This appears to be a software bug in macOS or AMD's drivers. Plugging in an external monitor at certain resolutions (1440p@60Hz in my case) will cause the AMD GPU to draw 18-20W constantly, no matter what it's doing. This causes the total system draw to increase from ~10W to ~30W. All that heat has to go somewhere. If I change the resolution of my external monitor to 1080p the AMD GPU drops to ~4W and the fans are quiet again. A lot more information available in this long MacRumors thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an...
This is a bug on Macbooks in general, as I understand it. I have a 2019 MBP with a 4k monitor, and if I change the resolution to anything except the default, there is massive system-wide lag. God forbid I use PyCharm on 4k scaled resolution – a full second between typing and seeing the text.
That seems unrelated; I think Mac OS is the only place where non native resolutions use GPU-accelerated scaling. The other operating systems just set whatever resolution you asked for and let the monitor handle it.
This seems to be excessive GPU use when simply connecting an external monitor at its native res.
The 2015 MBP is a work horse but it too had issues with external monitors. I used to connect it to two external 1080p monitors one via HDMI the other with some ancient adapter. When I plugged in the latter my internet would suddenly stop working. This was apparently from a multi year bug where the ports adapter was so close to the wireless card that it interfered with the wireless cards normal operation. Upgrading the adapter fixed the problem (it was one of the old display adapters with physical pins you had to screw in) - took a very long time to debug that issue!
The MBP 2015 with discrete GPU is hardwired to output video signal through AMD M370X. It can get quite noisy when just connected to an external display.
Also, at least macOS provides a consistent resolution for windows, texts, etc. On Windows (after Win 8), many times old applications run with __blurred__ texts and icons while the new shiny Win apps have no such problem. It's actually one of the reasons I don't use Windows anymore, although it's been making good progress.
It's technically consistent, Windows just chooses to rasterize non-DPI-aware applications at the lowest common denominator DPI and scale them up on high-DPI monitors. AFAIK MacOS does the opposite, and rasterizes everything at the highest DPI and then scales down as necessary. The latter looks much better so I'm not totally sure why Windows doesn't do it - perhaps a compatibility hack for apps that expect classic 96dpi.
Newer versions of Win10 actually have an odd variant of this that works more like MacOS where it will sometimes rasterize at a higher DPI and scale down - it looks pretty nice but it's not compatible with all old applications, I only have it enabled for a couple.
But those apps were written for specific resolution and you (probably) cannot make them render themselves with higher resolution. And MacOS unlike Windows simply doesn't support running old apps.
NVIDIA drivers on Windows have an option to scale on the GPU instead of on the monitor, though I'm not certain whether they ever default that on. Presumably it's there as a workaround for people with bad/broken monitors. It'd be interesting to try and measure whether that option raises power draw...
I've never had an NVIDIA driver with it on by default. I've run two different computers with NVIDIA GPU's through a TV and had to manually scale the picture on both of them when I couldn't get the TV's auto scaling to work properly.
I can speak from personal experience that NVIDIA GPUs will use bilinear scaling on Windows to display non-native resolutions on displays that don't have built-in scalers. This isn't a rare situation either. As far as I know, every display with a G-SYNC module inherently does not support display-side scaling. Also worth noting, NVIDIA lets you choose whether to use their scaler or the display's scaler.
I've seen tons of other bugs related to MBP+external monitor over the years, with multiple MBP / OS versions.
My current issue is that I use an ultrawide curved monitor at work, and when I lock the screen and then unlock it, some of my previous window positions are changed on the external monitor. My large-but-not-fullscreened IDE that takes up ~85% of the external monitor is resized and shifted off screen, every time. I have to use the 4-finger swipe up gesture to see all windows, drag the now-visible IDE window into a new desktop panel at the very top, then minimize it from fullscreen, to get back to where I was before I pressed ctrl+cmd+q...
I think the lag is common to all JetBrains IDEs: IDEA, WS, PyCharm, etc. IIRC, it's the JVM not using any acceleration for rendering and there might be another bug whereby using the integrated display and an external 4k panel at the same time causes massive lag. Try closing the lid with your 4k monitor attached and see if things speed up.
In any case, I feel you on the system-wide lag. I basically just avoid using JetBrains products at this point.
wow, a few years ago i was working in java world, and using intellij on a daily basis. any time i used a 4k monitor, i simply could not type anything or scroll through code without insane delay. i googled it and found a ton of people having the same issue. i could only sanely use intellij if i upscaled my resolution to its highest. is this all interconnected?
Same here, but recent versions are much better. If you take a screenshot when running one of the scaled modes on 4k it's actually rendering at a far higher resolution, which then gets scaled down. Almost 6K IIRC, which on a laptop is pretty much insane.
I have medium-to-high fan noise/RPM consistently when connected to an Apple TB display (2560x1440@60Hz), but it's much quieter when connected to a 2560x1600@60Hz monitor. So if it is very specific resolutions, but not necessarily higher resolutions in general, that matches my experience.
So I first thought that using gfxCardStatus to force the use of integrated graphics could help.
However:
> gfxCardStatus v2.3 and above actively prevents you from switching to Integrated Only mode when any apps are in the Dependencies list (or if you have an external display plugged in). This is because if you were to do this, your discrete GPU would actually stay powered on, even though you've switched to the integrated GPU.
Because of the way the ThunderBolt ports are wired, you cannot use external graphics without activating the discrete GPU. It's been like this in MacBook Pros for a long time.
fwiw NVIDIA GPUs have had a similar behavior under normal conditions on Windows forever. After following up with tech support about it, the explanation provided can basically be summarized as 'the higher the resolution + refresh rate of your attached monitors, the more demand placed on the memory controller and scan-out, which means a higher minimum GPU and/or memory clock to drive it'.
My current RTX 20xx card can drive two 4k monitors at low clocks, but the 9xx series really struggled and the 10 series still needed to clock up some. I suspect something similar is probably happening here with the AMD GPU if you're running the laptop's integrated retina display along with a 1440p60 external display, it's probably forced to clock up to drive that many pixels. I'm not really sure how AMD could get around basic hardware limitations here unless they have a really clever way of driving displays at a low memory clock.
I have a 2160p external monitor attached to my MBP 16" via Thunderbolt/Displayport 1.2 at 60 Hz.
I tried out the five different "Looks like" scalings the Display Preferences allow for and then eyeballed the "Radeon High Side" wattage readouts via iStat Menus:
1280x720: 18W
1920x1080: 6W
2560x1440: 6W
3200x1800: 6W
3840x2160: 6W
So it looks like it might (also?) be related to the display resolution scaling.
It would make sense if situations where the native panel resolution doesn't match the framebuffer resolution are causing the driver stack to have to maintain two framebuffers (native and non-native) to do the upscale and then feed it to the monitor. GeForce drivers on windows specifically have a setting to control whether this happens or not (let the monitor scale it, have the GPU scale it). The upscale would not only use more VRAM in that case (and as a result more memory bandwidth) but it'd need a bit more GPU compute as well to perform the scaling.
On my low-spec laptop from a while back, running Rising Thunder set to 720p was faster than native, but it was even faster to first set my desktop resolution to 720p because the overhead of the game engine scaling its 720p framebuffer up to native 4k was measurable. Setting the desktop resolution down also improved battery life.
That's interesting. I was watching a movie on my 1440p@60hz monitor last night on my 16" MBP in clamshell mode and the fans were on the whole time. That sounds like a connection.
Can you share how you're measuring GPU power draw? I have just migrated to a 16" MBP with the AMD chip, and also use an external display some of the time. Have noticed the fan noise and heat but it hasn't been a problem yet.
I’d guess they measure total draw and compare against their baseline eg when they say the GPU draws 20W it’s 20W more than whatever the draw is when only using the internal display.
I’m curious if this is affected by the resolution on the laptop display. I believe the 16” and more recent 15” all default to a slightly scaled resolution, versus the pre-Touch Bar 15” which defaults to the panel’s native 2x resolution.
I'm using the MBP in clamshell driving a 2560x1440@60 Apple Cinema Display at native res, and seeing the GPU drawing 20W constantly (via iStat Menus). The laptop's internal display is set to native 2x.
