What. Apple designed a laptop that cannot keep itself cool.
"BUT THE APP ISN'T OPTIMIZED!!!"
What the hell is that supposed to mean. A machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do. Why should apple be the exception. Golly, you people need to get that apple dick outta your mouths
Yeah and here's how PCs do it:
You do realized how hard is today to keep a laptop cool, right? There's nothing wrong with an ATX Because they're a desktop to begin with.
jdw said: Indeed, I've already said my 2015 15" MBP thickness is about ideal. It's a very thin machine, yet you can fit a good keyboard in there with a good amount of key travel. Hardly anyone complained about the key travel on that model, versus the complaints that are still ongoing about the butterfly keyboard. And if Apple did suddenly start make Professional MacBook Pros that were as thick as the 2015 model but put a host of ports, slots and thermal goodness in such a machine, I assure you, Apple enthusiasts would not turn up their noses, especially when the MacBook exists for people who are willing to have the absolute thinnest and leanest machine possible. Saying it another way, people who dislike something thicker than a piece of paper are the target buyers for the MacBook.
For sure. The assumption here, though, is that the target market for MBPs is pros. If the target market is, rather, the masses with money to buy a fancier MacBook, then the design is perfect.
That was pretty much what one of my friends who worked with a number of pros said after the introduction of the cylinder MacPro. He had like 6 of them he was setting up and testing for a client. He said it was an awesome machine, but not what the people he knew wanted/needed. He said they don't care about how it looks on the desk, or its size, as they have huge machines tucked under desks and all kinds of equipment and wires around.
jdw said: Apple once did. Seriously. Apple once came out with new Macs that very few Mac users were upset about. These days, we Mac users have become very divided over the thinness and its tradeoffs. (And over bad thermal paste or excessive thermal paste.) And again, that is precisely why Apple should use its 3 notebook product lines to create models that fit the needs of most Mac users. Sorry, but they are not doing that now.
Yeah, I really don't know what they are doing right now... I sometimes wonder if they do, either. One theory says that Apple is going to make (within a few years) only pro Macs, and pretty much everyone else will move towards iDevices (i.e.: the non-pro user). But, then they keep making 'pro' products that seem to fall short of the pros, targeted more at the wealthy non-pro users. What they don't seem to have is a solid, 2 or 3 tier platform like they used to (as you mention).
lorin schultz said: With due respect to Apple's engineers, I'm not sure I would hold up designing cooling systems as an Apple forté. Thermal constraints have held back improvements to the Mac Pro cylinder for five years and counting. The cooling in the iMac was incapable of supporting faster hardware and required a complete redesign for the iMac Pro. Last night I aborted a Pro Tools cataloguing operation because my MacBook Pro was getting so hot I was afraid letting it continue would cause damage.
I don't pretend to know anything about designing cooling systems myself, and I'm sure the challenges are daunting, so I'm not accusing Apple of a fault. I'm just saying if I was compiling a list of things Apple does really well, cooling might not be near the top.
I suppose I'd agree... but didn't the 'cheese grater' do a pretty good job of keeping cool enough? Yeah, the laptops have always been problematic in being under-cooled. I get the impression that's common in the industry, but shouldn't really be the case with a 'pro' level machine. Keeping it cool/reliable should be pretty darn high up the priority list on such a machine.
rogifan_new said: Apparently this YouTubeer also saw massive throttling with the Dell XPS. But yet it’s so much easier to bring out the tired Apple is obsessed with thinness trope.
By the way, Apple’s not going to completely redesign a chassis mid design cycle because an Intel chip runs hot. Apple could have refused to offer this upgrade but then people would’ve been bitching about that.
Maybe they shouldn't have redesigned it in the first place. What was wrong with the previous design? it isn't like it ran cool before, either.
And, I'm kind of sick of this 'Apple's hands are tied' trope. If you know the thermals of the chip, you design to that. You don't just stick it in there and go, oh well.
... I have this nagging feeling that its always the D team working on these MacBooks. ...
I think it is partly that, and partly that they were working on stupid stuff like the TouchBar instead of just making a great machine. And, now that they have shrunk the design again, it would be too hard an ego-hit to go back. So, now chip thermals have to come down to meet Apple's design, rather than Apple designing to reality.
I suppose the A-series might help this if they go all-in on making desktop/laptop versions, but that is a while off yet I think.
rogifan_new said: And if Apple had upended their mid-design cycle with a thicker and heavier laptop Marco Arment and his ilk would have been happy but all the tech writers and hipsters over at the Verge would’ve been hating on Apple for going backwards. I remember everyone complaining about the 3rd gen iPad getting thicker and heavier.
Who is Apple's pro customer though... Arment or the hipsters? I think you might have identified the problem. The 'old' Apple wouldn't have given a %$*#( what the hipsters at the Verge did/said. They would have designed it properly for the purpose, not some ideal sells-the-most audience. Then they would have probably built another machine for those hipsters.
