping up the CPU frequency to handle load, then wasting some of the additional CPU time idling to avoid turning the fan on, then turning the fan on just long enough to get the heat down before turning the fan back off again, and repeat.
notadoc 8y ago
What an embarrassment. This particular generation of MacBook Pro can't be abandoned fast enough. Flush the whole thing and start over.
neop1x 8y ago
Problems with MBP unibody cooling are known for years... https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=...

411 points by electic 8y ago

mandioca 8y ago

Macbook “Pro”.

mirimir 8y ago
This! They ought to rename it, and actually sell a professional laptop.
- walru 8y ago
  That would require a complete and total culture change. As it is, and I know Apple has a war chest, the clock is ticking on their survival.
  - sneak 8y ago
    Yes, they can only survive so long with their revenues shrinking like they have been...
    - walru 8y ago
      Nothing lasts forever. The bigger you are, the harder you'll fall. The clock and mindset and innovation of Apple products has been alluding to a sea change for years, these things don't happen overnight.
- freetime2 8y ago
  "Pro" is a pretty broad term. I suspect the MacBook Pro is powerful enough for most professionals who need a computer to do their jobs. I use one professionally for software development, and it suits my needs just fine. Sure - there are some professions out there that require more power than a MacBook Pro can offer. But is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it can't meet the needs of 100% of all working professionals?
  - rubbingalcohol 8y ago
    Is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it doesn't deliver on the stock rated performance of the hardware it's spec'ed with? Yes, that's fair.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    > But is it really fair to say it's not "Pro" just because it can't meet the needs of 100% of all working professionals? Apparently it cannot even meet the needs of its own spec sheet. It gets throttle back below its base clock speed according to the video. That's the real issue. Apple claims this is "More Pro" but it turns out to be just more of the same from Apple lately. One issue after another.
RyJones 8y ago
It pains me how correct this feels. The MacBook Pro becomes an echo of itself every generation. Soon, the beat fades and we're left in the dells
- theabacus 8y ago
  I’m sticking with my 2015 15” until it bites the dust and then probably getting something else if Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. Even there software is degrading. I feel like I’m doing better by not running updates (I know this is not so, for security reasons, but...)
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    My favorite is the latest Air (years old now) which doesn’t even have a retina screen yet, a perk in my book. I could watch Netflix on my bare stomach with my Air. Latest Pro is quickly too hot to handle. Of course not the only issue but the computer never bounced back from that first impression. The dedicated gfx card doesn’t even seem to run games like Civ 5 better than my Air which I’m guessing is due to all the extra screen pixels.
    - sneak 8y ago
      I do wish they would bring back the Air’s keyboard on higher end models.
    - jsjohnst 8y ago
      > I could watch Netflix on my bare stomach with my Air Don’t try that with a first gen Air. It had a very significant problem with thermal related issues. Several times a week it’d get so hot I could make pancakes off it, the rest of the time it was in a throttled state. Was a very common problem among folks I worked with (albeit mine was a personal, theirs was a work machine) too.
      - lloeki 8y ago
        The Air story is incredible. It went from compromising, underpowered, overheating, pricey, loathed and ridiculed, to everyone's favorite laptop, with excellent performance across the board at a stupefyingly low price point.
rado 8y ago
PS4 "Pro".

ianamartin 8y ago

You know, I'm so beat down by the state of apple laptops, I don't even care. I was all ready to spring for a new machine the day these dropped. Until I found out that they max the 13" model at 16 gigs of ram. I'm so pissed. I don't want the 15". That's what external monitors are for. I like the portable to be fucking portable. Jesus. I give up.

saagarjha 8y ago
Why do you need 32 GB of ram?
- no1youknowz 8y ago
  Not the op, but I need 32 GB for:- - running virtual machines. - running MemSQL which requires a minimum of 8GB to be available. - running video editing software. There are probably other reasons, but those are the ones off the top of my head.
  - cs02rm0 8y ago
    Similar to VMs, I run a lot of docker containers, mostly with JVMs in them. I bought an Intel Hades Canyon with 32GB to run Linux on after the new MBPs didn't turn up at WWDC. Feeling somewhat relieved right now.
yourapostasy 8y ago
Who makes a 13" laptop with 32 GB RAM that is Thinkpad or the better models of Asus build quality? That much RAM in such a small form factor, regardless of thickness, also seems a hefty thermal challenge, but if someone out there is doing it, I'd like to take a look at them. I swung by the Lenovo and Dell sites, and only the Dell 14" will let you go up to 32 GB, but I've yet to see a 13" model.

slantyyz 8y ago

The heat off that MBP reminds me of how hot my early 2011 15" MBP got. I suspect that the heat was the culprit for the GPU failures that gave the 2011 model its notoriety.

olliej 8y ago
I thought that was gpu manufacturer issue? I recall Nvidia specifically had a lot of issues across many oems.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  Hard to say. Some people got temporary fixes by baking their logic boards and/or reballing the GPU. IIRC the "recall" involved replacing the logic boards with refurbs having the same GPUs. The CPUs on the boards seemed to be throttled after the replacement.
- walru 8y ago
  It was likely a bit of both, but there's one thing that can't be denied, apple products are built for form over function.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Apple was by no means the only manufacturer to have trouble with those Nvidia parts; it was an industry-wide problem.
- neya 8y ago
  You are right, NVIDIA replaced the die for many OEMs, at the time my Vaio was affected and out of warranty, but Sony was nice enough to replace the motherboard for me and the laptop still works..roughly 10 years later..

