4 ms·

Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point, though. I suppose there's merit in

by Neywiny 10mo ago

Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point, though. I suppose there's merit in knowing if your configuration causes thermal throttling, but what are you able to do about it? There's no fan profile to tweak or anything. Can you undervolt them?

amelius 10mo ago
You can move to a colder place or turn the room temperature down.
- nottorp 10mo ago
  In the northern hemisphere you can just open a window at this time of the year. Remember to put your coat and hat on!
  - amelius 10mo ago
    They didn't say anything about that in the adverts.
angristan 10mo ago
> but what are you able to do about it? On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed. For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max) For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
- somat 10mo ago
  An open question on fan curves Environment: I am currently playing with a pid control function for my gpu fan, that is instead of saying "map temp x to fanspeed y"(fan curve) say "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control) Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make pid control undesirable? As a final thought, I have halfway convinced myself that in a predictable thermal system a map would match a set of pid parameters anyway.
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control) Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%. I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better. I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
    - somat 10mo ago
      In my case the gpu fan was not changing speed automatically, (something, something, linux) which I discovered after an embarrassingly long time of poking at other things trying to figure out why my system was crashing so much. And now instead of doing the sane thing and figuring out how to get the fan speed map to work, I thought about it and came to this conclusion "I want my temps to be set value, say 45C, why not use a closed loop controller to find the fan speed necessary for that temp at any load?" And now am about halfway through building pid fan control software and a janky gpu temp simulator so I can get some intuition on tuning the pid parameters before I set it on my actual gpu. you know, the fun part of computing. But now I am worried that perhaps there is a real reason nobody does it this way.
jtbayly 10mo ago
I wanted this app to exist. Now it does! I sometimes face thermal throttling because a process has gone wacko, and all I have to do is kill it. But first I have to notice it. I rarely notice until half my battery is gone!
- Neywiny 10mo ago
  You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes sense.
  - jtbayly 10mo ago
    Yeah I’m on a MacBook Air, so no fans.
  - angristan 10mo ago
    Indeed, that's why apps like iStat Menus, Stats, Sensei etc (for macOS at least) are very useful, I keep the CPU usage and power usage in my menu bar at all times, this is very useful on battery. For example I know that my Macbook Air idles at ~2W-5W, so if I'm doing nothing special and it's using 15W, a process is doing some funny stuff
nicoburns 10mo ago
> but what are you able to do about it Quit some apps probably. I often have a bunch of stuff running in the background that I haven't bothered to close yet. It also sounds like it'd be good for detecting software that's gotten stuck in a busy loop or similar. And/or possibly take a tea break while it chills out.
embedding-shape 10mo ago
> but what are you able to do about it? Depends on the environment, back when I had a MacBook, they still had fans, but the new ones are all passive, I think. So then the surface (or lack of it) below it would matter the most. If you keep it in your lap, on top of a hairy blanket, it'll be a lot effective at getting rid of the heat compared to if you have it sitting on a stone table, as just one example. Edit: Seemingly the split of Air/Pro being passively/actively cooled seems to still apply today, so then checking fans, their performance and intakes/outtakes for chaff tends to be the best way, if you have a Pro.
- saagarjha 10mo ago
  MacBook Air is passive, MacBook Pro is not
- hu3 10mo ago
  New macbooks still have fans. Depending on the model.
vunderba 10mo ago
I've been using Macs-Fan-Control since I picked up a Mac M1 a few years back and it works great. It lets you control the fan RPM based on CPU Core values. I adjusted it to ramp the fans up at more conservative values because otherwise during intense usage periods it would hit 90C+. https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
I use TG Pro on my Macbook Pro to auto-cool my Mac. It drives me crazy that Apple lets your Mac burn to a crisp before kicking on the fans.
- varenc 10mo ago
  Is Apple actually letting the Mac burn to the point at which it has damage or other negative consequences? I've definitely observed they delay the fans until they're absolutely needed, but I trust their thermal management to not actually cause harm. (besides a warm lap)
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    I'm not sure, but I know I'm not the only one who is concerned about how hot it can get long before the OS kicks on the fans. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1kmacsf/macbook_pro_m4_pro_is_hot_but_fans_arent_turning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1kmacsf/macbook_pro_...
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by Neywiny 10mo ago

amelius 10mo ago

You can move to a colder place or turn the room temperature down.