The fans sit just fine at the minimum speed under this setup, nice and quiet... until I start to do anything even remotely demanding, like, oh, open Ableton Live. Used to be I could run dozens of tracks and plugins with no fan noise. Now I can't even have a blank project open without the fans spinning up to audible levels. So much for recording vocals!
This would explain why when an external monitor is plugged in, my battery drains despite being on a charger. When it reaches 5% battery, the CPU load goes to 800%.
I’ve noticed this too using an HP Thunderbolt Dock G2 with a 16” and 2x 4K60 monitors. I just assumed it was because it’s summer here and the laptop tends to sit in the sun a bit, but it’d be nice if it got fixed.
What can I say as a person somewhat close to electronics engineering:
Look at that single skinny heat pipe, it will get saturated very fast. Second to that, look at those tiny radiators, they are clearly not capable to discharge the full heat flux.
I simply don't see any signs of proper thermal engineering there.
Apple says "we are listening now, and here is a new cooling design," then it comes out to be even less adequate that the old one. I can't think of anybody else capable of trolling up their customers like that.
If anybody wants to dish out something on an order of $1.5m to do a contract manufacturing run for a properly designed full sized laptop, give me a note. I do have some tricks in mind how to make 40W+ CPUs work in a relatively compact case.
If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down. Or the management/product design group has overridden the input of the people who actually know how to design thermal solutions, because the laptop CANNOT be 2mm thicker.
Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious. At least the 12 inch Macbook from a few years ago which was truly fanless uses an appropriately low powered CPU.
disclaimer: used to do systems engineering for a server manufacturer a long time ago, after you've gone through a dozen iterations of ways to mount skived copper heatsinks on dual socket motherboards in 1U cases, with various fan solutions, you realize that everything that is not acoustically terrible is some sort of compromise. People are trying to put CPU+GPU+RAM packages that are anywhere from 25W to 45W TDP in laptops that are physically too small for them.
That's why I buy gaming laptops for my work needs even though I don't play games. Their heatsinks are generously sized resulting in good thermals and acoustics.
I use a similar trick: I try to find a laptop that comes in both discrete-GPU and integrated-GPU configurations, and both version must share the identical chassis.
This way, when I buy the integrated version, I know the chassis has been designed with the heavier airflow of the discrete-GPU version in mind. If I'm lucky, my integrated-GPU config might even use the identical size heat-sinks as the discrete-GPU version.
Do you mean the XPS 13? I've never seen an XPS 15 in recent years without an NVIDIA card. The cheapest XPS 15 from 2019 that I can find still comes with the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, as does my own XPS 15 9560 from 2017.
In my experience the XPS 15 7390 with the 6c12t cpu with Windows had the fan running very often. Each time a single cpu thread ran at 100% the fan turned on.
The thinkpad T470/T480 dual-pipe dGPU heatsink is a drop-in replacement for the iGPU version, so if you buy the version without dGPU, you can pretty easily double your heatpipes quite cheap.
Not OP, but from experience I know the Razer Blade Stealth 13 has the same cooling for both integrated GPU and dedicated gpu versions - and it's a very beefy cooling system as is, even with the dedicated gpu the system can stay at full load indefinitely without any issues.
This has been true since the days of desktop computers, too (when laptop wasn't even an option). Gaming specs always make for simply great all-around machines — largely due to component specialization indeed, including thermal outtake.
Note that to this day it's magnitudes of order cheaper to build a desktop for crunching numbers. There's no beating the thermals of that, and thermals = cost either in money or time in this very physically-underpinned market.
I do the same thing for my personal laptops. While it certainly has a few quirks, I've found the Razer Blade to be a good balance between size and cooling performance. It is noticeably thicker than a Macbook Pro, but still light enough to carry around.
> If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down.
If that was the gamble, you'd assume that the laptops would thermal throttle way below the physical Tjunction limit. As a matter of fact, they're still allowing themselves to reach very high temperatures even in common usage, despite an undersized (hence, to some extent, less reliable) cooling solution. That's kinda hard to explain as a sensible choice.
> Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious
This doesn't have to be a bad path. Most peoples' CPU use is intermittent, and there's a decent amount of thermal mass around. I'd rather be able to go fast for 5 seconds and then be throttled to speed X by ability to move heat than to be throttled to speed X all the time.
Tech workers and tech company engineering divisions must be a decent chunk of all MBPs sold. And then there’s the pro video people. Where is that assumption coming from? Compiling, rendering, transcoding are all pretty heavy workloads.
Is Apple ignoring this? Or just assuming these workloads are short/bursty enough to not worry about sustained utilization?
Maybe they're making the assumption that people doing super heavy load stuff like that would more more likely be using a dedicated desktop workstation rather than a laptop.
> relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down
Seems like that wasn't working fully, since they report having GPU issues after stress testing the computer (external GPU worked fine). And that is worrying. Is the thermal stress shutdown from OS, or onboard the GPU/CPU?
I feel like GPUs don't thermal throttle as gracefully as CPUs do. I have a desktop GPU and when it's at its max temperature for too long, eventually the graphics driver crashes. Meanwhile, CPUs are perfectly happy to run with inadequate cooling; they just thermal throttle.
I worry that it might actually be a software issue. GPU clock starts running slowly, software assumes that it will be running faster, two commands are issued but only one is processed, driver gets confused, driver crashes.
> if anybody wants to dish out something on an order of $1.5m to do a contract manufacturing run for a properly designed full sized laptop, give me a note.
Something tells me that Apple spent more than $1.5M designing the recent MacBook Pro.
It is a bit presumptuous to say "well i could do it better" when referencing an entire team of qualified electrical engineers at one of the largest corporations in the world that has near limitless resources.
Especially coming from such a qualified background as "a person somewhat close to electronics engineering".
I worked in OEM electronics since 2007, and spent almost entire career in roles around manufacturing. And yes, when cookie cutter OEM laptops were making money, I did them too.
> It is a bit presumptuous to say "well i could do it better" when referencing an entire team of qualified electrical engineers at one of the largest corporations in the world that has near limitless resources.
Well, they still clearly screwed up. Challenge that.
I does not take to be a genius to understand that this scrawny cooling system could've performed much better if it had adequate heatpipe size, radiators, and air pathway optimisation.
So you are the missing link in their hardware team? If you have the answers, go work for them. You probably wouldn’t even have to interview, just tell them in your cover letter than you are better than 1000 of their hardware and materials science guys. While you’re at it, you might as well offer to rewrite the operating system as well, because why not?
As far as “clearly screwed up,” I’m not sure how clear that is. A few people on a forum complaining about something out of hundreds of thousands of those computers sold. In all of the rigorous professional reviews, this “screw up” hasn’t been mentioned. Not sure exactly what the screw up was, that fans turn on? On a huge, high end, powerful laptop?
Erm yea or maybe don’t put high wattage, almost-desktop-class, processors in a laptop. People need to decide if they want a comnputer for easy portability or a desktop or pseudo-desktop.
Modern Intel notebook processors like these are likely running close to 80W and 65 steady state - They've got up to 8 cores to do this. Measurements by Notebookcheck seem to suggest that the MacBook Pro is already doing fairly well compared to PC OEM solutions, especially given the size of the enclosure and the fact that unlike Asus in the Zephyrus, they're not using 12V server level 60dBa fans in a laptop.
Where I think the MacBook Pro could do better is if they adopted more of a vapor chamber strategy for the heatsink, but as you mentioned the radiators are probably going to be the limiting factor, seeing as there's really not a huge temperature delta going on here.
I suppose one strategy could be to perhaps up the fan speed yet again, maybe at the cost of a little bit more noise, and use heat sinks with fins as finely pitched as the MacBook Air. Of course this will make the heat sink more heavy and expensive, but given the robustness of old Thinkpads that did not go easy on the copper, it could work.
> Apple says "we are listening now, and here is a new cooling design,"
They also keep at "oh, look how thin it is" even though the vast majority of people stopped caring 5-7 years ago. Make it thicker, but with better cooling, better storage, better GPUs etc.