jdhn 8y ago

I don't know a lot about heat dissipation, but could the slimness of the MBP be a factor in this? I would think that after a certain point, you wouldn't be able to get good airflow in such a small space.

veryconfident 8y ago
The slimness makes it more aerodynamic, which is actually a thermal benefit in some high-speed air tunnels. Apple knows what they’re doing.
slantyyz 8y ago
There are multiple factors, but slimness is probably not the only culprit. I don't think Apple (or most other PC vendors) use the best thermal compound on their CPUs. When my early 2011 MBP was having heat problems, I replaced the compound over the CPU and GPU and got noticeable although not spectacular reductions in heat. Of course, that's not something you can do on a "modern" Macbook Pro, since they're not intended to be user serviceable any more.
- AmVess 8y ago
  They can use an okay quality thermal joint compound if it is applied well. My Dell's thermal joint compound looked like someone was trying to make a PBJ sandwich with the stuff. Applied too thickly, and it becomes an insulator. Mac used to have this problem in the past. I repasted my Dell and got 5F reduction at load right away. The problem with all high end mobile CPU's is that they are given a tiny heatsink and heatpipes which are simply not up to the job. They quickly become heat soaked and the fans are unable to reduce the heat, so the units throttle.

nodesocket 8y ago

That's seems to contradict a recent benchmark/post [1] which showed impressive CPU performance from the i9 MacBook Pro. [1] http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/

mohaba 8y ago
The only impressive one was single core. Otherwise it was in line with a laptop, and not a desktop.
slantyyz 8y ago
Depends on the workload and amount of time spent processing the workloads. Dave Lee ran some tests that took a half hour to complete with the CPU pretty much maxed out. I would imagine the CPU was running hot for most of that time.
endorphone 8y ago
They really do test different things. In this case he is testing video renders from Premiere Pro, which renders for tens of minutes at 100%. It's apparently an outrageously inefficient app as well as the Windows version of it renders the same output in a fraction of the time (which invalidates it as a test, really). All modern chips thermally throttle. Run a heavy AVX2 workload and you'll often go below the so-called "base" frequency. Run one or two threads and it can dramatically "overclock". It is the nature of all current chips. Eh. For the overwhelming majority of users I doubt this would ever be an issue. Compile a kernel. Apply a filter. Do some convolutions. Every normal thing will be ridiculously fast. Run a server or workstation style load and it won't be so good. That has been the case with laptops for time eternal.
- Namesareapain 8y ago
  BS! All modern chips do not thermally throttle! Only ones in systems that have not been designed correctly! The fact that the Aero x15 he tested with the 2.2Ghz base clock 6 core i7 can all core boost to 3.1Ghz in the same workload that brings the macbook pro far below it's base clock speed proves that! P.S, it does not matter what program it is running, throttling is a hardware flaw!

theabacus 8y ago

Not surprised given how thin the thing is.

rasz 8y ago

Macs dont even start running fans until you hit >80C.

lgvln 8y ago
I think the correct terminology is “don’t start running the fans at high(audible) speeds till >80C.
- mustaflex 8y ago
  Apparently they don't start at all until 80C here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU
  - sushid 8y ago
    Mine runs at >6k RPM after 50-something Celsius.
  - tedmiston 8y ago
    Mine are running at 2k RPM ~40 C.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  Depends on the model. The MacBook Escape (non-touchbar Pro) doesn't run fans at all at low temperatures. I actually thought it was broken when I first got it, but it's intentional behaviour.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It really depends on the model. My older MacBook Pros would idle at 2K RPM, while my new MacBook Pro can go all the way down to zero in the winter or with very few things open but generally stay at 1200 RPM during daily usage. All of these are silent, of course.

owenversteeg 8y ago

I keep seeing thermal issues come back to bite some of the smartest companies with products designed by the world's best engineers. Everything from batteries to laptops to phones is severely affected by heat, and improper thermal design can lead to some huge issues. For example, the biggest thing affecting battery life is thermal load. The biggest thing affecting the maximum sustained power of a laptop or phone is the thermal design. Anyone can slap a cheap, powerful chip in; good thermal design is much harder. I think people are going to start realizing this more and more, especially as powerful chips get extremely cheap.

zengid 8y ago
That's really interesting. Do you have any suggestions on some further reading?
bri3d 8y ago
Don't forget the infamous Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death, caused by incorrect thermal management causing balls on a BGA package to lift from the board underneath as it deflected.
- Puer 8y ago
  Which is ironically also how you fixed it. I'll never forget the "magic" of wrapping my Xbox 360 in several towels and overheat for 30 minutes to supposedly resolder it back together. It worked for another 6 months after that until it completely and finally died.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    The problem was more precisely that thermal variations combined with the way the heatsink was attached and pushing on the middle of the CPU repeatedly warped the board due to thermal expansion, causing the balls to unseat. Heating the thing would help reseat the BGA thanks to thermal expansion but would certainly not reflow soldering (not enough heat). The proper fix was to try to reseat the BGA by whatever means and change the way the heatsink was attached so that pressure on the BGA/board was even. I did that on two units and they survived for years after their first RRoD, and on a third unit right from the get go, and that one never suffered of any issue.

lebrad 8y ago

Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received". Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do people really think he just got a lemon?

