8 ms·

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

by 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
      We were able to shave 1mm off of the skin by removing the sweat glands. When you start to feel hot just stop what you're doing.
- pixelcloud 8y ago
  But does the i9 version have performance issues (i.e. it under performs compared to the i7)? The XPS 15 with the i9 configuration comes with 32GB ram and it much cheaper than an equivalent macbook pro. I can deal with it getting hot!
  - lhl 8y ago
    The XPS 15 i9 does do a bit of throttling, but off the boost clock (it manages to mostly stick to 4GHz in the stress test that Lee shows) while the MBP i9 apparently can't even maintain the 2.9GHz base clock. That, along with performance that's below the previous-gen i7 but charging $300 more is the real kicker - honestly, I'm not sure how anyone at Apple would be able to justify that as not just bilking their customers out of money. It seems like these days, the mantra is "buyer beware" if you're looking to buy a Mac.
    - shub 8y ago
      IMO the last good laptops Apple made were the pre-Touch Bar Retina MBPs. I've used three different ones, two for work and one that I purchased myself, and they were all solid performers with excellent screens, excellent keyboards, excellent performance, adequate ports, and adequate portability. The new MacBook, with its terrible everything-aside-from-thickness-and-weight, showed that Apple has lost interest in making a usable laptop in favor of any kind of differentiation they can get. Even if it's pointless or apparently even worse than nothing.
  - wlll 8y ago
    In the video he shows the i9 rendering slower than the i7. When he runs the render on the i9 in a freezer then it runs faster.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    A couple of weeks into f/t use, mine (XPS 15" 9570, i9, 32GB RAM) doesn't get hot at all (fairly typical dev stuff - Docker, VMs, browsers, IntelliJ). It throttles intermittently, for short periods (perhaps 5% of the time) under a stress test.
- wukerplank 8y ago
  In all fairness: If you sell a >3000€ laptop, people should expect to get the full value out of it. Maybe it's hard to cool CPUs in thin laptops. But then don't let people pay for expensive upgrades that have no performance benefit.
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    It depends on workload. If I'm typing code for a minute and then spending few seconds compiling and launching it, it won't trigger throttling, but reducing each compilation from 3 seconds to 2 seconds is certainly a benefit.
    - gaius 8y ago
      “Creative” workloads require sustained CPU tho’ and that’s who Apple claims this is for
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - coldtea 8y ago
        Which "creative" workloads? Video, 3D, and photography mostly require sustained GPU. For audio, it's more the CPU.
        gaius 8y ago
        I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures. This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??
        andromeduck 8y ago
        Does the internal GPU generate enough heat to throttle under typical conditions? Having the option for external GPUs is a completely different story.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just having a ton of browser tabs open. I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7 desktop. I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just got a lemon. It got so hot the battery is now swelling and it popped out the trackpad (I think there might be a recall; or if not take it in since that's gotta be under warranty). My current laptop is a HP Spectre. It's thicker than the XPS, but I think it's got a much better cooling solution and preforms better. I don't think I'd recommend a Dell XPS again.
  - anothergoogler 8y ago
    The higher end Latitudes seem like a better comparison to the MBP, I'd be interested to know how they stack up (thermal and otherwise).
  - eropple 8y ago
    YMMV, but in addition to a dodgy (manufacturer defect) and oddly designed (strangely shaped modifier keys) keyboard, my HP Spectre got really hot under comparatively minor load.
  - kart23 8y ago
    My old xps 13 with the i5 had great thermals on the other hand, but was still snappy enough for almost everything I threw at it. Didn't like it b/c the screen was just a tad too small for me and I had some problems getting good audio on the machine. Also, coil whine. It was awful.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      Same here. 13 inch XPS, coil whine is insane. Had the motherboard replaced 3 times, no improvement. It was a replacement for my ageing Air 13", and I honestly wish I didn't swap. At first glance it's just as nice, the build quality and form factor are identical - and then you start using it, and see that Dell charges just as much if not more than Apple, but quality of several different elements is ages behind apple.
- locusm 8y ago
  A CPU in a laptop destined for any target market that doesn't even hold base clock speeds should not have made it out of the QA dept.
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  I have had thermal issues both in my old Lenovo T61P and a more recent Macbook Pro 15, both with dedicated graphic cards. No replacing of soldering paste on my part was ever able to improve the situation, with the result of having powerful machines only on paper, that were brought to their knees even by light workloads. My Mac becomes impossibly hot and slows down playing games like Hearthstone and Civ5, FFS. I have long decided that my next laptop (regardless of the brand) will have integrated graphics and a medium TDP CPU, and I will just limit heavy workloads and gaming to my desktop.