Worse still, they do it across the line. "We painted ourselves into a thermal corner with MacPro" says Apple and keeps releasing iMacs (and iMacs Pro) with sealed aluminum enclosures, and making them thinner and thinner.
Well, would be a wonder if they would still be using 2017s i7, wouldn't it? So, accepting natural or following common improvements should be nothing to brag about.
Besides that they obviously still fail with the second point, otherwise this whole issue would not exist.
Yes they made it thicker, but as you see, without much gain. They just made it look thicker, with an innuendo that this is for better thermals, while in reality it isn't.
My opinion is that MacBook Pros turned into consumer machines somewhere along the way and the overwhelming majority of buyers use them for Facebook, Youtube and Mail.app.
I imagine Apple has a vast amount of metrics on this. None of these use cases require better thermals, so Apple engineers the devices accordingly.
I don't recall my 17" Powerbook G4 ever having thermal issues but how many people would buy a ~$5000 base spec MBP today? See Mac Pro.
One of the confusing issues is that people say, "I'm only using 15% of my CPU, the fans should not be coming on."
What they don't realize, is that using 1 core running at turbo speeds is only going to show up as 15% of the CPU, but draw enough power and create enough heat to trigger the fans!
Another thing that some of these posters are not aware of, is that running these temperature/fan speed monitoring applications can use quite a bit of power! They're drawing all these fancy graphs, the applications are usually poorly optimized. Even the Mac OS Activity Monitor is a hog in Catalina for some reason and can take 15-20% of a CPU all by itself.
And that doesn't even take into consideration all the other apps people have running. You can see in their screenshots or menu bar they have Dropbox, 3rd party wireless keyboard/mouse programs, they might have 10 things running in just their menubars! They need to look in the Activity Monitor's Power section to see what the real culprit is.
Plugging an external monitor into your MacBook will enable the dGPU and that will create more power draw, this is nothing new:
It's the workload, not the monitors you have plugged in.
I posted a picture in the MacRumors thread with 4 externals (4K, 2x1440, 1x1080) plugged into my base model 16" and it idled in the 50 degree range with no audible fan noise. Once I started streaming video and opening apps, the fans then started, as expected.
My 2019 15" mbpro makes quite a bit of noise on login screen with nothing connected to it. It's not a made up issue. USB 2.0 devices disconnect randomly which is a no-go for musicians. Touch bar freezes. The list goes on. I'd abandon it a long time ago but music software is macs first. Plus Logic is decent. It's so sad that they don't give a damn because market takes a while to adjust.
That touchbar freezing issue is a pet peeve of mine. It's been happening for years now. I've personally witnessed over it perhaps 10 times over multiple hardware/OS revisions.
Perhaps it's time for Apple to admit defeat and just build a watchdog service that runs every 30 seconds and if things aren't working: kill and restart whatever process and/or driver that runs the touch bar.
I agree with what you are saying up until you say nothing is wrong with the fan coming on at a 15% cpu load.
regardless of what is really happening to take that 15% load, if the fan comes on that strong, it is not a proper thermal design. As a contrast, I have an 8 core iMac Pro. It can run full throttle and I rarely if ever hear the fan and it is much quieter than my 2018 6 core macbook pro. Of course a 27" home chassis has much more room to dissapate heat, but that is the point. Shoving oversized processors with multiple cores that generate lots of heat is at odds with Jony Ive's add more thinness campaign. I am now in a position where I use my macbook for dev and more intensive uses and its so damn annoying that Im seriously considering getting rid of it. I was at a client site this week, and my laptop was constantly the but of the joke, and disruptive to 5 other people working in a conference room. Sorry, but that just sucks...
15% load can mean a single i9 core boosting to 4.8-5ghz. The OP is correct. When I use a single threaded program that is keeping a core pinned at 100% why would it be unreasonable for the fan to be on?
I dont care if the fan is on. I care that the fan is egregiously on. It is probably 95-100db on. That means that the macbook is fundamentally unable to manage the heat load it generates. It would be one thing if I were in the middle of the desert outside at 100degreeF conditions. But I was indoors and the ambient temperature was probably 68F. Again, I dont care if the fan runs, I just dont want to hear it, and I dont want the fan to be loud enough that everyone worries that my laptop is going to "catch fire", "Take off", "heat the room", and a half dozen other comments that were made at a client site. I bought a macbook to have nice hardware that I dont have to worry about...
Your reply comes off a little condescending. You don't know the technical ability of the people posting in the forum, or what they realize or not.
It doesn't take any special qualifications for a person to hear the the fan turning on more often on their new MBP than with their old MBP running the same work loads.
Fair point, but the issue that might be pointing to this being a problem is that the same thing didn't happen on a laptop from 4 years ago:
> We DID NOT notice this on our 2015 MacBooks...
So, if a much older laptop with lower specs wasn't engaging the fan while performing the same tasks, something may very well be wrong (at some level: I have no diagnosis for what the issue could be).
Agreed. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I'm curious: Isn't it inherently harder to cool a single turbo'ing core the smaller the core is? Say a core is 1mm by 1mm, and generates 45W of heat in that area, then say it's 0.5mm by 0.5mm and generates the same heat. Apologies in advance for any inaccuracies or misphrasing of the question.
macOS (Activity Monitor) reports utilization normalized to a single core, so 15% really means 15% of a single core. On the MBP the scale goes up to 1600%.
I understand that - I did mean CPU core and not an entire CPU. Still a ridiculous amount of power when the previous versions of Mac OS didn't have that kind of usage in Activity Monitor.
Been using Mac primarily since 2011 and sad to see everything keep declining with Apple's software and hardware quality. When programming an app and its backend with react native/clojure my 2015 Mac Pro gets way too hot and slow.
Just built a Ryzen 3600 desktop with 32 gigs of RAM for about 1/4th the price as the cheapest 16 inch Macbook. Windows with WSL2 has been extremely good and I'm satisfied with my development environment. Key things were disabling automatic updates via group policy, setup autohotkey to keep all my MacOS keybindings, use X410 to display emacs and using the new windows terminal. Development is super fast, compilation is fast, git is fast, everything just works. Attempted to switch with WSL1 awhile a year ago or so and while it was okay, I wasn't very happy with it.
My mac just sits there now mainly being a coaster until I need to test iOS builds.
I think you are underestimating the cost of your setup. There is no way in my opinion that you can build a decent PC with 1/4 price of a MacBook Pro. European prices might be higher, 2699 official price for base 16" (you can actually get it for 2399 from official resellers). But still 675 Eu for a proper setup is impossible. Just the CPU and RAM will cost you a bit over 300. I know you are just making a point, but it is a false statement that people constantly make when discussing prices of Apple hardware and this thing is getting quite annoying. Yes, they are more expensive, but when you look at the exact components, specs, you will find that Dell or Lenovo could be only around 10 to 20% cheaper in best case scenario.
I mean, it's not that outlandish. It's such an apples to oranges comparison but performance for dollar is still in the "build your own desktop" side of the arena, as it's always been.
Motherboard, CPU, aftermarket cooler, case, RAM, power supply, 256gb m2 ssd all came to about 2500 AED from a computer store in Dubai after some negotiating. Already had a GPU, SSD, monitor, peripherals from my previous dying computer. On Apple's offical website, the base model 16 inch starts at 9999 AED and selecting 32gb of RAM comes to AED 11,679.00.
1680 to go from 16 to 32 GB of RAM. The total I spent on my 16gb x 2 corsair vengeance LPX 3200 DDR4 RAM was no more than 650 AED. What false claims am I making? You do the math.
I've become extremely dissatisfied with Apple's direction and felt frustrated being locked into the MacOS ecosystem because until recently there was no alternative that I was happy with. If they'd just make a new Macbook Pro with sufficient cooling and a normal keyboard I would have been satisfied.
I built it to replace my dying 9 year old gaming PC, having absolutely no idea that it would become my primary development machine. I just gave WSL2 a shot with pretty low expectations from my experience with WSL1 and just kept using it.
My main point to make was not about just about the hardware itself, but about Windows finally becoming a viable alternative for the work I'm doing.
this is not a laptop, or new, but thought relevant: used Dell Precision workstation, 2x 14-core xeons, so total 28 physical cpu cores (also your cpu isn't throttled all day so it can fit inside a tiny box) with 64gb ddr4: $1700 on ebay currently.
the computer weighs a lot, and it won't run osx. but as someone forced to work all day at a desk on a heavily-throttled macbook, that looks like a lot of hardware for the money in comparison.
