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Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with

Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there is so little public awareness about it - most of the machines like your macbook are indeed defective. The only solution unfortunately is to do some more research & read reviews which cover throttling & thermal management before you buy your next laptop to make sure you're not buying something that is defective. On my previous Dell XPS laptop the CPU and GPU shared one heatpipe & heatsink. It could handle 100% CPU with an external monitor, but the GPU was much more power hungry and placing any significant load on the GPU made the CPU throttle significantly. Each manufacturer & product has different thermal management solutions and you need to do research before buying to see if a laptop will work for you. You'll also want to see whether external displays are always driven by the discrete GPU instead of the integrated GPU on the CPU - even if not being heavily used, just turning on the discrete GPU creates a fair bit of heat. Or just buy a gaming laptop if you can accept with the added size & heft - they're often cheaper for equivalent CPU/GPU than the 'premium' laptops like MacBook, XPS, but sometimes don't get the newest features (Thunderbolt, USB-C charging, etc.) as early. One of my friends had a gaming laptop with the same specs as my XPS and when under load his laptop would blow out enormous amounts of hot air from its big vents, whereas the XPS clearly had a much lower heat removal capacity.

walrus01 5y ago
At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version. I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.
- vvanders 5y ago
  Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
    - evilduck 5y ago
      I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA. Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
      - rejectfinite 5y ago
        But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
      - vvanders 5y ago
        The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.
Ancapistani 5y ago
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. My 16” Intel MBP has this issue. My 13” M1 MBP does not.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Yeah this comment became outdated with the M1. Nothing from VMs to cross-compiling large toolchains has caused throttling in a fanless laptop. And that's while driving a 6k monitor and charging at full wattage.
  - marcan_42 5y ago
    The fanless M1 MBA throttles very easily, but only slightly. The M1 MBP with its fan that barely ever is audible pretty much never throttles.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      I'll take no fan over in imperceptible change in performance then (and no touch bar, and an easy to change battery)
  - rejectfinite 5y ago
    That is all nice sure, but cant use more than 1 monitor though...
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Yeah, I ended up going with the XDR in part because it was the most screen real estate I could get without sacrificing DPI
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    A question about the M1: can you actually run an x86 VM under Rosetta? A large part of my job involves driving VMs for expensive hardware loaded with dev tools. I thought the answer was "no", which has put me off getting an M1, but just wanted to check.
sbierwagen 5y ago
Or you can stick it on a "laptop cooling pad", a plastic platform with fans in it that blow on the bottom of the laptop. Twenty bucks on amazon. https://www.amazon.com/ThreeLeaf-10-15-6-Office-Laptop-Cooling/dp/B013JQBPUK/ https://www.amazon.com/ThreeLeaf-10-15-6-Office-Laptop-Cooli...
- rejectfinite 5y ago
  Imagine buying this to your 2000$ laptop because it cannot actually be used.
- mabcat 5y ago
  I tried one of those, it didn't make a shred of difference. MBP 16" still throttled so hard it was frequently unusable.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. There is. You don't need to keep that hardware running 24/7. That is a problem in the OS and associated software. Apple could disable all these monitoring daemons and accept the tiny delays in starting various things, accept some fan noise, accept a mic that isn't tuned to a room, accept that the computer will take a few extra seconds to wake from sleep, accept that charging won't be lightning fast. But that isn't Apple. That isn't what Apple's customers want. Those seconds are precious. They want everything all services to remain at attention 24/7 ready to attend their slightest need. If that means burning a few extra watts then so be it. I am not an apple customer. My laptop is currently turned off... properly off. I can live with waiting a few seconds for it to boot because my time is cheap. So is my power bill. And so is my laptop's carbon footprint.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  What you say may be right, but it's not really related to the parent's complaint. If you run a stripped-down distro of Linux, running only the bare minimum, no service listening for anything, no service reporting on anything, etc, the issue still stands if the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Say they're working on some big project in a compiled language from the middle of nowhere with unreliable internet, so they can't offload compiling to someone else's computer. Or they're into video, etc. There are many use cases for a laptop with strong specs. Not everyone has such a use. But the fact is that high-powered components stuck in a small enclosure will have a bad time with thermals.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >>the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Beefy hardware or not isn't the point. My hardware is rather beefy. The delays I speak of are not delays in accomplishing the actual commuting task. I'm talking about those tiny delays in spinning up a piece of hardware. I don't car is my threadripper's 49 extra cores take a few milliseconds to wake up from a deep sleep. I can live with a microphone that takes a second to turn on as I dial a voice call. Once the actual task is going, those little delays are in the past. But Apple doesn't tolerate little startup/wakeup delays. Apple would rather burn a little power keeping everything ready at a moment's notice.