  - skgoa 8y ago
    > I have long decided that my next laptop (regardless of the brand) will have integrated graphics and a medium TDP CPU, and I will just limit heavy workloads and gaming to my desktop. You get more bang for your bucks this way, too. Desktop hardware costs a fraction of a comparable laptop.
    - Kurtz79 8y ago
      Of course. A laptop, no matter how powerful and well designed, is always going to be a compromise compared to a desktop, in terms of raw power and relative cost. The tradeoff is convenience, where you would have single machine that is able to fill all your needs (power and mobility), instead of two. But, for me at least, in the end it's not worth it. Also, cloud and sync services made working in parallel on multiple machines almost painless.
mcphage 8y ago
> Do people really think he just got a lemon? Well, other sites have done benchmarks... have any of them reported it being slower than last year’s model?
- slantyyz 8y ago
  Dave Lee's tests usually come from a gamer and media creator's perspective. In most, if not all, of his reviews he makes a point to check thermals and throttling related to heat, because that matters to the gaming segment of his audience. As for media creation, he always tests Adobe Premiere for his cross-platform media creation tests while acknowledging that Premiere on Mac is less performant than it is on Windows, and that there's a significant number of Mac media creators who prefer Final Cut. The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. Running a CPU hot for short bursts can yield different comparative results than for a task that takes 30 minutes or more.
  - mcphage 8y ago
    > The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. I would expect so—benchmarks often have long-running tasks; if a task only takes a few seconds it's hard to distinguish the overhead from the task itself. But if nothing else—they will do so going forward.
    - slantyyz 8y ago
      >> benchmarks often have long-running tasks Yes, but depending on who you're talking to, "long-running" could mean a few minutes or several hours. Throttling doesn't usually have a major impact on tasks that take a few minutes. But on heavy, long running loads, the effect of throttling starts to add up quickly, which is why the i9 MBP couldn't outperform the 2017 i7 MBP until it was stuffed in a freezer. While the use of Premiere might raise eyebrows, I don't think it matters in Lee's testing, because he ran the same test on both the 2018 i9 MBP and a 2017 i7 MBP. Either way, it was a heavy, taxing, long running task. I don't think anyone will dispute that the i9 has significant performance gains for people whose CPU utilization spikes are relatively short -- and that might be the majority of people who will opt to buy an i9 equipped MBP. For content creators and other users who need to tax the processor for long periods of time, however, those users might be better off with the i7 version of the MBP.
arthurfm 8y ago
Quinn Nelson (a.k.a. Snazzy Labs) recently did a couple of videos where he replaced the stock thermal paste on a 2017 MacBook Pro with a liquid metal thermal paste [1] and then 3 months later with a standard thermal paste [2]. With the liquid metal paste the CPU temps dropped 10°C, ran 200MHz faster and the MacBook Pro didn't thermal throttle. The standard thermal paste also saw a 7-10% improvement in thermals compared to Apple's paste. I wonder if replacing the paste with a better one would help with the latest i9 MacBook Pro? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4gqfrBN4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4gqfrBN4c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoZNzOQpVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoZNzOQpVw
- aequitas 8y ago
  When working as intern at an Apple store more than 10 years back the instructions from Apple for reassembly would always tell to put a huge amount of thermal grease on the CPU. So much that it would be squirted out from under the heatblock in large blobs. I always found it odd as I was used to add just as much as was needed without spilling over. Never read any research on it though so I'm curious what was the right approach. I can't image Apple just getting this part of the thermal puzzle wrong when everything else is fully optimized. Or them just skimping a few cents on better grease.
  - rozenmd 8y ago
    Came here to say this. Former employees of Apple I know recommend reapplying the thermal paste immediately after getting a MacBook Pro.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      They recommend I open up the device myself? Thereby voiding warranty? Isn't that getting more and more difficult?
      - thinkythought 8y ago
        This may have changed, but for years the apple warranty was "as long as you don't damage anything, you're allowed to open it". I did some research and at least the manual for my machine still states this, but mine is also from 2012
bengale 8y ago
It's impossible he had a faulty model?
- ben-schaaf 8y ago
  Considering it ran fine with a lower ambient temperature, likely not...
willio58 8y ago
> Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. You've said this in two threads that I've read and I truly do not know what you mean by it. Is it a bad thing that Dave doesn't scream at his viewers when making a video? Or do you mean something else entirely?