The original comment said a quarter of the price of the cheapest configuration, so I don't quite see how the price of the most expensive one is relevant.
I second this. For $2000 I built an absolute monster of a desktop PC. Super fast, never an issue and I use it for everything. I only use my MacBook when I wanna sit on the couch and that's it. Thankfully I got my laptop through work almost for free because it wouldn't have been worth the money.
What's disturbing is that Apple seem to be deleting posts:
After attempting to be part of the solution; spending a ton of time testing, providing information in the community, communicating with Apple Engineers and Apple Business Team, our most recent post was deleted as "Speculative".
We have spent over $300,000 on Apple hardware over the years both business and consumer and now our voice has been muted. How can we move forward using Apple? Instead of deleting our posts, how about send it to management?
Yes, and most of that thread is posts full of noise and faulty suggestions that add nothing to the discussion but serve to dilute the original post and the few posts with relevant information. Which is why I seldom bother with discussions.apple.com. It's a cesspit.
Considering the existence of the long support thread, Apple doesn't seem to be trying to suppress this issue. And that poster has many posts, so isn't being targeted either.
Could it be the posts were deleted legitimately?
Some people in that thread are pretty angry and may have let it get the better of them.
Your assertion doesn't match the plain facts though.
We know Apple isn't suppressing this issue because there's a long, detailed thread about it on their own discussion site. If they wanted to try to suppress it, they would surely include that but didn't.
Also, suppressing information about problems to prevent bad press can't work anyway, since Apple only controls its own litter corner of the internet. If Apple didn't allow discussion of this issue on their board, it would be discussed elsewhere and generate the same bad press. If we suppose Apple tries to work in its own self-interests, they wouldn't bother with deleting posts to prevent bad press since it can't possibly work.
Meanwhile, there are obviously legitimate reasons to moderate postsm, so the fact that posts are being deleted doesn't seem nefarious on its own. There are angry people in that thread and angry people tend post things that need moderation.
I mean, I don't know. I'm open to the possibility that Apple is doing something bad. But so far, there's really no smoke, much less any fire.
Yeah, which is why this MacBook Pro line has a non-butterfly keyboard and why they went through three iteration of the butterfly keyboard before giving up on it.
Yes, and sort of the reason why most people discuss these sort of issues in other forum to gain support and evidence before posting it in the Official Forum.
Negative Post there, whether they are Hardware or Software are regularly deleted.
And why should they? What's wrong with trying out something like Thinkpad X series[1] instead? Or Thinkpad P series, which can now come with Ubuntu LTS pre-installed. I wonder, if they would have invested so much time in fixing Dell's issues for Dell. Probably not. Why? Because there is no Dell's lock-in.
Oh come now, you surely understand that you cannot just drop in a Windows or Linux PC as a replacement for a Mac, just like you couldn't do the opposite. Organizations have management tools, single sign on, and software that may only run on one OS.
Suggesting a ThinkPad or Dell as a replacement is naive.
If an organization wants to change the computers it gives it's employees so dramatically, it will take some transition time, and a lot of fighting. We're not just talking about your personal laptop here.
What you are saying is, that no matter how much one company keeps failing, they will never leave its ecosystem. What I am saying, is that it's never too late to begin considering it.
I literally said they can switch, but it is not easy and takes effort. You're assuming a lot by saying they haven't even considered it.
And more relevant to this post, Apple still sold people a multi-thousand dollar device, and those people are entitled to question why the device doesn't perform as expected.
My point was, that we now have a long enough history of Apple's hardware failures, delayed admissions, and constrained repairability.
Instead of pretending to be surprised by another of Apple's non-reactions, they should use this as an opportunity to reconsider the whole picture.
At least, if Dell starts sucking, they can switch to HP or Lenovo, and the other way around. If Apple stars sucking, they have no other option but to keep complaining online.
>My point was, that we have now a long enough history of Apple's hardware failures, delayed admissions, and constrained repairability.
Because despite all of its problems, sadly Apple's product is still very often the best on the market.
You sort of wish Microsoft to do better, both hardware and Software, along with HP and Dell. But the market is polarised with one group who dont care or understand quality, or another group who demands absolute perfection and are willing to pay for it.
I'm curious about how long you were using Mac and how much of the ecosystem you were taking advantage of. Specifically were you using Apple messaging, photos, and / or email?
Also, did you take advantage of handoff or airdrop?
I imagine if you were strictly using cloud services, it was a relatively painless transition.
I’ll tell you one reason why you shouldn’t switch to a Lenovo laptop: their atrocious history with backdoors and buggy, vulnerable software, and the lockdown within their BIOS/UEFI to prevent things like swapping components for no good reason.
Ok well, that was more than one reason, but you get the drift.
That's not true for Lenovo Thinkpads, which is a separate business division from Lenovo consumer hardware, as far as I am aware. And subsidizing consumer hardware with spyware has, unfortunately, become a standard industry practice. Most smartphone and Smart TV manufacturers are shipping their consumer devices full of bloatware that is extremely hard to get rid of.
It is entirely true for Thinkpads. In fact I wasn’t even really aware of their consumer line. All of what I mentioned occurred on Thinkpads.
And maybe spyware is a standard industry practice like you said. In fact, I’d agree that’s very true. But this is a MacBook thread and I’ve yet to see such a practice on Apple laptops.
For non-Apple consumers I see only two options now: to avoid consumer-level hardware (unless it runs something like Android One), or to replace the OS with an open-source alternative (Ubuntu and Fedora work pretty much out of the box on most PCs). In case of Smart TVs, one either has to buy a Commercial TV[1], or run something like Kodi[2].
I have a SAAS that uses video chat for medical professionals and the #1 creator of support tickets for video problems are those with Lenovo. In fact, when someone has an audio of video problem, “Is this a Lenovo” is among the first questions we ask. The people who have the fewest technical issues? Mac users.
A single anecdote, of course, but advice to switch to Linux is naïve. Most people aren’t software developers. Many people use their computers for things like graphic design or media editing. How do you run Final Cut or Logic on Lenovo with Linux? How about Photoshop? MacOS and Apple hardware is superior for a wide variety of use cases. Maybe not yours, but for many people the pluses of Apple far outweigh the minuses.
> I have a SAAS that uses video chat for medical professionals and the #1 creator of support tickets for video problems are those with Lenovo. In fact, when someone has an audio of video problem, “Is this a Lenovo” is among the first questions we ask. The people who have the fewest technical issues? Mac users.
That says nothing without knowing what percentage of people were using each brand.
Also, Lenovo's consumer hardware is of a much lower quality than Lenovo Thinkpads, which still maintain the standards of IBM.
> A single anecdote, of course, but advice to switch to Linux is naïve. Most people aren’t software developers.
I have switched all of my non-technical family members from Windows to Ubuntu over 5 years ago, and haven't received a single complaint from them yet. A single anecdote, of course.
> Many people use their computers for things like graphic design or media editing.
That's a minority of computer users. Most people use computers for web browsing, media consumption, and editing of Office documents.
> How do you run Final Cut or Logic on Lenovo with Linux? Photoshop?
Bitwig Studio[1] runs on all platforms and is in many ways superior to Logic Pro.
Adobe Photoshop can be installed on Linux[2], but for professional graphical and video editing I would still choose MacOS.
In other words, the only market where iMacs and Macbooks are clearly above competition is creative industry.
I have a 2011 here still going strong. Looking like new after all of the free replacements, LOL. I guess that GPU either fried over and over by now or came from a lucky batch.
Mine collected dust for almost 2 years until they announced the repair program. It came too late. I ended up giving it to a junior dev which used it for another year before dying again.
I think we replaced the battery for free or cheap and the screen was in the lamination program, the GPU is the same one as day one. Isn't it weird that it just never happens to some people and other people keep getting their GPU's fried??
I was planning to buy MacBook 16-inch as I am still on 2014 edition which in my view were one of the best MacBooks.