vaughan 5y ago
> the only solution Putting thermal pads on your VRMs and dissipating heat to the backplate works perfectly.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  It would work. However since the product is a laptop with the key word being lap... manufactures actually have to throttle beyond what would be required from a physical standpoint. While laptops can and do emit heat from the top & bottom of the chassis that is actually a negative since you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned. Although this is a somewhat recent development/concern, you could fine and maybe still can find non-Apple laptops from the ~2015 era that will have extremely hot surface temperatures. Any many more laptops were just designed poorly so as the regular cooling solution gets less effective due to dust the keyboard and bottom will become exceedingly hot.
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned You don't have to. Look up erythema ab igne.
  - vaughan 5y ago
    This is why Apple cannot add the thermal pads themselves, there are some regulations around the temperature limits. I never use it on my lap though. And as mentioned in the other comment "erythema ab igne" is a real thing is seems.
philwelch 5y ago
Or, potentially, buy an M1 MacBook since Apple’s ARM chips are much more power (and thus heat) efficient than Intel’s?
- brentis 5y ago
  New m1 MBP is one of best computers I've ever owned. Recently just sold 2020 i7 16" MBP and it was a dog. Also had 15.4 2018 prior. 2020 constantly had fan running with performance throttling. M1 doesn't break a sweat. Would like more RAM, but rarely sense need.
darkwizard42 5y ago
Any suggestions on what else you can do to prevent overheating? Does having something cool underneath or a fan-pad or something like that help?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation Those also have cooling problems. I bought a bulky one with 3 fans just because it had a nice processor. It couldn't sustain high performance under load for more than 5 seconds even with the fans maxed out. Compiling some code pushes CPU temperatures into the 80-90 ℃ range. Scrolling a chat in WhatsApp Web also overheats my laptop. I've given up on laptops. If they require cooling at all, the manufacturer did it wrong.
southerntofu 5y ago
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. Yes, and that's why it should be illegal for firms to sell broken devices as we can read in this thread. Stop pretending everything can be smaller and prettier, just build stuff that works no matter what it looks like. Apple is also guilty on the smartphone front. They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I remember when "dumb phones" lasted many years and held battery for at least a week... we have let their shiny advertising corrupt our minds and have lost features and created even more environmental disaster as a result.
- tasogare 5y ago
  > They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I'm still using an iPhone 7 for 5 years now without issue, which is longer than any dumb phone I had in the past. Nobody is forced to buy the last iPhone every year, especially since they don't bring a lot of improvements anyway.
- amelius 5y ago
  Apple phones have good resale value.
- tmd83 5y ago
  And you probably don't even have to make it a whole lot of thicker or weightier to have a better heat dissipation at least these days. Just a little thicker which still keeps it very portable and probably increase grip in fact will get a lot more room for fan/airflow which probably don't increase weight to that degree.
danieldk 5y ago
Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). The M1 MacBooks are the outliers here. They go to toe on many benchmarks with e.g. the Ryzen 3700X and even beats it in some areas such as single-thread performance or through dedicated hardware (e.g. matrix multiplication). And the M1 can be passively cooled. After many generations of Intel MacBooks, the M1 MacBook was a revelation. I am curious though whether they can maintain this in newer models, which are supposed to have 6 (or perhaps even more) high-performance cores. We'll see. It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. [...] a gaming laptop if I feel like towers are under-appreciated these days. A lot of people I see with these overpowered laptops use it plugged into a screen anyway. Why not buy a tower with a Ryzen 5900X or 5950X? It will blow away your laptop CPU and with a high-performance tower cooler, it will stay cool and won't make a lot of noise. Same for GPUs. Every time I hear about people buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU to do machine learning... Just buy a tower and SSH into the machine. Your life will be so much more pleasant.
go_prodev 5y ago
>Or just buy a gaming laptop... I was considering these for work, but most reasonably priced options have a poor display. I think there's a gap in the market for gaming performance with a decent display. I ended up going with a 4k x1 carbon and been pretty happy so far
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

walrus01 5y ago

At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version. I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.