by lebrad 8y ago

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
    We were able to shave 1mm off of the skin by removing the sweat glands. When you start to feel hot just stop what you're doing.
pixelcloud 8y ago
But does the i9 version have performance issues (i.e. it under performs compared to the i7)? The XPS 15 with the i9 configuration comes with 32GB ram and it much cheaper than an equivalent macbook pro. I can deal with it getting hot!
- lhl 8y ago
  The XPS 15 i9 does do a bit of throttling, but off the boost clock (it manages to mostly stick to 4GHz in the stress test that Lee shows) while the MBP i9 apparently can't even maintain the 2.9GHz base clock. That, along with performance that's below the previous-gen i7 but charging $300 more is the real kicker - honestly, I'm not sure how anyone at Apple would be able to justify that as not just bilking their customers out of money. It seems like these days, the mantra is "buyer beware" if you're looking to buy a Mac.
  - shub 8y ago
    IMO the last good laptops Apple made were the pre-Touch Bar Retina MBPs. I've used three different ones, two for work and one that I purchased myself, and they were all solid performers with excellent screens, excellent keyboards, excellent performance, adequate ports, and adequate portability. The new MacBook, with its terrible everything-aside-from-thickness-and-weight, showed that Apple has lost interest in making a usable laptop in favor of any kind of differentiation they can get. Even if it's pointless or apparently even worse than nothing.
- wlll 8y ago
  In the video he shows the i9 rendering slower than the i7. When he runs the render on the i9 in a freezer then it runs faster.
- crispinb 8y ago
  A couple of weeks into f/t use, mine (XPS 15" 9570, i9, 32GB RAM) doesn't get hot at all (fairly typical dev stuff - Docker, VMs, browsers, IntelliJ). It throttles intermittently, for short periods (perhaps 5% of the time) under a stress test.
wukerplank 8y ago
In all fairness: If you sell a >3000€ laptop, people should expect to get the full value out of it. Maybe it's hard to cool CPUs in thin laptops. But then don't let people pay for expensive upgrades that have no performance benefit.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  It depends on workload. If I'm typing code for a minute and then spending few seconds compiling and launching it, it won't trigger throttling, but reducing each compilation from 3 seconds to 2 seconds is certainly a benefit.
  - gaius 8y ago
    “Creative” workloads require sustained CPU tho’ and that’s who Apple claims this is for
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Which "creative" workloads? Video, 3D, and photography mostly require sustained GPU. For audio, it's more the CPU.
      - gaius 8y ago
        I expect the GPU generates heat as well. Which is why all the interest in external enclosures. This entire thread is baffling to me. Everyone rushing to justify buying a new high performance laptop which they don’t mind throttling because they never needed the performance in the first place??
        andromeduck 8y ago
        Does the internal GPU generate enough heat to throttle under typical conditions? Having the option for external GPUs is a completely different story.
djsumdog 8y ago
I have a Dell XPS 15 (2017) and the thermals are really bad. I saw constant throttling in my kernel logs and the laptop sometimes slowed to a crawl when compiling, running a ton of docker containers, using Light Table or even just having a ton of browser tabs open. I finally ditched it a few weeks ago, finally replacing it with a Ryzen 7 desktop. I'll admit my XPS 15 was a factory refurbished model, so maybe I just got a lemon. It got so hot the battery is now swelling and it popped out the trackpad (I think there might be a recall; or if not take it in since that's gotta be under warranty). My current laptop is a HP Spectre. It's thicker than the XPS, but I think it's got a much better cooling solution and preforms better. I don't think I'd recommend a Dell XPS again.
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  The higher end Latitudes seem like a better comparison to the MBP, I'd be interested to know how they stack up (thermal and otherwise).
- eropple 8y ago
  YMMV, but in addition to a dodgy (manufacturer defect) and oddly designed (strangely shaped modifier keys) keyboard, my HP Spectre got really hot under comparatively minor load.
- kart23 8y ago
  My old xps 13 with the i5 had great thermals on the other hand, but was still snappy enough for almost everything I threw at it. Didn't like it b/c the screen was just a tad too small for me and I had some problems getting good audio on the machine. Also, coil whine. It was awful.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    Same here. 13 inch XPS, coil whine is insane. Had the motherboard replaced 3 times, no improvement. It was a replacement for my ageing Air 13", and I honestly wish I didn't swap. At first glance it's just as nice, the build quality and form factor are identical - and then you start using it, and see that Dell charges just as much if not more than Apple, but quality of several different elements is ages behind apple.
locusm 8y ago
A CPU in a laptop destined for any target market that doesn't even hold base clock speeds should not have made it out of the QA dept.
Kurtz79 8y ago
I have had thermal issues both in my old Lenovo T61P and a more recent Macbook Pro 15, both with dedicated graphic cards. No replacing of soldering paste on my part was ever able to improve the situation, with the result of having powerful machines only on paper, that were brought to their knees even by light workloads. My Mac becomes impossibly hot and slows down playing games like Hearthstone and Civ5, FFS. I have long decided that my next laptop (regardless of the brand) will have integrated graphics and a medium TDP CPU, and I will just limit heavy workloads and gaming to my desktop.
- skgoa 8y ago
  > I have long decided that my next laptop (regardless of the brand) will have integrated graphics and a medium TDP CPU, and I will just limit heavy workloads and gaming to my desktop. You get more bang for your bucks this way, too. Desktop hardware costs a fraction of a comparable laptop.
  - Kurtz79 8y ago
    Of course. A laptop, no matter how powerful and well designed, is always going to be a compromise compared to a desktop, in terms of raw power and relative cost. The tradeoff is convenience, where you would have single machine that is able to fill all your needs (power and mobility), instead of two. But, for me at least, in the end it's not worth it. Also, cloud and sync services made working in parallel on multiple machines almost painless.