I simply hate that unnecessary Touch Bar, was hoping Apple will remove it but didn’t. Thought then of getting 16-inch as they have an esc key.
Waiting for this kind of review, I will put on hold purchasing it until get a clarity on fan noise. My current old MacBook fan do make some noise but only under load of games.
Hope Apple can go back to basics and redo the MacBook Pro to make it similar to 2014 with new hardware.
I have a 16 inch, the keyboard is amazing, the display is beautiful, and I have had no thermal problems running multiple VMs, and heavy web development workflows.
Not sure what people are going crazy about regarding the keyboard, it is one of the most amazing ones on a laptop I have used.
He didn’t say anything about the keyboard. He only made a negative comment about the Touch Bar.
Who are you defending the keyboard against? No one anywhere complains about the keyboard on the new 16”. They complain(ed) about the butterfly keyboards on the older MBPs. Apple themselves implicitly agreed they were garbage by offering free replacements and abandoning the butterfly design.
Your comment and the motivation for posting it is very confusing.
The touch bar gets in the way, but I use external keyboardS 90% of the time, so it isn't that big of problem. I would have gladly payed extra for F-keys.
The larger track-pad also gets in my way often.
Fan noise is significant compared to the old model.
USB-C-only is quite annoying. I never missed a port on the 15", whereas now ... well...
I bought it to get a performance boost (compiling/ML-training/etc.). The performance upgrade isn't really that significant.
My 2014 13” i5 broke last year after a drop so I bought a 2019 6 core 15”. I was pretty surprised that the performance of the new device isn’t really that much better. And the hardware feels worse. I think they should go back to the 2015 form factor, maybe replace some USB-A with C but otherwise leave it.
I went from late 2013 13 inch to the 2016 16 inch (maxed everything but the graphics). I also hate the touchbar. Things like volume control that used to be a tap away are now hidden in sub screens. You can switch it to only function keys but they are missing the icons for volume etc and you can't touch feel where the buttons are so I have left it in full touchbar mode. Some functions of it are actually quite cool but it should exist as well as the function keys not instead of. I haven't had any of the issues described anywhere. Mine works flawlessly. Very very happy with the machine overall. A huge improvement on the 2013 mbp i came from which i agree was an excellent machine.
You can tweak the touch bar to put e.g. volume control on the 'home screen' if you prefer; it's hard to find though, it's under Keyboard, then the Customize Control Strip button at the bottom.
I just checked. Unless I'm missing something there is no simple volume control like on the physical keyboard? I already have the volume button on my touchbar home screen however tapping it opens a slider. I don't want or need a slider and have to do a tap and then slide to get the volume down whilst before it was one press of a button. This usually requires me to look away form what I'm doing. It's definitely a step back in terms of UX. It was perfect before the touchbar.
Thanks for pointing that feature out though. Have replaced Siri with the play button :)
Edit: Just playing around with this a bit more I noticed the expanded view now has all the normal icons. Either I missed it before or I changed something. Is there a way to make the expanded view the default?
You can tap-hold-slide to adjust across the whole range, rather than tapping then hunting for the slider. You can also set the touch bar to show an expanded control strip by default (which includes a volume up/volume down/mute triple) if you want.
I have the problem where the TouchBar goes blank and it's not even detected by the system any longer (System Preferences - Keyboard) and I have to reboot to get the controls back.
Tweaks like Goldenchaos can help with usability. Volume control becomes a 2-finger slide on the touchbar. It’s not ideal, but it’s certainly better than nothing.
For things like volume control and brightness, you don't have to treat it as a two step process, you can simply press on the volume button, for example, and immediately slide to adjust without moving your finger over to the slider.
I have recently bought the 16" (max GPU, max CPU, 32GB, 2TB disk). It's way better. There's still stuff wrong with it for sure. Some takeaways:
- The keybord is better than recent models, but still not as good as the 2014. I can live with it though.
- The touch bar is still there, but there's an escape key which was my main gripe. I would still prefer an option to not have one though.
- I hate USB-c so so much. The mental overhead of trying to work out what will work with what cable is horrible.
- I had to buy a £250 dock to make everything work as it did before (the TS3 caldigit one on the Apple site). Apple would not recommend a USB-c to mini displayport adapter, and the first one I bought didn't work.
- The screen is lovely.
- The speakers are a massive improvement.
- The trackpad is too big. I hit it accidentally way too much.
- I have it plugged into two external 4k monitors and I keep the lip open, so it's driving three screens. It does this with seemingly no problem or cooling fan use.
I'm definitely keeping it. There's still issues, but it's now simply a much better machine overall (taking speed into account) than my 2014.
We have the same model. It's a much better machine than my old one. I agree with you on all points except the USB-C hate. I don't use it often enough to have to worry about what cable does what. I usually route everything through the TS3 Caldigit, and only ever hook up the TB3 cables to the laptop.
I've got a new MBP (from work) and an x1 yoga personally. The X1's running Linux and frankly works beautifully. The mac's "quirks" aren't counterbalanaced anymore by being the only reasonable unix laptop solution. They're just an annoying PITA.
The Yoga is nice, I have one too, but there was no option to add a dedicated video card, and this issue with the MBP always seems to stem from the dedicated cards.
I recently switched from a 2014 edition MBP to a 2017, and the experience has been terrible. I had to make the switch b/c the battery on the 2014 machine was starting to die and my work had an extra 2017 model.
- popping sounds coming from the chassis that drive me crazy
- bunched up arrow keys that are occasionally unresponsive at least in X11 emacs
- it seems like the touchbar has potential but is difficult to customize
- I find it lame you need an adapter for USB or HDMI.
Most reviewers dont even want to touch on the topic as if Apple told them to do so. The so call new Magic Keyboard doesn't felt anywhere close to the Magic Keyboard used on iMac or iMac Pro. In fact they felt more of the same as the old butterfly, and it is awful.
I am on early 2015 ( brought it in 2017 if I remember correctly because I cant stand the MBP 2016+ ), and I pray it wont break down. It is already getting some strange lock up for no apparent reason.
I would even pay for a brand new 2015 MBP for the same price during its time in 2020.
I waited multiple years to upgrade from a MacBook Pro 2014, but was disappointed year after year, because I read about heating issues, the bad butterfly keyboard or the useless touch-bar.
In 2019 I felt like things are not going to get any better, so I bought a MacBook Pro 2019.
Was quite unhappy that I didn’t wait a bit longer after I saw the 16inch version coming out a few months later, because it had an escape key (which I really miss on mine), but now I am kind of happy that I have the 2019 15 inch version where the heating problem does not appear.
The touch-bar really is completely useless, I find myself tapping the wrong "keys" all the time. Changing volume was so easy before, now it became really hard. But most of all I miss the escape key.
If it wasn’t for macOS I had long picked a Windows laptop.
Cook is a complete businessman, best at cutting costs, increasing profits and attracting customers to buy more. Don't forget that memory began to weld on the motherboard because this can only be replaced and not upgraded. He was a businessman, not an engineer or a designer, and that was the beginning of apple's decline.
This cliched argument is quite ironic and insane. A leader doesn't have to be visionary all the time. Just last week there was a news about Apple selling more Watches than the entire Swiss industry and no one would talk about Cook there but when things go wrong, we forget that it's someone in QA or Product but all the blame goes to how Cook isn't a Product guy.
> A leader doesn't have to be visionary all the time
Yes they do. If they're not visionary, then they're just a manager.
Apple grew because of a visionary, and now it shrinks because the best a manager can do is try to maintain the status quo in the face of changing factors. It's fundamentally a losing battle.
Jobs was a business man and manager, and Apple hasn’t had ‘visionary’ product release every single time, some of them were run-of-the-mill upgrades. Arguably, iPhone may be the only major visionary achievement after Mac 1. Anyway, all of the Apple hecklers talked about how Jobs wasn’t a visionary, or had lost his vision, with every single product release, every Mac change, every iPhone, tablet, watch. Claiming that Jobs was the singular visionary and Apple is doomed without him has a long history, somewhat buys into a pro-Apple narrative, and views Jobs with rose-colored glasses. It’s a nice thought, but not exactly accurate.