slantyyz 8y ago
In fairness, Lee criticized the Dell XPS 15's thermals in a video a couple of days ago. Of course, he also posted a video last week about how he was starting to hate Apple products. If you watch a lot of his videos, you'll notice that he almost always talks about thermals, so it's not surprising to see him focus on that aspect of the MBP.
- gnufied 8y ago
  And thermals is real issue with race to making thinnest laptops possible. My Thinkpad T450s throttles just running Chrome and bunch of tabs. I don't see how a competitor having thermal problems exonerates Apple from having similar problems.
  - eropple 8y ago
    A big part of why I got the T480 instead of the T480s was to avoid the thermals issue. Seems okay so far, but who knows how long (I've only had it a couple days) that'll go.
  - rz2k 8y ago
    In biology thin would imply a high surface area to volume ratio, and great performance if you're trying to get rid of internally generated heat. Here, I guess we're talking about room for cooling systems so as to avoid blistering users' skin or charring their pants?
    - lebrad 8y ago

cmurf 8y ago

Is this throttling in the chip itself? Or is it something that e.g. Linux (the kernel) needs to be taught specifically for make/model? Or some combination of the two? And is it possible that the in-chip limiter is more of an emergency limit, and hitting it regularly can result in long term consequences if the kernel doesn't do aggressive enough limiting? I just see really different behavior with heat, fans, and kernel behavior between XNU vs Linux, and Windows vs Linux on the same hardware.

lykr0n 8y ago
In the source video, it shows that the chip is downclocking to 2.2GHz under sustained load. There is nothing any software can do about that as that's hardware doing it. The OS can govern how the fans spin up, but all CPUs will throttle down when they hit a predetermined temperature.
Namesareapain 8y ago
I am not sure why you are referring to Linux (macos kernel is XNU), but the firmware of the chip is in charge of controlling the CPU clockspeed and the only reason it is hitting this limiter is because the CPU does not have correct cooling, nothing to do with the OS.

lgvln 8y ago

I’m not surprised. I’m hitting 90C avg, 95% CPU, fan maxed, 25C room temp, running W10 on a 2016 15in MBP.

cozzyd 8y ago
That... seems way too high? Are your vents clogged?
- BigJ1211 8y ago
  This is pretty normal on laptops, my 6700HQ can go up to 95°C. These chips are rated for up to 100°C (TJunction).

TillE 8y ago

After seeing those benchmarks, I'm feeling even better about having just decided to go for an Aero 15. I quite like Mac laptops, but I've concluded that I don't really need one. I'll just grab one of the new (rumored) Mac minis to continue MacOS development as needed.

drngdds 8y ago

One of the many downsides of making all your computers like two millimeters thin.

symfoniq 8y ago
Indeed. What ever happened to product differentiation?
- MBCook 8y ago
  To be fair they’ve always been bumping up against this since they don’t like to put tons of fans in their laptops. While this obviously shouldn’t happen, it seems like something you could easily predict might be a flaw if you knew that one had to exist.
  - white-flame 8y ago
    They've always been bumping up against this back in the Apple II days, and systems would overheat then, too. All in the name of Steve Jobs emphasizing case aesthetics & not wanting fan noise.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
      Eh, that reminded me of the paper chimneys some people advocated for better air flow on the original Mac or MacPlus. (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+chimney , namely https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234 https://www.flickr.com/photos/idontlikewords/275104234 - some case aesthetics ;-)
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    Oh they put the fans in there, they just don't spin them up until components are half desoldering themselves off the board.

kalleboo 8y ago

It's summer now and as soon as I plug my MacBook Pro 2017 in to charge, it starts throttling itself due to the heat of the charging battery. Same thing happened to the 2012 I had before. These things just don't have adequate cooling.

LyndsySimon 8y ago
I often work outdoors, and merely being in sunlight makes my 13” MBP go to max fan speed after about ten minutes, and insufferably slow after a half hour or so.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  That doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy/unexpected.
  - LyndsySimon 8y ago
    You don’t think it’s unreasonable that a laptop should work in daylight?
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      A 15" laptop's body could easily be absorbing 75 watts of heat from the sun, equivalent to running both the CPU and GPU of a MacBook Pro pegged at 100%. I think throttling in this scenario is a reasonable tradeoff, much more so than overengineering the cooling solution to handle it and thereby increasing cost, weight and bulk. Sit in the shade.
      - agentdrtran 8y ago
        "You're holding it wrong!" Other laptops work in the sun.
        ToFab123 8y ago

duxup 8y ago

I guess the key is that it under-performed vs last model's i7... not that it has thermal issues. I would think most laptops have some level of thermal trade offs.

NoPicklez 8y ago
The key is that the thermal issues are so bad that it causes it to underperform against the last models i7.
symfoniq 8y ago
I’d say that not even being able to maintain the advertised base clock is a pretty key issue. Being slower than last year’s model just adds insult to injury.
komocode 8y ago
My guess is Premier already had optimizations for the 2017 Macbook Pro to lessen the amount of hits to the throttle threshold temperature.
- coldseattle 8y ago
  Premiere.

throw2016 8y ago

Apple it seems is happy to be known for iPhones and iPads but for many people Apple is really about a rich history in computing, computers, good engineering, design and well built products. Now especially with the mac business they are reducing the scope and value of their brand, and becoming purveyors of high value trinkets. This is nothing short of a tragedy. There is a difference between a small premium for good engineering, components choice and design, and profiteering to the point of becoming an extremely overpriced luxury product with more brand than real value.

shiburizu 8y ago

Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less insane prices. Granted, I don't see many with that much storage space and RAM but I'd love to hear how some of you have experienced the same workload on non-Apple devices and felt you should keep buying MacBook.