...the 2011 17" i7 quad core I tried for a while would ramp fans to 4k just connecting a large monitor... 'Downgrading' to the 2010 i7 dual core solved that issue for me, even working with a 4k display quietly now ...
Yeah, I wouldn't be buying an Apple laptop with the highest end CPU option. Even if I had the extra money, I'd rather have it be quieter/cooler.
DuhSesame said: See that tricks me in the early days as well, which I think it wouldn't be so bad to keep something under 45W to cool.
But what TDP really means, I think, is "the smallest value of a cooler you can put on top of our processors". ...
rogifan_new said: And if Apple had upended their mid-design cycle with a thicker and heavier laptop Marco Arment and his ilk would have been happy but all the tech writers and hipsters over at the Verge would’ve been hating on Apple for going backwards. I remember everyone complaining about the 3rd gen iPad getting thicker and heavier.
Who is Apple's pro customer though... Arment or the hipsters? I think you might have identified the problem. The 'old' Apple wouldn't have given a %$*#( what the hipsters at the Verge did/said. They would have designed it properly for the purpose, not some ideal sells-the-most audience. Then they would have probably built another machine for those hipsters.
...the 2011 17" i7 quad core I tried for a while would ramp fans to 4k just connecting a large monitor... 'Downgrading' to the 2010 i7 dual core solved that issue for me, even working with a 4k display quietly now ...
Yeah, I wouldn't be buying an Apple laptop with the highest end CPU option. Even if I had the extra money, I'd rather have it be quieter/cooler.
DuhSesame said: See that tricks me in the early days as well, which I think it wouldn't be so bad to keep something under 45W to cool.
But what TDP really means, I think, is "the smallest value of a cooler you can put on top of our processors". ...
Unfortunately, there's no better way if you want to cool an i9 down. All of the technique suggested before might bring it down, but not expecting to be full-turbo.
The only solution is to change the processors.
Blaming solely on Apple simply missing the target. Intel got it all planned out, that people who likes full performance will purchase a gaming laptop anyway, and all of the rest can have fun to throttle.
The funny thing is, this is not the first time, not something Apple-only, laptop communities are panic about it all around since Haswell. Yet, only now someone points out, all of you freaks out act like it's doomed, and crying to rethink how should it be done.
The real solution is to change the processors. Intel right now can't keep their products consistent, it might be worked so well past year, and now 50% worse.
What. Apple designed a laptop that cannot keep itself cool.
"BUT THE APP ISN'T OPTIMIZED!!!"
What the hell is that supposed to mean. A machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do. Why should apple be the exception. Golly, you people need to get that apple dick outta your mouths
Yeah and here's how PCs do it:
You do realized how hard is today to keep a laptop cool, right? There's nothing wrong with an ATX Because they're a desktop to begin with.
My point should have been obvious. The previous fellow claimed "a machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do." -- a foolish claim, since even large ATX case formfactor PCs need excessive cooling mechanisms to remain cool under taxing loads.
The claim that a machine ought to remain cool under all loads and PCs do it so notebooks should too is quite silly.
StrangeDays said: My point should have been obvious. The previous fellow claimed "a machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do." -- a foolish claim, since even large ATX case formfactor PCs need excessive cooling mechanisms to remain cool under taxing loads.
The claim that a machine ought to remain cool under all loads and PCs do it so notebooks should too is quite silly.
Maybe trying to use context and be a bit reasonable would be a good thing?
My point was more that older generations of Mac laptops had cooling capacity to handle even hotter chips. And, we're not talking about 12-core Xeons here, either, but mobile chips. It shouldn't be unreasonable that such a chip could be adequately cooled in a laptop design... again, within reason.
But, if you start out with a design that has barely any margin (or worse) and then put a higher output chip into it, of course you're going to have problems. I'll bet even the lowest end chip in there gets quite hot and maybe throttles as well... that's been the case with Apple's laptops for decades.
StrangeDays said: My point should have been obvious. The previous fellow claimed "a machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do." -- a foolish claim, since even large ATX case formfactor PCs need excessive cooling mechanisms to remain cool under taxing loads.
The claim that a machine ought to remain cool under all loads and PCs do it so notebooks should too is quite silly.
Maybe trying to use context and be a bit reasonable would be a good thing?
My point was more that older generations of Mac laptops had cooling capacity to handle even hotter chips. And, we're not talking about 12-core Xeons here, either, but mobile chips. It shouldn't be unreasonable that such a chip could be adequately cooled in a laptop design... again, within reason.
But, if you start out with a design that has barely any margin (or worse) and then put a higher output chip into it, of course you're going to have problems. I'll bet even the lowest end chip in there gets quite hot and maybe throttles as well... that's been the case with Apple's laptops for decades.
They could add one extra heat pipe and air vent to barely keep the 8750H down, but could never control the core i9. Besides that, even previous generation (I'm talking about Retina and Unibody) have trouble to do that too, for example, Crystal Well is just as bad, where 2~3GHz is pretty common.
deminsd said: Yet putting the exact same 2018 Macbook Pro in the freezer to cool it, and run the same test, drops render times from 39 minutes to 27 minutes. Doesn't sound like a software problem to me.