> and now it shrinks
By what metric is Apple shrinking? They just reported their best quarter ever.
Cook is riding on the upward trajectory that was set before he took his role. Brand image carries a lot of inertia, and as a manager rather than a visionary, cook focused on getting the most use out of that pre-set trajectory while it lasted.
It has run out of energy. If AR doesn't pay off, it's all downhill for Apple from Q4 this year onwards.
This argument gets more and more ridiculous as time progresses. Apple is worth nearly ten times what it was eight years ago. It’s launched a watch which has, in a few short years, overtaken the entire Swiss watch industry in revenue.
This is just another take on the tired argument that Apple is only successful because of a core group of fanboys/girls who will buy anything just because it’s Apple, despite Apple’s customer base being an order of magnitude greater today than it was back then.
I set some fairly short term and trivially verifiable predictions. Save this comment and come back to it at the end of this year.
Unless Apple's AR play succeeds, they're going to be left in the dust by Chinese offerings with better functionality at half the price.
Cook has had the better part of the decade to come up with something new, and has failed to deliver anything except incremental minor updates which are increasingly convergent on competitor offerings. There is clearly no vision.
Are you going to pretend either AirPods or Apple Watch are meaningfully competitive against other offerings on the market?
There are headphones with better spec than airpods at half the price available right now. They're not locked to any ecosystem. Apple has no idea how to continue competing in the envelope of modern hardware because competitors either beat them or match them on every move but without the premium.
Save my comment. Check back in a year. It'll be a good lesson.
> Are you going to pretend either AirPods or Apple Watch are meaningfully competitive against other offerings on the market?
The definition of meaningfully competitive is growth, revenue, and market share. You're implying they're not competitive, which implies you think they're not making money. By what metric are they not competitive?
> There are headphones with better spec than airpods at half the price available right now. They're not locked to any ecosystem. Apple has no idea how to continue competing in the envelope of modern hardware because competitors either beat them or match them on every move but without the premium.
This claim has always been made, for 35 years, and has always been true of all Apple hardware. Yet they compete and make a lot of money. What you're demonstrating is you don't understand what Apple is making or why people buy their products. What you're demonstrating is that better spec cheaper hardware isn't enough to beat the competition.
An upward trajectory set in motion over 8 years ago?
You have no idea what you are talking about. Watch and AirPods were entirely Tim Cook and that’s one of their biggest successes in the history of the company. You don’t think Jobs had significant misfires? The hockey puck mouse, the Cube, the iPhone antenna issue, etc.? People are mad because the thermal properties of their computer are perceived to be less than perfect and somehow Cook is a failure? That’s ridiculous.
In the context of what we're discussing here, everything Apple does is product (including services), and needs a product visionary.
They've degenerated to minmaxing profits and running focus groups to tell them what to do without any overarching vision or long term plan, just like GP commenter said. It's sad. Steve Jobs is spinning in his grave.
The Swiss watch industry hasn’t gotten subsidies? You might want to check your history.
And the US health insurance industry isn’t buying watches in any great numbers (yet.) The US health insurance interest isn’t driving the demand, the demand is driving the interest.
What metric are you using to point to Apple's decline since Tim Cook came into the company?
Product lines, revenue, customers, market cap, employees, daily client interactions, brand value, customer satisfaction?
Choice as a customer - choice of upgrading the RAM, choice of getting to keep the data in case the motherboard fails, choice of picking a non genius bar repair shop, choice of looking at product schematics, choice of being able to buy legitimate spare parts for Apple products
> What metric are you using to point to Apple's decline since Tim Cook came into the company? Product lines, revenue, customers, market cap, employees, daily client interactions, brand value, customer satisfaction?
Not everything can be measured, or measured practicably. Qualitative judgments are valuable.
Looking at things too much through the lens of metrics can make you blind to many things.
So a rigorous 4 year degree in a highly technical engineering stream doesn’t make him an engineer, but the script kiddie high school dropout making crypto apps is?
Give me a break. Tim Cook is more engineer than 90% of people who call themselves one.
One thing I miss about Steve Jobs is that he hated fan noise. The fact that Macs only made noise under extreme load was something that I really appreciated.
I'm at a loss for what I'm going to do for my next laptop. Windows 10 still has performance issues that Macs don't have, but Windows laptops clearly have better hardware.
Anyone make the switch back to Windows? (Every time I try Linux it feels like a dumpster fire, even though I want to like it.)
>One thing I miss about Steve Jobs is that he hated fan noise. The fact that Macs only made noise under extreme load was something that I really appreciated.
Yes but those were the era of Mac. When Apple were trying to make Mac like an Appliance. But we dont need that anymore. We have a Fanless design that is capable of 90%+ of most consumer's work. It is called iPad.
Without Steve Jobs, the iPad didn't know where to go next.
But now the Mac is mostly a Prosumer Product. And those workloads require fan cooling. Steve just dont like the idea of a consumer product with constant fan spinning.
>> One thing I miss about Steve Jobs is that he hated fan noise.
We also had Macs with heat related problems back then. Most of the fanless designs were 'bad'. G4 Cube, Trashcan Pro...And even though they had fans, does anyone remember how hot the first few Intel MacBook Pro's got? Yowza.
To be fair, my Thinkpad fans come on quite often (more in Windows than Linux which is strange), and they are higher-pitched and generally louder and more annoying than any of my Mac fans are.
Switched to a Surface and it's great (except the touchscreen is useless). Use a remote desktop + homebuilt tower when I need more performance (computational simulations). Use onedrive to sync everything between them.
I've been considering both Linux and Windows (with the linux subsystem, obviously) but so far can't bring myself to do it. I'm leaning towards Linux. My main beef with both ecosystems is the high amount DYI and tweaking needed to get things functioning and that I actually need to make an indepth study of exactly which variants of which hardware to get in order to get a linux setup that works.
With windows I have no love for Windows specifically but would appreciate access to a wider selection of games. For work, all I need is docker and access to linux/unix tooling. Homebrew and docker for mac cover my needs but I've been hearing good things about windows and the linux subsystem. Obviously that kind of stuff works great on Linux as it all runs natively there.
IMHO the big problem with Linux is that people are still thinking about distributions like it is the early nineties. It does not make sense to me for small (or even bigger) linux distributions to even pretend to be able to maintain huge software repositories with distribution specific builds of all OSS known to mankind. What's needed here is people just agreeing on how to package up binaries such that they can be run on any linux distribution after their developers test, sign and release them.
I saw this in action when one of my favorite OSS tools released a major version a few weeks ago and I was able to install the mac build while world + dog was complaining about a lack of pre-packaged binaries for their favorite Linux distros (pretty much all of them). I'm talking about Darktable, which is one reason I'm seriously considering a move to Linux because I absolutely love it and it runs best on Linux. I installed it within 2 hours after it was tagged on Github. That for me sums up the problem with Linux: the application ecosystem remains a mess of incompatibility and middlemen adding dubious value (mainly verifying it does not clash with their other customizations for other packages).
IMHO this is a reason why the most widely used consumer versions of Linux are basically things like Android, ChromeOS, and a wide range of software for TVs and other embedded hardware; none of which involve a mainstream Linux distribution or package manager. The only package managers you need on a mac are for installing OSS software. Normal software is just a simple drag and drop to install and move to trash to uninstall. Apple nailed this already with OS 9 before Linux was a thing. MS with its need for custom installers never figured this out either.
Docker is kind of doing this for servers these days and snaps look promising but still a bit flaky. I think it's telling that the hope for gaming on Linux is basically Steam doing the hard work of providing a way to install software on Linux that is compatible with the goals of software developers that want to release software directly to users instead of to some middlemen that need to repackage, modify, an tweak a custom package of your software.
I find that I'm spending more time tweaking MacOS than the two others.
At my previous job I was lucky to use a workstation. It was running a plain Ubuntu LTS provisioned by my IT using Puppet. Zero maintenance on my end.
For the handful of applications where I wanted the latest versions, getting upstream or PPA packages was usually enough. I don't know why you think Snap packages are flaky, they're great for things like Jetbrains IDEs. Never had a problem.
I admit Homebrew gives me access to the latest binaries quickly, but it's also the slowest and most brittle package managers I've been using.