abakker 8y ago
OSX really. Loss of productivity from the little stuff in windows just isn’t manageable for me. OS X has problems, but I’m used to it and familiar with it and it works as expected.
- garren 8y ago
  I agree with the loss of productivity in Windows. For me it started with Win7, really took hold with Win8/server 2012 "metro", and only got a little better in Win10. I don't understand why there are two significantly different ways to do simple things like connect to a network or configure an existing connection. The OS throws the pretty/flat metro inspired applet at you, but it has 10% of the actual functionality you're looking for, so you end up popping open the control panel anyway. The start menu ads are an insane addition. The apps in the app store are pretty much pointless and anything you actually need you can install via chocolatey. If MS were to produce an actual "pro" version of Windows that removed all of the fluffy inconsistent stuff, ripped out all vestiges of Win8, and put PowerShell front and center, it would appeal to a lot of people that just want to get stuff done.
RussianCow 8y ago
> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned to the point that you can't find another laptop on the market that just feels anywhere as nice as a whole. The tight integration between the hardware and the software doesn't hurt, either. If all you need is a powerful laptop, or if you don't care about any of those details, you are probably better off getting a more cost effective machine, but you will always sacrifice some combination of things for it. (For me personally, the biggest one is the touchpad.) I say this as someone who doesn't own any other Apple products, but I will likely never buy a laptop other than a MacBook Pro.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

I develop on a macbook pro for 12 hours a day. Have a bajillion chrome tabs open, 2-3 ides open, sequel pro, photoshop, slack/skype, utorrent, spotify, and more.... My macbook pro 2016 i7/16G doesn't even skip a beat. Unless you're doing 3d graphics or Machine Learning or something...I think for 99.9999999% of POWER USERS a throttled i9 with 32 gigs of RAM is plenty for the year 2018. This throttle issue in my opinion is such a minor quibble it feels like demonization of Mac. You can focus on the very very very few negatives of Macbooks but in my opinion at the end of the day it's an incredible machine.

wlll 8y ago
I think the main quibble is that the laptop can't even hold it's base clock speed without throttling.
- lykr0n 8y ago
  Under sustained load. That's the key part here.
- nickthemagicman 8y ago
  Yeah but that's like buying a race car and being upset that it's throttled at 300 mph. 99.9999% of people will never go 300mph..unless you're using it in a very specialized way.
  - thatswrong0 8y ago
    But it's supposedly _slower_ than its predecessor in sustained situations like this. What's the point of having a "more powerful" 2018 machine over the 2017 if, when trying to use that power, you end up worse off?
    - wtallis 8y ago
      For most users, sacrificing some sustained performance for the sake of higher burst performance is absolutely the right choice if such a tradeoff is possible. People who keep the CPU at 100% with a multi-threaded workload for minutes on end have a workload that requires a desktop form factor. For the other 97% of users, the CPU will spend far more time idle than fully-loaded.

tedmiston 8y ago

All three 15-inch Mid 2018 MBP configurations benchmarked are at the top of Geekbench for multi-core, only behind iMac Pro and Mac Pro models [1]. Here they are in isolation compared to the 2017 and 2016 15-inch models sorted by score descending overall: | Model | Configuration | Score | |---------------------------------|------------------------------------------|-------| | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i9-8950HK @ 2.9 GHz (6 cores) | 22547 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i7-8850H @ 2.6 GHz (6 cores) | 21266 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2018) | Intel Core i7-8750H @ 2.2 GHz (6 cores) | 21096 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7920HQ @ 3.1 GHz (4 cores) | 15550 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7820HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 15251 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2017) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ @ 2.8 GHz (4 cores) | 14374 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6920HQ @ 2.9 GHz (4 cores) | 14134 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6820HQ @ 2.7 GHz (4 cores) | 13706 | | MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz (4 cores) | 13008 | [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

lykr0n 8y ago
The Macbook Pro has a great 100m sprint, but it can't complete a 1km race without crawling across the finish line. Geekbench takes a few minutes to run. If you ran it back to back to back without letting the laptop cool down, you'd see different numbers.
zzleeper 8y ago
Were the benchmarks run on a cooled room? Some years ago, as a student, I paid $$$ for a Toshiba with 4 cores and hyperthreading, and I could only run them well on the winter or in a very cool room. In the summer it would reach 100C and constantly throttle, so I do think that temperature is a key issue, sp. now with slimmmer laptops
- tedmiston 8y ago
  Not sure on an individual basis but the Geekbench numbers are aggregate across all users of the machine. I reached out to the video author to see if he'd be willing to run Geekbench on it in a freezer vs not. https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/1019420588467740673 https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/101942058846774067...

jillesvangurp 8y ago

I use smcfancontrol on my imac to force the fans to do their thing. The problem seems to be that osx prefers throttling over turning the machine into a vacuum cleaner. For me this is the only way to play games. Without smccontrol throttling kicks in and the fans never go on fully.

llekn 8y ago

Anybody knows if Apple's ARM chips (iPhone) have better thermal efficiency (watts/GFLOPs) than the chips in this latest gen? If this is the case, I think it's just a matter of time for Apple replacing Intel with their own custom ARM chips.

