4 ms·

My MBP is currently running at ~800 MHz; it will be until about October or November, when I feel the coming chill of winter upon my skin. macOS thermally thrott

My MBP is currently running at ~800 MHz; it will be until about October or November, when I feel the coming chill of winter upon my skin. macOS thermally throttles the chip down, even if the chip is not actually that hot: the CPU is only ~65℃. But the surface temp on the keyboard is 109℉. All I can guess is that even though there's plenty of thermal headroom at the chip, you'd roast the user's hands if you attempted to use it. The fans cannot move the heat away from the CPU and out the back sufficiently fast, and too much ends up bleeding out the keyboard. But now you have a 2.4GHz i9 limited to 800 MHz. During a meeting, it can't really do anything else, VC eats the available compute. This is pathetic. Perhaps IT is different where you are, but my IT is out to lunch. IT is "hand new hire a new MBP" and … that's it? Unless a literal hole ended up in it¹, they're not going to replace it, ever. Spolsky wrote that one of the "rules" for SWE firms was "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" — he wrote that that was table stakes, and if you're not doing it, you're nuts. He wrote that in 2000, nearly twenty-three years ago. But tech cos love the MBP; IT teams only want to support one model of machine, regardless of how much of a lie that is (there are multiple models of a MBP deployed over time in a company) or how ill-suited a MBP is for the task at hand. Absolutely I'm losing at least 20% if not more waiting multiple seconds for keyboard input to show up. Being unable to look things up during meetings, meaning mistakes get made, begetting more meetings. ¹Hmm. HMM. Then there's the keyboard. The display cable connection. It goes on and on…

jeroenhd 3y ago
Macbooks had absolutely atrocious performance once the CPU heated up, masked by turboing extremely quickly to make short bursts of performance feel responsive. This was made worse by Apple's absolutely terrible cooling design. Their user-hostile form-over-function designs are also typically Apple. They made great devices for quick demos, but terrible professional workstations. I actually suspect Apple sabotaged their own Intel-based products when M1 was on the horizon to make performance look better in comparison. Their attempt to basically passively cool an i3 that had a thermal output that clearly couldn't be cooled in such a way can only be described as either intentional or incompetence somewhere in the chain. With the new ARM chips, things have changed for Apple. Their cooling solution is still worse than the competition, but their excellent CPUs don't need nearly as much cooling. The GPU sucks, but that doesn't matter for most productive use by using hardware acceleration (in select applications, for select formats). You're not going to be doing CAD work on a Macbook Air anyway. The sad truth is that Apple's competitors are doing worse these days. AMD is doing relatively well, beating Apple in most benchmarks, but with lower performance per watt in the end. Intel is still trying to compensate for their inferior CPU designs by squeezing more power into their silicon, leading to impressive numbers for anyone hooking their computer up to the wall, but terrible battery life if you try to use that performance in a laptop. I expect AMD to eventually get competitive based on the direction their mobile CPUs and GPUs are taking, but they still lack the production capacity to make a dent in the laptop space. What I don't understand is why even people working in the office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to docks and dongles. Even the excellent Macbooks get beaten hands down for cheap by normal desktop components that are available prebuilt with excellent warranty and on-site service for very similar prices. Just use a desktop! You don't have to pick between top-of-the-line laptops and bargain bin desktops!
- throwaway42401 3y ago
  Well, everyone is hybrid working now, but even before that, a laptop says "now you can't refuse to hotdesk or work evenings/weekends"
- hiq 3y ago
  > What I don't understand is why even people working in the office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to docks and dongles. I just need to connect one USB-C cable to get all the devices when I'm at my desk, and I still have my main machine with me in meetings or anywhere else. I also have a dev machine I can ssh into for any heavy process. That does mean I can't work without internet (well at least I can't program), but in practice it's not a problem, and I actually like this setup, at least more than the alternatives I can think of.
- Miraste 3y ago
  Intel deserves a lot of blame for the last few x86 MacBooks too. The TDPs on those i9s are completely imaginary. Out to lunch. If one were to, say, design a cooling system based on the specs and then receive a production sample that ran twice as hot at half the speed, one would have to do things like downclock it below a gigahertz to avoid burning the user's hands off. That entire generation of Intel chips was a trash fire that demanded a whole car radiator to stay cool just to provide two hours of battery life if you were lucky.
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Intel's cooling specs certainly aren't great, but Apple did mess with the power profiles a LOT. People also often misread the TDP numbers (it's for describing the thermal load of a certain performance threshold, NOT the maximum power output of the chip) and that doesn't help.. I completely agree that Intel's chips were consuming way more power than they had any right to, but Apple knew that when they were designing their computers, and they also had complete control over the performance characteristics, so they could've compensated (or picked more appropriate chips). AMD's Ryzen was the proof that Intel's designs were flawed. I suspect that AMD's impressive Ryzen performance spooked Intel and they responded by making their existing designs faster by just pumping more power through them.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Macbooks had absolutely atrocious performance once the CPU heated up, masked by turboing extremely quickly to make short bursts of performance feel responsive. This was made worse by Apple's absolutely terrible cooling design. Their user-hostile form-over-function designs are also typically Apple. They made great devices for quick demos, but terrible professional workstations. I actually suspect Apple sabotaged their own Intel-based products when M1 was on the horizon to make performance look better in comparison. Their attempt to basically passively cool an i3 that had a thermal output that clearly couldn't be cooled in such a way can only be described as either intentional or incompetence somewhere in the chain. With the new ARM chips, things have changed for Apple. Their cooling solution is still worse than the competition, but their excellent CPUs don't need nearly as much cooling. The GPU sucks, but that doesn't matter for most productive use by using hardware acceleration (in select applications, for select formats). You're not going to be doing CAD work on a Macbook Air anyway. The sad truth is that Apple's competitors are doing worse these days. AMD is doing relatively well, beating Apple in most benchmarks, but with lower performance per watt in the end. Intel is still trying to compensate for their inferior CPU designs by squeezing more power into their silicon, leading to impressive numbers for anyone hooking their computer up to the wall, but terrible battery life if you try to use that performance in a laptop. I expect AMD to eventually get competitive based on the direction their mobile CPUs and GPUs are taking, but they still lack the production capacity to make a dent in the laptop space. What I don't understand is why even people working in the office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to docks and dongles. Even the excellent Macbooks get beaten hands down for cheap by normal desktop components that are available prebuilt with excellent warranty and on-site service for very similar prices. Just use a desktop! You don't have to pick between top-of-the-line laptops and bargain bin desktops!