vvanders 5y ago
Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.
- walrus01 5y ago
  yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
  - evilduck 5y ago
    I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA. Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
    - rejectfinite 5y ago
      But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
    - vvanders 5y ago
      The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.

Ancapistani 5y ago

> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. My 16” Intel MBP has this issue. My 13” M1 MBP does not.

BoorishBears 5y ago
Yeah this comment became outdated with the M1. Nothing from VMs to cross-compiling large toolchains has caused throttling in a fanless laptop. And that's while driving a 6k monitor and charging at full wattage.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  The fanless M1 MBA throttles very easily, but only slightly. The M1 MBP with its fan that barely ever is audible pretty much never throttles.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    I'll take no fan over in imperceptible change in performance then (and no touch bar, and an easy to change battery)
- rejectfinite 5y ago
  That is all nice sure, but cant use more than 1 monitor though...
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Yeah, I ended up going with the XDR in part because it was the most screen real estate I could get without sacrificing DPI
- azalemeth 5y ago
  A question about the M1: can you actually run an x86 VM under Rosetta? A large part of my job involves driving VMs for expensive hardware loaded with dev tools. I thought the answer was "no", which has put me off getting an M1, but just wanted to check.

sbierwagen 5y ago

Or you can stick it on a "laptop cooling pad", a plastic platform with fans in it that blow on the bottom of the laptop. Twenty bucks on amazon. https://www.amazon.com/ThreeLeaf-10-15-6-Office-Laptop-Cooling/dp/B013JQBPUK/ https://www.amazon.com/ThreeLeaf-10-15-6-Office-Laptop-Cooli...

rejectfinite 5y ago
Imagine buying this to your 2000$ laptop because it cannot actually be used.
mabcat 5y ago
I tried one of those, it didn't make a shred of difference. MBP 16" still throttled so hard it was frequently unusable.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. There is. You don't need to keep that hardware running 24/7. That is a problem in the OS and associated software. Apple could disable all these monitoring daemons and accept the tiny delays in starting various things, accept some fan noise, accept a mic that isn't tuned to a room, accept that the computer will take a few extra seconds to wake from sleep, accept that charging won't be lightning fast. But that isn't Apple. That isn't what Apple's customers want. Those seconds are precious. They want everything all services to remain at attention 24/7 ready to attend their slightest need. If that means burning a few extra watts then so be it. I am not an apple customer. My laptop is currently turned off... properly off. I can live with waiting a few seconds for it to boot because my time is cheap. So is my power bill. And so is my laptop's carbon footprint.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
What you say may be right, but it's not really related to the parent's complaint. If you run a stripped-down distro of Linux, running only the bare minimum, no service listening for anything, no service reporting on anything, etc, the issue still stands if the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Say they're working on some big project in a compiled language from the middle of nowhere with unreliable internet, so they can't offload compiling to someone else's computer. Or they're into video, etc. There are many use cases for a laptop with strong specs. Not everyone has such a use. But the fact is that high-powered components stuck in a small enclosure will have a bad time with thermals.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >>the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Beefy hardware or not isn't the point. My hardware is rather beefy. The delays I speak of are not delays in accomplishing the actual commuting task. I'm talking about those tiny delays in spinning up a piece of hardware. I don't car is my threadripper's 49 extra cores take a few milliseconds to wake up from a deep sleep. I can live with a microphone that takes a second to turn on as I dial a voice call. Once the actual task is going, those little delays are in the past. But Apple doesn't tolerate little startup/wakeup delays. Apple would rather burn a little power keeping everything ready at a moment's notice.