lykr0n 8y ago
You can't really compare ARM and x86_64 chips. I'm going to use a crude example. Think of the ARM chip being one of those USPS Trucks (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_USPS_Truck.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Small_US...) while the x86_64 is a F150 pickup. Both can drive around and transport things, but the USPS Truck is purpose build to deliver mail, stop and start frequently, and be reliable. It does a few things well. On the other hand the F150 is widely produced, can be customized in many different ways, and is general purpose vehical. Could it do the function of the USPS Truck? Sure, but it would be slower, cost more to run, and be less efficient. Could the USPS Truck haul a trailer? Maybe, but it wouldn't be very good at it. Both are a truck, but both are designed to different things and excel at different things. That crude comparison is ARM vs x86_64. ARM is getting there, and for the specific ARM functions it's more performant than the equivalent x86_64 functions. But once you go outside of what the ARM chip has been specifically designed for, your performance takes a massive hit. Will ARM be able to take off in a Macbook? Maybe in a few years, but Apple would need to dump a massive amount of R&D into their designs before I would think they would consider it (but who knows?)
- shub 8y ago
  What? They're CPUs. They're designed to run instructions. Intel's chips spend more energy on the really fancy stuff like huge reorder buffers and extensive speculation. They get higher IPC at lower MIPS/watt. An i7 isn't going to run iOS more slowly than whatever Apple calls their latest ARM SoC. It _is_ going to blow its lid without a big ole heatsink brick on there and a fan too, which is why smartphones use ARM cores designed for efficiency. P.S. if anything, ARM is the "general purpose vehicle" in your analogy. x64 is all about high throughput and high power on a chip you buy and plug in. ARM is the one where you can get an architecture license and customize the shit out of it.

chx 8y ago

This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for. It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air. Today the entire Mac revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... is below 10%. See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a thin laptop. There's no advantage to it whatsoever. People do need lightweight laptops and well before the Macbook Air we had shockingly lightweight ones, my Panasonic CF-Y5 was 1.5kg including a DVD ROM more than ten years ago. It had a protrusion on the lid to create a cushion which made a review to call "the exterior design of the machine's casing is reminiscent of a Sherman tank cross-bred with a 1970s sports saloon". It made it 45mm thick at the thickest point. Still, it was 1.5kg and undestructible. So, instead of focusing on materials science and building lightweight laptops in whatever thickness a good cooling system would require everyone is falling over themselves to produce a thin laptop. Which, of course, can't be properly cooled. It's just physics. In this case, the Macbook "Pro" is 0.61" high where the Lenovo P52 (which is Pro for real) is 0.96”. This thinness craze killed off the convenient bottom dock ports from the business laptops creating these awkward side docks. Fantastic trick, Mr Jobs, well played.

komocode 8y ago
That's a serious tin-foil hat you got there.
- chx 8y ago
  https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-an...
Shank 8y ago
> But noone needs a thin laptop. There's no advantage to it whatsoever. I own an Air, and it's been my go to machine in university. Yes, the weight does a lot to help me just pick it up and grab it, but the thinness does help a ton too. Thin means that I can throw it in a bag and still fit textbooks, notebooks, hoodies, and whatever else inside. I've had bags packed fully and needed every inch of space. The Air does that. It's not a huge market, and I think only the Air models should focus on it, but it does exist. A bigger but equally light laptop wouldn't make nearly the difference that the Air does in how it fits ends up being the smallest thing in many of my bags.

Tloewald 8y ago

Here's a review from a dev who works at NASA: http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ http://hrtapps.com/blogs/20180712/ Maybe the key point is he isn't running Adobe Premiere. The thermal issues in modern laptops certainly concern me, but they've been running hot for a long time now, and being thin doesn't actually change the surface area significantly.

cozzyd 8y ago
Well the single-core test is unlikely to max out the thermal loading on the CPU. You can see how the scaling from 4-6 cores provides severely diminishing returns, perhaps due to throttling.
- StillBored 8y ago
  Uh, it turbos in the 4+Ghz range. That is by itself probably going to blow the 45W thermal rating the entire chip has. My gut instinct says that macbook probably can't even dissipate that over a long period of time. The linked test seems to indicate the truth of that, and its not unusual for a mac product, the last one that could probably continuously dissipate the combined cpu+gpu heat was that crazy ugly mac pro. Intel didn't invent some new physics to get "high" performance cores crammed into a laptop, they are just pulling the same stuff the phone market has been doing for the past few years. Put enough thermal capacitance against the chip itself to absorb a few multiples of the chips dissipation, allow it to get really hot, and then throttle it hard. Hope, people keep their benchmark runs short. There is a difference between socket 2011/2270 based i7/i9s and their insufficiently cooled, memory and IO bandwidth starved cousins found in laptops. Even a fairly low end desktop is going to stomp the most expensive laptop you can find simply due to physics. Being able to dissipate more heat means higher performance. Its possible to move the curve up/down depending on fab processes, or micro-arch, but these days there aren't any miracle cures. More power equals more performance.
  - n1000 8y ago
    Isn't the 4 GHz meant as a boost frequency as thermals allow? The more CPUs are active the rarer this happens. It becomes problematic when the CPU can't maintain its base clock speed anymore.

meesterdude 8y ago

Well I guess my next machine has to be a PC running linux now. Been waiting to replace my aging MBP with this latest gen, but this is the the last straw for me. Charging such a premium and being too lazy (or thin-focused) that it can't meet it's base clock outside of a freezer is ridiculous. I just wish I could run OSX in a VM. Linux as a primary desktop isn't quite there yet.

abvdasker 8y ago
I've been thinking the same for some time. Razer makes supposedly quite good premium laptops with some degree of linux compatibility. They also seem to have a community of enthusiasts behind them so I will likely try that or the Surface Pro.
tpaschalis 8y ago
You could run an OSX VM in either Windows or Linux (I'm doing fullscreen Linux VM on Windows with a Thinkpad, and it's quite good/fast). Idk if there are issues with licensing, though. Also, give Linux as a primary desktop a try! What do you believe that's lacking, from your perspective? Granted, it's not great out of the box, and some software isn't available, but if you have a couple of weekends to spare/invest with tinkering, you can have a pretty and solid desktop workstation setup.
gaius 8y ago
Been waiting to replace my aging MBP I replaced my MBP with a Surface and I’m very happy with it, so add that to your list. WSL beats my previous setup of VirtualBox easily for Linux stuff.