WSL is the bee's knees for me and is about to get a lot better with WSL 2 (can talk to an X server for instance).
I couldn't deal with the Wayland/X, not playing nice with Nvidia, etc bullshit on Linux. Since I really only care about the terminal WSL has been great.
I have an issue with an external monitor, confirmed with multiple users on MacRumors forums [1], that looks like a software bug.
When using opened Macbook with an external screen power usage by discrete GPU is not less 19W almost no matter what (resolution, screen size, etc.).
In my case, with new LG 5K, GPU power usage in clamshell mode is near 5W and with the lid open – 19.5W (and the laptop is too noisy to be usable as an additional screen).
The thermal design of Macbook pros just isn't adequate for >4 core high clock speed CPUs, especially with a discrete GPU thrown in the mix too.
I had one of those i9 2018 MBPros and it was always super hot. Much happier now with a 13" 4 core MBpro, it runs quite cool and without any fan noise most of the time.
Built a separate AMD 3900x PC with an Nvidia GPU for heavy lifting, and can use that remotely with the MBpro if needed.
For what it's worth, this only occurs when connected to an external monitor -- which causes the discrete GPU to overheat, even with no apps running.
Using the built-in display (with the discrete GPU on) is fine.
I’m using 2 external displays (one 4K) and it’s not overheating and the fans are completely silent.
My 16” i9 is MUCH quieter than my 15” 2015 Macbook pro, and it’s not like i’m browsing Facebook: i’m constantly compiling and running tests on every file save.
My macbook feels warm but not hot, even when I touch it at the fan exhausts. I do notice my battery only lasting about 2,5 hours though.
Playing games it runs great and while you can hear the fans, it’s much better compared to my 15” 2015.
Personally i’m really impressed with the cooling and performance of the 16”
I wish someone would publish a guide for MacBooks based on palm rest idle temperature, having a hot sweaty palmrest (especially in warmer climates) bugs me more than having a bit of fan noise and if it was clear and transparent maybe Apple would design better thermal solutions.
I have MBP 16" with the 8-core i9, palm rest sensors show they are at 32C and 30C at my regular usage (browser, IDE, slack and other apps). However i don't use external screen.
These problems are not new or only affecting MacBooks. I had a 27" iMac for work and it cooked the display panel, HDD and the discrete graphics card. I did drive the system, including the GPU, reasonably hard, but nothing exceptional. To Apple's credit, they did replace the HDD and the display panel for free, but when the graphics card died I just gave up on it.
It seems like the combination of the form factor, components and thermal solutions that Apple uses just don't add up.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro has a completely different thermal design compared to the 15-inch, so I’m not sure what relevance your 2018 experience bears on the 16-inch.
It’s basically a different computer in a lot of ways, despite looking similar on the outside.
To be fair, I run 2 4K monitors at 60hz and I don’t hear my fans doing normal work (Excel, Firefox, PyCharm, Jupiter Labs). I use a DisplayLink hub (idk if that matters, but I’ve heard DisplayLink is driven by CPU)
However, when I watch a 1080p movie, no matter what player, on just the laptop display, the mouse cursor feels sluggish and my fans are on 50-75% at all times.
I have this happen too, on my 2014 at work. In Chrome, like clockwork, any time I watch a video that isn't on YouTube my fans spin up to the point where it's distracting. Not sure if I've had it affect my mouse cursor, though. I do have a 1080p monitor plugged in but I never have fan issues outside of watching videos.
It sounds like something is forcing the window manager to composite your cursor rather than leaving it as a hardware overlay. That’s the usual cause of sluggish feeling cursor. Now, as to what’s doing that, it could be AirPlay mirroring or perhaps some screen capture/sharing software, or maybe it is related to your displays.
DisplayLink for 4k60 involves compression, yes. So it's probably driving the monitor through a different flow and relying more on the CPU instead of relying on the GPU (the latter will naturally increase GPU heat dissipation)
Just to add my two cents, I drive a 4K monitor in a quiet room and don’t notice any significant difference in operation compared to my previous 2016 model.
Perhaps this is a driver bug that hits some configurations or situations?
The thermal design of the 16-inch seems adequate especially when compared to outgoing 15-inch models, so I think it’s something they can fix in software.
Something to note: all recent discrete GPU MacBooks will switch to discrete graphics as soon as you plug in any external monitor. Higher power consumption and heat should be expected to a reasonable extent (everyone’s definition of reasonable is different).
My new i9 15" is a lot cooler and more silent than the i7 2015 it's been replacing. I guess doing a completely clean install with nothing else than using iCloud to sync data from the old machine fixed a lot of software related performance issues that piled up on the old one. I expect the 2015 to be a lot better again after a clean install. I think most of the problems on the 2019 are software related.
Not seeing any of the heat / performance problems mentioned by other people, the only really weird thing I've seen is that the color palette was way too dark getting out of sleep until I minimized and maximized brightness. That helped until the next sleep where it was too bright this time and the brightness trick didn't work anymore. Finally fixed it by switching between another color profile and back.
Otherwise TouchID was pretty good, don't really notice the touchpad in any way good or bad and the touch bar goes largely ignored just like the row of keys it replaced. Keyboard action is nice, it's slightly more clicky than the 2015 but still has about the same travel.
I really doubt anybody still on a 2015 or older will regret getting the 16". Probably the software problems get ironed out over the course of the next months.
More and more on the Mac hardware it feels like "revolutionary" now means it "just works" again.
The one comment in that thread:
"Bottom line, the combination of using the GPU and CPU is pushing the MBP into heat conditions causing the FAN issues and in our case, possibly damage to the GPU."
I was taking the whole Apple MBP keyboard thing with a pinch of salt, but the keyboard on mine has been degrading significantly over the last few weeks & I'm going to have to take it in for repair. Grr.
I have the same issue with a 2016 15" model. When I plug an external monitor, the place you put your wrists on gets super hot. I had to buy an external keyboard/trackpad long before my keyboard started to fail.
I use Firefox and my machine is silent. Typing on it now. 20+ tabs open and about 20 others apps open. I can't hear my machine without putting my ear against it.
This isn't even the bad part. Apple have a massive batch of faulty macbook pro 2019 16" machines and aren't admitting it.
I'm on my 3rd $7000 replacement 2 months after purchase, this third still faulty so now swapping for an early 2020 model when it comes out. I'm lucky if it lasts longer than an hour without restarting. Terrible during renders.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250905859
Funny thing is, when I do eventually get a machine that isn't faulty, I still have to deal with Catalina, since the new macbooks can't be downgraded and Catalina has a lot of sleep bugs that restart also:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250826263
Every single 2019 16" macbook owner has also experienced the speaker popping issue, which after 2 system updates has simply lowered in volume instead of being loud and noticeable.
PopGate. GPUgate. KernelGate. T2Gate. It is actually far beyond a joke, this was the true cost of apple become the world's first 'trillion dollar company'. They cut so many corners all they can produce are lemons now.
I've got the 16" MBP and definitely echo many of the same frustrations that others have noted here.
Owning Apple products nowadays is a bit of a masochistic endeavor in many ways - a year ago my local Linux group had me write a funny book on "Escaping the Cult of Mac" that talked about this (https://github.com/jasoneckert/CultOfMac).
There are tools that can measure some sensor temp and control the fan speed according to that on Mac. I was using it on my older MacBook Pro and the fan usage was relatively better than when it was set to auto.
I went from a MacBook Pro 13” late 2013, to a 2019 16” and I have the same issue, running the exact same development setup, and I hear the fan much much more on the new machine. I know it’s faster etc so it can’t directly be compared, but still, I feel like I notice it now, every single day multiple times, where with the old 13 inch I never really noticed it at all.
*Same setup and dev env on new MacBook as on the old
I have the Macbook Pro 16 and have been using it for a few months now. Overall, I think its pretty bad laptop for how expensive it is. Yes Apple fixed many things people were complaining about but it is a perfect example of how Apple has stopped innovating and stopped caring about the MacBook line. In fact, I dislike it so much I have started using my 10 year old MacBook Air instead of my brand new Macbook Pro.