vaughan 5y ago

> the only solution Putting thermal pads on your VRMs and dissipating heat to the backplate works perfectly.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago
It would work. However since the product is a laptop with the key word being lap... manufactures actually have to throttle beyond what would be required from a physical standpoint. While laptops can and do emit heat from the top & bottom of the chassis that is actually a negative since you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned. Although this is a somewhat recent development/concern, you could fine and maybe still can find non-Apple laptops from the ~2015 era that will have extremely hot surface temperatures. Any many more laptops were just designed poorly so as the regular cooling solution gets less effective due to dust the keyboard and bottom will become exceedingly hot.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned You don't have to. Look up erythema ab igne.
- vaughan 5y ago
  This is why Apple cannot add the thermal pads themselves, there are some regulations around the temperature limits. I never use it on my lap though. And as mentioned in the other comment "erythema ab igne" is a real thing is seems.

philwelch 5y ago

Or, potentially, buy an M1 MacBook since Apple’s ARM chips are much more power (and thus heat) efficient than Intel’s?

brentis 5y ago
New m1 MBP is one of best computers I've ever owned. Recently just sold 2020 i7 16" MBP and it was a dog. Also had 15.4 2018 prior. 2020 constantly had fan running with performance throttling. M1 doesn't break a sweat. Would like more RAM, but rarely sense need.

darkwizard42 5y ago

Any suggestions on what else you can do to prevent overheating? Does having something cool underneath or a fan-pad or something like that help?

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation Those also have cooling problems. I bought a bulky one with 3 fans just because it had a nice processor. It couldn't sustain high performance under load for more than 5 seconds even with the fans maxed out. Compiling some code pushes CPU temperatures into the 80-90 ℃ range. Scrolling a chat in WhatsApp Web also overheats my laptop. I've given up on laptops. If they require cooling at all, the manufacturer did it wrong.

southerntofu 5y ago

> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. Yes, and that's why it should be illegal for firms to sell broken devices as we can read in this thread. Stop pretending everything can be smaller and prettier, just build stuff that works no matter what it looks like. Apple is also guilty on the smartphone front. They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I remember when "dumb phones" lasted many years and held battery for at least a week... we have let their shiny advertising corrupt our minds and have lost features and created even more environmental disaster as a result.

tasogare 5y ago
> They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I'm still using an iPhone 7 for 5 years now without issue, which is longer than any dumb phone I had in the past. Nobody is forced to buy the last iPhone every year, especially since they don't bring a lot of improvements anyway.
amelius 5y ago
Apple phones have good resale value.
tmd83 5y ago
And you probably don't even have to make it a whole lot of thicker or weightier to have a better heat dissipation at least these days. Just a little thicker which still keeps it very portable and probably increase grip in fact will get a lot more room for fan/airflow which probably don't increase weight to that degree.

danieldk 5y ago

Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). The M1 MacBooks are the outliers here. They go to toe on many benchmarks with e.g. the Ryzen 3700X and even beats it in some areas such as single-thread performance or through dedicated hardware (e.g. matrix multiplication). And the M1 can be passively cooled. After many generations of Intel MacBooks, the M1 MacBook was a revelation. I am curious though whether they can maintain this in newer models, which are supposed to have 6 (or perhaps even more) high-performance cores. We'll see. It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. [...] a gaming laptop if I feel like towers are under-appreciated these days. A lot of people I see with these overpowered laptops use it plugged into a screen anyway. Why not buy a tower with a Ryzen 5900X or 5950X? It will blow away your laptop CPU and with a high-performance tower cooler, it will stay cool and won't make a lot of noise. Same for GPUs. Every time I hear about people buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU to do machine learning... Just buy a tower and SSH into the machine. Your life will be so much more pleasant.

go_prodev 5y ago

>Or just buy a gaming laptop... I was considering these for work, but most reasonably priced options have a poor display. I think there's a gap in the market for gaming performance with a decent display. I ended up going with a 4k x1 carbon and been pretty happy so far

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]