ColinWielga 8y ago

I have been watching Dave2D videos for years. He is one of the best laptop reviewers on YouTube.

tjpnz 8y ago

The biggest shock for me with these laptops came when I tried to do some light gaming. I'm not talking about recent titles either, my 2017 MBP gets bought to the brink by KSP at minimum settings with no mods. I understand that I would be quite rightly criticised for trying to run something like Fortnite but we're talking about a game here with roots in 2013. The hardware they put inside the later models has no hope in hell of running normally with all the thermal issues.

slededit 8y ago
KSP can lag on my desktop with a 1080ti. Don't feel too bad.
- zaarn 8y ago
  KSP is largely CPU intensive, the GPU barely matters (You can run KSP on maximum settings on a RX460 very comfortably with low parts numbers)
StapleHorse 8y ago
KSP is CPU constrained and IIRC uses only one thread beacause of Unity 3d. Try lesr boosters :)
- isostatic 8y ago
  More struts!

komocode 8y ago

So far the last several Macbooks have throttled after X minutes of rendering. The only real surprise is that the 2018 Macbooks ended up with worse rendering time. But it does make sense since the i9 is a hotter chip and combine that with the same thin design...you'll reach the threshold faster...which will throttle faster.

matte_black 8y ago

This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook, and only when you are doing some heavy tasks. In normal day to day use most people will not do enough processing to be affected by thermal issues. Keeping the form factor of a MacBook is much more important than eliminating every thermal edge case. People take for granted how much we’ve improved on old big and heavy laptops (with worse performance even).

gaius 8y ago
This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook So, making it an inch or two thicker?

pasta 8y ago

This is why the pro desktop market is not dead. Rendering real time path tracing while designing a house, visualising point clouds, video editing, sound design, you can do it on a laptop but the pro market will buy a desktop because it's 'cheaper', more reliable and upgradeable

jbb67 8y ago

So... they discovered that there is a reaason that desktop computers have a large heatsink with a fan many times larger attached... Don't buy a laptop and expect it's sustained performance to be anywhere near that of a proper desktop computer. It simply won't be

lebski88 8y ago
That's not really it at all. His point is that this laptop is significantly worse than other laptops in terms of throttling. To the point where the i9 renders slower than the i7 in his testing. That's pretty damning for a $300 upgrade.
Const-me 8y ago
Not just desktops. A few years ago we had thick laptops with good cooling, too. Unlike newer thin laptops, they were, and still are, viable desktop replacements. Some of them even allowed upgrading the CPU. I once inserted i7-3612QM in 13” HP ProBook 4340s of a family member (it had an i3-3110M initially) also replacing fan assembly. It runs well under sustained loads, and the performance with the i7 is very close to much newer 15W mobile CPUs such as i7-8550U found in the current 13” macbook pros. It’s a shame we no longer have these, not Apple, not Windows, nobody.
alluro2 8y ago
Imagine someone selling you a 4K monitor (for 50% more than other 4K monitors) without ever mentioning that you can only actually have 4K for 5 min max, then it falls to QHD.

aparashk 8y ago

The i9 CPU is a K part, therefore, I would think one could conceivably undervolt/underclock in order to change the thermals on the machine to their liking. Is there such a tool for Mac OS X?

cdmckay 8y ago
What’s a K part?
- aparashk 8y ago
  The Intel processors that have the suffix “K” are unlocked, and can be under or overclocked: https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocking-intel-processors.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocki...
asloma 8y ago
We're talking about a laptop here, which most definitely doesn't contain an overclockable i9 K processor.
- aparashk 8y ago
  It is according to Intel (otherwise it would not be labeled as i9-8950HK): https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocking-intel-processors.html https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/gaming/overclocki...
- paulmd 8y ago
  And you would be wrong there. There are mobile K SKUs that can be overclocked.
nickflood 8y ago
You can actually undervolt and underclock any Intel CPU, Unlocked ones are just unlocked in the "up" direction.

izacus 8y ago

Every MacBook Pro I've ever owned locked it self down to low frequency after running a CPU intensive task for a minute or so. I thought that was common knowledge? There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). This is why desktop workstations are still so much faster even though they carry same frequency chips.

deaddodo 8y ago
Sure, but the amount of throttling his tested configuration was running at was fairly significant. Most laptops can at least run their base clock most of the time, his MacBook couldn't even do that (2.2 GHz vs 2.9ghz). The XPS 15 is considered a PC laptop with subpar thermals and even those issues only crop up during turbo, not baseclock (same CPU).
aparashk 8y ago
That, and also battery life (and the extrapolated time left until empty) takes a severe hit when doing CPU intensive task for more than a minute. Does anyone know if thermal throttling is so much of an issue for iPads?
leni536 8y ago
>There's NO laptops out there that wouldn't do that (and NO mobile devices either). My 10 years old HP nc6400 doesn't do that. It requires occasional (once a year) cleaning of the fan assembly though (not that hard to access). The fan is loud, the laptop is bulky but it never ever throttles. The CPU has 34W TDP, I do not think that's on the low side.
lloeki 8y ago
I've been doing hours-long CPU+GPU intensive tasks (compiling ghc, number crunching, playing games like Bioshock Infinite and StarCraft II on a HD4000) on a bunch of pre-retina MBP and rMBP 13" and they never throttled. Thermal design and management is spot on, fans stay silent most of the time and kick in only when load requires it. Beware of anecdata. Given the stories I hear I would squarely put the various issues in the realm of thermal paste gone bad, busted fans, or clogged airducts, and certainly not on intrinsic bad design because I have personal counterexamples of dozens of various Apple laptops from 2008 to 2016 being perfectly fine out of the box. Obviously though, a desktop will beat a laptop's thermal performance any day but I think this is missing the point.