mcphage 8y ago

> Do people really think he just got a lemon? Well, other sites have done benchmarks... have any of them reported it being slower than last year’s model?

slantyyz 8y ago
Dave Lee's tests usually come from a gamer and media creator's perspective. In most, if not all, of his reviews he makes a point to check thermals and throttling related to heat, because that matters to the gaming segment of his audience. As for media creation, he always tests Adobe Premiere for his cross-platform media creation tests while acknowledging that Premiere on Mac is less performant than it is on Windows, and that there's a significant number of Mac media creators who prefer Final Cut. The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. Running a CPU hot for short bursts can yield different comparative results than for a task that takes 30 minutes or more.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > The better question to ask is if any of those other sites who did benchmarks did heavy workload testing on the computers for extended periods of time. I would expect so—benchmarks often have long-running tasks; if a task only takes a few seconds it's hard to distinguish the overhead from the task itself. But if nothing else—they will do so going forward.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    >> benchmarks often have long-running tasks Yes, but depending on who you're talking to, "long-running" could mean a few minutes or several hours. Throttling doesn't usually have a major impact on tasks that take a few minutes. But on heavy, long running loads, the effect of throttling starts to add up quickly, which is why the i9 MBP couldn't outperform the 2017 i7 MBP until it was stuffed in a freezer. While the use of Premiere might raise eyebrows, I don't think it matters in Lee's testing, because he ran the same test on both the 2018 i9 MBP and a 2017 i7 MBP. Either way, it was a heavy, taxing, long running task. I don't think anyone will dispute that the i9 has significant performance gains for people whose CPU utilization spikes are relatively short -- and that might be the majority of people who will opt to buy an i9 equipped MBP. For content creators and other users who need to tax the processor for long periods of time, however, those users might be better off with the i7 version of the MBP.

arthurfm 8y ago

Quinn Nelson (a.k.a. Snazzy Labs) recently did a couple of videos where he replaced the stock thermal paste on a 2017 MacBook Pro with a liquid metal thermal paste [1] and then 3 months later with a standard thermal paste [2]. With the liquid metal paste the CPU temps dropped 10°C, ran 200MHz faster and the MacBook Pro didn't thermal throttle. The standard thermal paste also saw a 7-10% improvement in thermals compared to Apple's paste. I wonder if replacing the paste with a better one would help with the latest i9 MacBook Pro? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4gqfrBN4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4gqfrBN4c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoZNzOQpVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNoZNzOQpVw

aequitas 8y ago
When working as intern at an Apple store more than 10 years back the instructions from Apple for reassembly would always tell to put a huge amount of thermal grease on the CPU. So much that it would be squirted out from under the heatblock in large blobs. I always found it odd as I was used to add just as much as was needed without spilling over. Never read any research on it though so I'm curious what was the right approach. I can't image Apple just getting this part of the thermal puzzle wrong when everything else is fully optimized. Or them just skimping a few cents on better grease.
- rozenmd 8y ago
  Came here to say this. Former employees of Apple I know recommend reapplying the thermal paste immediately after getting a MacBook Pro.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    They recommend I open up the device myself? Thereby voiding warranty? Isn't that getting more and more difficult?
    - thinkythought 8y ago
      This may have changed, but for years the apple warranty was "as long as you don't damage anything, you're allowed to open it". I did some research and at least the manual for my machine still states this, but mine is also from 2012

bengale 8y ago

It's impossible he had a faulty model?

ben-schaaf 8y ago
Considering it ran fine with a lower ambient temperature, likely not...

willio58 8y ago

> Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. You've said this in two threads that I've read and I truly do not know what you mean by it. Is it a bad thing that Dave doesn't scream at his viewers when making a video? Or do you mean something else entirely?