Adobe requires AMD users to work inside of a freezer? Great programming.
I think the video shows that it's the Intel CPU which is throttling and locked at 2.2GHz, so not really anything about AMD users. Actually, when not put in freezers, the 2017 MacBook Pro with Core i7 CPU performed better than the 2018 MacBook Pro with Core i9 CPU with the same Adobe software, so you can't really blame that on Adobe.
StrangeDays said: My point should have been obvious. The previous fellow claimed "a machine ought to be able to keep itself cool under all conditions. PCs do." -- a foolish claim, since even large ATX case formfactor PCs need excessive cooling mechanisms to remain cool under taxing loads.
The claim that a machine ought to remain cool under all loads and PCs do it so notebooks should too is quite silly.
Maybe trying to use context and be a bit reasonable would be a good thing?
My point was more that older generations of Mac laptops had cooling capacity to handle even hotter chips. And, we're not talking about 12-core Xeons here, either, but mobile chips. It shouldn't be unreasonable that such a chip could be adequately cooled in a laptop design... again, within reason.
But, if you start out with a design that has barely any margin (or worse) and then put a higher output chip into it, of course you're going to have problems. I'll bet even the lowest end chip in there gets quite hot and maybe throttles as well... that's been the case with Apple's laptops for decades.
They could add one extra heat pipe and air vent to barely keep the 8750H down, but could never control the core i9. Besides that, even previous generation (I'm talking about Retina and Unibody) have trouble to do that too, for example, Crystal Well is just as bad, where 2~3GHz is pretty common.
Yeah... what I was taking exception to is the comparison to a decked out desktop. Of course a laptop isn't going to feasibly run overclocked, maxed out stuff like a desktop. But, every bit of cooling would help eek a bit more performance out. So, at some point you're making tradeoffs between space and performance.
Comments
The assumption here, though, is that the target market for MBPs is pros. If the target market is, rather, the masses with money to buy a fancier MacBook, then the design is perfect.
That was pretty much what one of my friends who worked with a number of pros said after the introduction of the cylinder MacPro. He had like 6 of them he was setting up and testing for a client. He said it was an awesome machine, but not what the people he knew wanted/needed. He said they don't care about how it looks on the desk, or its size, as they have huge machines tucked under desks and all kinds of equipment and wires around.
Yeah, I really don't know what they are doing right now... I sometimes wonder if they do, either. One theory says that Apple is going to make (within a few years) only pro Macs, and pretty much everyone else will move towards iDevices (i.e.: the non-pro user). But, then they keep making 'pro' products that seem to fall short of the pros, targeted more at the wealthy non-pro users. What they don't seem to have is a solid, 2 or 3 tier platform like they used to (as you mention).
I suppose I'd agree... but didn't the 'cheese grater' do a pretty good job of keeping cool enough?
Yeah, the laptops have always been problematic in being under-cooled. I get the impression that's common in the industry, but shouldn't really be the case with a 'pro' level machine. Keeping it cool/reliable should be pretty darn high up the priority list on such a machine.
Maybe they shouldn't have redesigned it in the first place. What was wrong with the previous design? it isn't like it ran cool before, either.
And, I'm kind of sick of this 'Apple's hands are tied' trope. If you know the thermals of the chip, you design to that. You don't just stick it in there and go, oh well.
I suppose the A-series might help this if they go all-in on making desktop/laptop versions, but that is a while off yet I think.
Who is Apple's pro customer though... Arment or the hipsters? I think you might have identified the problem. The 'old' Apple wouldn't have given a %$*#( what the hipsters at the Verge did/said. They would have designed it properly for the purpose, not some ideal sells-the-most audience. Then they would have probably built another machine for those hipsters.
Yeah, I wouldn't be buying an Apple laptop with the highest end CPU option. Even if I had the extra money, I'd rather have it be quieter/cooler.
Hmm, then this article needs to be adjusted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power
Thanks.
The only solution is to change the processors.
Blaming solely on Apple simply missing the target. Intel got it all planned out, that people who likes full performance will purchase a gaming laptop anyway, and all of the rest can have fun to throttle.
The real solution is to change the processors. Intel right now can't keep their products consistent, it might be worked so well past year, and now 50% worse.
The claim that a machine ought to remain cool under all loads and PCs do it so notebooks should too is quite silly.
My point was more that older generations of Mac laptops had cooling capacity to handle even hotter chips. And, we're not talking about 12-core Xeons here, either, but mobile chips. It shouldn't be unreasonable that such a chip could be adequately cooled in a laptop design... again, within reason.
But, if you start out with a design that has barely any margin (or worse) and then put a higher output chip into it, of course you're going to have problems. I'll bet even the lowest end chip in there gets quite hot and maybe throttles as well... that's been the case with Apple's laptops for decades.