andromeduck 8y ago

It's probably because Toronto, where he lives, has been around 27 degrees and 70% humidity the last few days. That's around 7 degrees and 20% humidity above the typical office climate of around 20 degrees and 50% humidity. That difference can result in roughly 20% lower dissipation power if the temperature at the heatsink is around 50-60 degrees which it appears to have been historically. That 20% extra dissipation power might be enough to get it from 2.2 to 3 GHz considering the base clocks are usually where processors have the most efficient marginal frequency scaling. IMO, designing the thermal solution + chip combination to reach base clocks at typical office climates seems reasonably smart/defensible because most places will be cooler than that most of the year even before AC.

akmarinov 8y ago
He wasn’t testing it outside in the sun, though …
- raverbashing 8y ago
  But if his place has no AC, it's even worse than outside (in the shadow)
simongr3dal 8y ago
What’s to say he didn’t perform the benchmarking in a room with AC?
- andromeduck 8y ago
  I'm guessing here because he appears to be in a house/apartment, didn't show ambient temperatures and because Toronto is surrounded by the great lakes which should make it more temperature than Montreal and Quebec city which recently experienced a spade of heat deaths and heat induced early mortality due to lack of widespread AC adoption.
Improvotter 8y ago
The i7 was tested in the same circumstances I assume. So it shouldn't matter how hot or humid it was. The comparison should be valid.

jakecopp 8y ago

"...'this degree' of thermal throttling..." Very impressive!

rehemiau 8y ago

Louis Rossmann made a video[1] a while ago presenting how badly optimized is the cooling on new MacBooks. In short: Apple prefers their MacBook CPU and GPU to run hot and thermally throttle so that the user is happy because the machine is quiet, and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU edit: Bear in mind these videos are about new MacBooks so there's no way to predict their usual lifespan. And I'm not saying all of them die after 2-3 years. Apple is simply optimizing for the 90% of users here, people doing mostly web browsing and using Microsoft Office. This does not put a sustained load on the CPU/GPU so these users will be fine.

coldtea 8y ago
>and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. Conspiracy theory BS. MacBooks don't die after "2-3 years", and they retain much better resale value than Wintel laptops too. That said, Apple could very well prioritise quiet over full-speed.
skgoa 8y ago
> more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years. And yet, MacBooks tend to be extremely reliable for many years.
fyfy18 8y ago
I switched from a MacBook Air to a similarly spec’ed (4260U vs 5200U) Thinkpad a couple of months ago, and noticed a vast performance difference when playing games. When playing games the processor gets up to 85C, but doesn’t throttle. It’s either that or Linux is a lot better for gaming than macOS.
andromeduck 8y ago
Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your device especially for longer sustained periods unless there's some glaring design defect as happened to Nvidia. So that's actually pretty well optimized.

sgloutnikov 8y ago

There is another video [1], in which a 2017 i7 outperforms a 2018 i9 in video compression due to its severe throttling. Sure the benchmarks look great and are better on the i9, but as someone mentioned, that's like looking at sprint compared to a longer race. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip-sZfWaVo0&t=04m37s

satysin 8y ago

I suspected as much which is why I didn't bother with the ~£300 upgrade from the default 2.6Ghz i7 to the 2.9Ghz i9. The MBP already struggled with the old i7 and with no redesign I couldn't see how they could handle the i9 without extreme thermal throttling. Turns out they can't but ship it anyway!

ryzvonusef 8y ago

When the heading said Youtuber, I thought for sure it would be Louis Rossmann

vivan 8y ago

This isn't a problem solely with the MacBook Pro - it affects most of the "ultralight" laptops these days. My XPS 13 (lovely machine, thermal issues aside) has been RMA'd 3 times because it overheated. It still gets far too hot and throttles itself so I've had to underclock it and turn off "turbo" mode. Other users have mentioned that simply repasting the CPU has caused massive improvements in temps, but I'm personally not comfortable with messing around inside a $2000 laptop. Users shouldn't have to cripple their hardware or actually fix components to make it work properly.

daemin 8y ago
I'm only comfortable doing that after I've got at least 3 years of value out of it. My current laptop is an aging Zenbook Pro where I've replaced the custom SSD with an adapter plus an m.2 board. So maybe if you still want to use the laptop after a few years you can open it up and give it a bit of a facelift. Maybe applying a whole bunch of thermal paste will give it a slightly new lease of life?
- vivan 8y ago
  Absolutely - once it is out of warranty and starting to lose performance I'm happy to mess around. But less so just a few months after I've bought it!
Tepix 8y ago
Which generation of XPS 13 is that?
- vivan 8y ago
  9360 so the previous generation. Made the mistake of going with the higher res screen - apparently they have more issues.

wareotie 8y ago

I bought the MacBook Pro 2017 13" without touch bar with an i7. I pretty happy with it, but, the only thing that bothers me is it gets hot. Hot as hell. Skype sharing the screen and JetBrains CLion and you get a beautiful roaster.