Things I dislike about the MBP 16:
- Still has the touch bar
- Screen size is awful. I like to work with windows size by size and the 16 inch screen size is awkward because most website won't re-size properly.
- Its heavy as hell, slightly thinker than the old ones.
- Its slow. Yes, all the RAM and CPU and the thing is
laggy. I don't know why but it just has a bad "feel" to it.
- Touchpad is too big. Its gigantic and I often end up touching it by accident.
- Its crazy expensive
In the end, I will end up selling it and using my 10 year old Macbook Air until it dies. After that I'm not sure.. maybe I will try the newer Macbook Air and see if its tolerable. At least it doesnt have a touchbar.
My experience has been quite different from yours, so I figured I'd share mine as well.
- Yep touchbar just sucks, I've spent too much time messing around with with the default version, bettertouchtool, and pock, and I cannot find anything its good at. Worse yet, the volume slider often will freeze the touch bar completely.
- The screen size and format is wonderful. I hate how Dell and Thinkpad laptops I've used in the past, have these widescreen formats, where very few lines of code can be visible at a time due to the limited vertical space.
- I didn't realize this until you pointed it out, but it's definitely very heavy compared to my 15-inch 2018 model and thinkpad x230. This haven't bothered me at all, however.
- It feels significantly faster than my 2018 model, and the CPU temperature stays much lower under the same workloads.
- I know a lot of people have trouble with this, so if you've previously had this problem the 16 inch doesn't change that. Both my hands rest on the touch pad while typing, and I have not had this problem once. Your mileage may vary.
- I got mine discounted down to roughly 2k. Pretty ridiculous yeah!
- The battery life is insane. On a simple workload it will last me an entire day. On my full workload (Flutter development with android and ios simulators open) it lasts about half a day.
In the end I'm very happy with my purchase. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm still using this laptop 8 years from now.
I like to keep my macbook on an elevated stand when its connected to monitor/keyboard/mouse. Does anyone know of a passive cooling stand (no fans) that works with macbooks? Maybe just something with a giant finned heatsink that presses right up against the middle of the case or something?
I use a Rain Design mStand. It's basically just a raised chunk of aluminum. It probably passively cools to some extent (it claims it does), but I have no metrics to say how much.
(Of course, you could possibly also lay a freezer pack on the bottom of the stand, and maybe it would wick heat away even faster, and still passively...)
So I'm just checking out a video review of that stand. It looks like there's rubber pads that maybe raise the laptop up a bit off the plate. Can you tell me if your laptop is actually laying flush against the aluminum plate, or is there an air gap?
I laughed at OP misspelling “fan talk” in the throwaway account’s name. Then I flagged this, because it’s the third time this past week that someone has tried to rabble-rouse about fan noise with a link to poor data and/or extensive discussion threads with terrible quality data and no summary.
A meta-analysis of this discussion would have been super interesting. A link to Apple’s equivalent of a Reddit post is not, especially from a throwaway account.
I feel bad for the people with fan noise but this is not the way to handle it. Please do better. Collect data, measure power draw, and most of all document how you performed your tests so that you can start asking others to perform those exact tests, to your specifications. More science, less complaining, please.
LOL, no. I’ve been a HN reader for years, and this MBP fan issue is driving me nuts for a while now, I wanted it to get some attention.
Then I realized I don’t remember my HN password, that’s why the new account.
My name is Antal. K is the initial of my last name.
Glad we cleared that up.
But the last part of your message is noted, thank you. Next time I will do so.
Apologies re: name assumption. There’s always a lot of throwaway accounts with blank profiles and they’re impossible to tell from genuine content with any certainty. I’ll not comment about account names in the future, it was a bad call.
I got one, heard the fan, felt the heat. Switched on "Automatic Graphics Switching" in the power saver options and as I type it's on my lap as quiet as a mouse and as cool as a cucumber.
For me (and at least one other commenter in this thread), the issue occurs when plugged into an external monitor. The linked thread seems to indicate the same. Any thoughts on that? I'll check the relevant setting.
I cloned it and then compiled it with xcode. I found one problem which is a badly encoded file, which I fixed using the file inspector to set the encoding and then saved it. After that it built and runs. On my 16' 2020 MBP it allows me to turn off my 5300M. When I open WOW it refuses to allow the card to be turned off, its web site says that's what it will do with an external monitor too.
I just installed and set up Ubuntu after a long time. IMO both Windows and Linux have totally caught up to OSX and while their hardware is still marginally better, that gap is on a downward trend as well.
With mobile, I think Android is close on software and far superior on hardware.
I wonder what happens to Apple stock if they don't get a new product line that takes off - cars, TVs etc. Will ApplePay eating PayPal and Stripe offset this downward trend enough?
I'm on a 15" MBP and I'm really missing the physical escape key (especially as a long time vim user).
I was considering the 16" MBP, but I think I'll just go ahead with my Hacking-tosh build instead! I spend 99% of my productive time at my desk. For anything on the move I'm more inclined to go "light", a 13" Air perhaps`. I was hoping iPad would cut it, but I'm afraid iPad OS is too limiting.
TL;DR:
1) It seems this is Intel's fault not Apple's
2) For fix - use TGPro (or something similar) to create your own fan speed profile (I use TGPro since many years without any issues)
I have a MBP 16 with a Philips 48.8” 5120x1440 monitor, running with the lid closed. I have the extra 8GB on the GPU. The only time I’ve noticed fan noise was when I was running Minecraft with Optifine and a very aggressive shader pack. At first I thought the hissing sound was from rain in the game. Apart from that I haven’t really heard anything.
I upgraded from a 2013 iMac to a 2019 model recently for two reasons, the primary being my 2013 used an Nvidia 780m chipset and Nvidia no longer made compatible drivers and Apple wasn't doing any real updates either. Second I wanted he higher resolution screen.
However, the fan which I rarely had come on in the 2013 is hyper active at times in the 2019 even with similar content. Oddly it is not consistent. Now I did go from i5 to i9 which do run hotter but they are very spiky as in the seem to flare a core or two enough to excite the fan logic.
The GPU while getting warm (Vega 48) will less likely cause the fans to spin up past 2k than a random cpu spike. So either the fan logic is wonky or the processor logic is. While I understand that core balancing is complex it just seems to randomly jump single channels far more often than load across the whole
FWIW, disabling Intel Turbo Boost (using Turbo Boost Switcher) has solved all my 16" MBP fan noise issues with no noticable performance impact for my daily tasks - you can even disable it in Bootcamp Windows (by setting CPU to 99% in power settings) and still get good framerates in Destiny 2.
My ASUS GA502 makes all kinds of noises. It has a loud coil whine when the keyboard backlight is off/dim, and the audio chipset is constantly popping the speakers by turning on and off to save power.
I bought it open box; the buyer probably went insane from the noise before they could even set up Windows.
Interesting. I have an Acer Swift 1 with passive cooling and just the integrated Intel graphics, and it seems to run a couple of degrees hotter when I've got an external monitor connected. Not so much that it worries or bothers me, I just think it's kind of strange.
Hmm, I have the 6-core i7 version of the 16-inch MBP, and I'm driving two 2560 x 1440 displays (in addition to the built-in display). I have Chrome open with dozens of tabs, lots of other apps running, etc. and I haven't noticed any unexpected fan load.
On a related note, I have a 2018 MBP touchbar and it's currently out at Apple so they can replace the bulging battery. My guess is that it runs too hot sitting on my wooden desktop.
Anyone have any great recommendations for quiet cooling systems?
I've found if I push the MacBook 16 at a certain point on the bottom of the chassis, it makes weird squeaking noises like there's a bird trapped in the machine. Other than that, a perfect machine so far!
My biggest painpint with mbpro 15 2018 is double keystroke problem. Just driving me nuts. Apart from that, I would never change mbpro for any other machine.
Mine seems fine. I have not noticed any more fan noise than any previous macbook. I use it for 8+ hours a day, open, usually with a Luna Display connected.
This isn't surprising at all to me. All Apple has to do is put "i7" on the box and their customers will eat it up and then just browse Facebook and YouTube. Their whole shtick for years has been selling "pro" devices to regular consumers who aspire to be pros.