nottorp 10mo ago
In the northern hemisphere you can just open a window at this time of the year. Remember to put your coat and hat on!
- amelius 10mo ago
  They didn't say anything about that in the adverts.

angristan 10mo ago

> but what are you able to do about it? On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed. For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613 https://support.apple.com/en-us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max) For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff, or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!

somat 10mo ago
An open question on fan curves Environment: I am currently playing with a pid control function for my gpu fan, that is instead of saying "map temp x to fanspeed y"(fan curve) say "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control) Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make pid control undesirable? As a final thought, I have halfway convinced myself that in a predictable thermal system a map would match a set of pid parameters anyway.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control) Why though? I generally don't care about the specific temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%. I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same, cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the simpler the better. I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to do here.
  - somat 10mo ago
    In my case the gpu fan was not changing speed automatically, (something, something, linux) which I discovered after an embarrassingly long time of poking at other things trying to figure out why my system was crashing so much. And now instead of doing the sane thing and figuring out how to get the fan speed map to work, I thought about it and came to this conclusion "I want my temps to be set value, say 45C, why not use a closed loop controller to find the fan speed necessary for that temp at any load?" And now am about halfway through building pid fan control software and a janky gpu temp simulator so I can get some intuition on tuning the pid parameters before I set it on my actual gpu. you know, the fun part of computing. But now I am worried that perhaps there is a real reason nobody does it this way.

jtbayly 10mo ago

I wanted this app to exist. Now it does! I sometimes face thermal throttling because a process has gone wacko, and all I have to do is kill it. But first I have to notice it. I rarely notice until half my battery is gone!

Neywiny 10mo ago
You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes sense.
- jtbayly 10mo ago
  Yeah I’m on a MacBook Air, so no fans.
- angristan 10mo ago
  Indeed, that's why apps like iStat Menus, Stats, Sensei etc (for macOS at least) are very useful, I keep the CPU usage and power usage in my menu bar at all times, this is very useful on battery. For example I know that my Macbook Air idles at ~2W-5W, so if I'm doing nothing special and it's using 15W, a process is doing some funny stuff

nicoburns 10mo ago

> but what are you able to do about it Quit some apps probably. I often have a bunch of stuff running in the background that I haven't bothered to close yet. It also sounds like it'd be good for detecting software that's gotten stuck in a busy loop or similar. And/or possibly take a tea break while it chills out.

embedding-shape 10mo ago

> but what are you able to do about it? Depends on the environment, back when I had a MacBook, they still had fans, but the new ones are all passive, I think. So then the surface (or lack of it) below it would matter the most. If you keep it in your lap, on top of a hairy blanket, it'll be a lot effective at getting rid of the heat compared to if you have it sitting on a stone table, as just one example. Edit: Seemingly the split of Air/Pro being passively/actively cooled seems to still apply today, so then checking fans, their performance and intakes/outtakes for chaff tends to be the best way, if you have a Pro.

saagarjha 10mo ago
MacBook Air is passive, MacBook Pro is not
hu3 10mo ago
New macbooks still have fans. Depending on the model.

vunderba 10mo ago

I've been using Macs-Fan-Control since I picked up a Mac M1 a few years back and it works great. It lets you control the fan RPM based on CPU Core values. I adjusted it to ramp the fans up at more conservative values because otherwise during intense usage periods it would hit 90C+. https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

I use TG Pro on my Macbook Pro to auto-cool my Mac. It drives me crazy that Apple lets your Mac burn to a crisp before kicking on the fans.

varenc 10mo ago
Is Apple actually letting the Mac burn to the point at which it has damage or other negative consequences? I've definitely observed they delay the fans until they're absolutely needed, but I trust their thermal management to not actually cause harm. (besides a warm lap)
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  I'm not sure, but I know I'm not the only one who is concerned about how hot it can get long before the OS kicks on the fans. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1kmacsf/macbook_pro_m4_pro_is_hot_but_fans_arent_turning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1kmacsf/macbook_pro_...

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