pentae 8y ago
FYI, I went through the same experience as you and returned it after discovering the non-touchbar model has one less fan. Apple clearly hates the customers who don't want to buy the touch bar model.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  The non-touchbar laptop uses a lower-TDP part (15W vs 27W or something).
- wareotie 8y ago
  Too late. It's been a while since I have it. The temperature is something that bothers me but is usable, I guess.
bluedino 8y ago
I have a 2016 Touchbar 13", doing anything Eclipse gets it hot. And I also have a 2016 15" that gets hot once you plug a monitor in. Not unusable or super hot, but just hot.

seba_dos1 8y ago

Is this a news? MacBooks aren't particularly known for their excellent thermal design...

bluedino 8y ago
The Retina model is pretty good, actually. A huge improvement over the original unibody. And the Touchbar models are even better (when comparing 2015 vs 2016) https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/perfovertime.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mac/retinaMacBookPro/pe...

yread 8y ago

Notebookcheck also lookedinto it in the recent review https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2018-Touch-Bar-i5-Laptop-Review.316648.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-13-2018-Touc...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

sniglom 8y ago

This is not a first for Apple. I remember buying the 2006 Macbook with a CPU upgrade. A Core 2 Duo with 2GHz instead of 1.83. Due to heat, the CPU throttled under load and ended up with the same speed as the standard model.

bischofs 8y ago

At this point, people in the Mac hardware engineering leadership need to start submitting their resignations or being forced out. This kind of sloppy engineering and lack of product focus is the antithesis of what Apple has stood for. If I were Tim Cook I would fire Dan Riccio, and then resign myself and hand the company over to someone who cares about products and not supply chain optimization. Also the whole executive Memoji thing is incredibly stupid and childish. Please take your jobs more seriously -> https://www.apple.com/leadership/ https://www.apple.com/leadership/

dewski 8y ago
The Executive team had nothing to do with the Memoji’s. It was probably someone from marketing or their web team. Why even bring that up? It doesn’t help your argument at all.
- 0xJRS 8y ago
  Actually I agree with him, it's fairly unprofessional, and i'm usually one for casual but it just feels immature.
  - aaron695 8y ago
    It's for World Emoji Day, one day, what's with the hate? (Emoji are probably the biggest/quickest language change ever seen. They are important. You might make a case Memoji aren't Emoji's but then people were dismissive of Emoji's when they came out There are also political, corporations now have control how we write, at the alphabet level.... - https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-redesign/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-... )
- protomyth 8y ago
  > The Executive team had nothing to do with the Memoji’s. I think Steve Job's own philosophy would override that assertion: Steve Jobs On The Difference Between A Vice President And A Janitor https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Steve-Jobs-On-The-Difference-Between-A-Vice-2361444.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Steve-Jobs-On-The-Differ...

gnrlbzik 8y ago

Is this due to their focus on iphone and ipad? Probably and very likely, if I remember, most of their hardware talent had been pulled at some point to work on things that bring more money, these products get less attention. Looks like mac line upgrade cycles suffers due to that, don't quote me though.... But on the other hand this is good that it a came out, should be fixed in next upgrade I would assume, no wonder we got huge bump spec, people voiced their concerns loudly.

roryisok 8y ago
I think it was the software team. MacOS dev team was inexplicably merged with the IOS dev team and that's when quality of macOS really plummeted, with laughable security issues every other week

garyrob 8y ago

Isn't it the case that access to 32GB currently requires more power use (hence the larger battery), and that more power use necessarily means more thermal stress? In which case there may be nothing wrong with the thermal paste or the engineering; it may simply be that Apple came to the conclusion that the 32GB was more important than the issue of thermal throttling. For my use, I would readily take computer a little slower than the 2017 model for extremely compute-intensive, long-running tasks, but that let me use 32GB of memory. Whether they are dishonestly marketing the machine as being faster is another.

mrsteveman1 8y ago

The 2018 MacBook Pro having thermal issues doesn't surprise me after seeing what my 2015 model does under load, but it's really disappointing since I've been anxiously waiting for Apple to release new laptops. This 2015 MacBook Pro will avoid turning the fan on at any cost. I frequently watch the CPU package heat up to about 190F while the fan is still at 0RPM. Further, the SMC chip and/or kernel are set to use fairly slow fan speeds compared to the amount of heat being produced, so even when it does come on, the system remains hotter than necessary. But, here's the major problem: it's also become clear that there is a thermal window where the system is hot enough to cause it to throttle itself, perhaps somewhere between 140F and 180F, but not hot enough for the SMC to turn the fan on fast enough or at all, even though it could and should. So in addition to being really hot and not using the fan to get the heat away from your lap, it gets slow at the same time, right when it's being used. The system becomes faster soon after the fan is turned up to the max. And to top it off, there appear to be two different throttling mechanisms, the CPU speed can adjust up or down (you can see this with the Intel Power Gadget), and Apple has some kernel system that will use CPU cycles for idling instead of scheduling threads that are waiting, which reduces overall CPU usage, and therefore also heat production. All combined, it looks like the system is constantly bouncing between ramping up the CPU frequency to handle load, then wasting some of the additional CPU time idling to avoid turning the fan on, then turning the fan on just long enough to get the heat down before turning the fan back off again, and repeat.

notadoc 8y ago

What an embarrassment. This particular generation of MacBook Pro can't be abandoned fast enough. Flush the whole thing and start over.

neop1x 8y ago

Problems with MBP unibody cooling are known for years... https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=cooling+macbook+drilled&tbm=...