9 ms·

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

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.

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.