throwaway42401 3y ago
Well, everyone is hybrid working now, but even before that, a laptop says "now you can't refuse to hotdesk or work evenings/weekends"
hiq 3y ago
> What I don't understand is why even people working in the office all day every day end up with laptops hooked up to docks and dongles. I just need to connect one USB-C cable to get all the devices when I'm at my desk, and I still have my main machine with me in meetings or anywhere else. I also have a dev machine I can ssh into for any heavy process. That does mean I can't work without internet (well at least I can't program), but in practice it's not a problem, and I actually like this setup, at least more than the alternatives I can think of.
Miraste 3y ago
Intel deserves a lot of blame for the last few x86 MacBooks too. The TDPs on those i9s are completely imaginary. Out to lunch. If one were to, say, design a cooling system based on the specs and then receive a production sample that ran twice as hot at half the speed, one would have to do things like downclock it below a gigahertz to avoid burning the user's hands off. That entire generation of Intel chips was a trash fire that demanded a whole car radiator to stay cool just to provide two hours of battery life if you were lucky.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Intel's cooling specs certainly aren't great, but Apple did mess with the power profiles a LOT. People also often misread the TDP numbers (it's for describing the thermal load of a certain performance threshold, NOT the maximum power output of the chip) and that doesn't help.. I completely agree that Intel's chips were consuming way more power than they had any right to, but Apple knew that when they were designing their computers, and they also had complete control over the performance characteristics, so they could've compensated (or picked more appropriate chips). AMD's Ryzen was the proof that Intel's designs were flawed. I suspect that AMD's impressive Ryzen performance spooked Intel and they responded by making their existing designs faster by just pumping more power through them.