I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew called "Hot" which tells you temperature and throttling percentage, and confirmed that this was indeed problem.
This happens when the room is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the CPU is at 3% utilization. Can't find root cause, or if this is even considered abnormal, but the laptop is defective in my opinion.
Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there is so little public awareness about it - most of the machines like your macbook are indeed defective.
The only solution unfortunately is to do some more research & read reviews which cover throttling & thermal management before you buy your next laptop to make sure you're not buying something that is defective. On my previous Dell XPS laptop the CPU and GPU shared one heatpipe & heatsink. It could handle 100% CPU with an external monitor, but the GPU was much more power hungry and placing any significant load on the GPU made the CPU throttle significantly. Each manufacturer & product has different thermal management solutions and you need to do research before buying to see if a laptop will work for you. You'll also want to see whether external displays are always driven by the discrete GPU instead of the integrated GPU on the CPU - even if not being heavily used, just turning on the discrete GPU creates a fair bit of heat.
Or just buy a gaming laptop if you can accept with the added size & heft - they're often cheaper for equivalent CPU/GPU than the 'premium' laptops like MacBook, XPS, but sometimes don't get the newest features (Thunderbolt, USB-C charging, etc.) as early. One of my friends had a gaming laptop with the same specs as my XPS and when under load his laptop would blow out enormous amounts of hot air from its big vents, whereas the XPS clearly had a much lower heat removal capacity.
Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation).
The M1 MacBooks are the outliers here. They go to toe on many benchmarks with e.g. the Ryzen 3700X and even beats it in some areas such as single-thread performance or through dedicated hardware (e.g. matrix multiplication). And the M1 can be passively cooled. After many generations of Intel MacBooks, the M1 MacBook was a revelation.
I am curious though whether they can maintain this in newer models, which are supposed to have 6 (or perhaps even more) high-performance cores. We'll see.
It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. [...] a gaming laptop if
I feel like towers are under-appreciated these days. A lot of people I see with these overpowered laptops use it plugged into a screen anyway. Why not buy a tower with a Ryzen 5900X or 5950X? It will blow away your laptop CPU and with a high-performance tower cooler, it will stay cool and won't make a lot of noise. Same for GPUs. Every time I hear about people buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU to do machine learning... Just buy a tower and SSH into the machine. Your life will be so much more pleasant.
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
Yes, and that's why it should be illegal for firms to sell broken devices as we can read in this thread. Stop pretending everything can be smaller and prettier, just build stuff that works no matter what it looks like.
Apple is also guilty on the smartphone front. They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I remember when "dumb phones" lasted many years and held battery for at least a week... we have let their shiny advertising corrupt our minds and have lost features and created even more environmental disaster as a result.
> They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now.
I'm still using an iPhone 7 for 5 years now without issue, which is longer than any dumb phone I had in the past. Nobody is forced to buy the last iPhone every year, especially since they don't bring a lot of improvements anyway.
And you probably don't even have to make it a whole lot of thicker or weightier to have a better heat dissipation at least these days. Just a little thicker which still keeps it very portable and probably increase grip in fact will get a lot more room for fan/airflow which probably don't increase weight to that degree.
At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version.
I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.
Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.
yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA.
Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
My 16” Intel MBP has this issue. My 13” M1 MBP does not.
Nothing from VMs to cross-compiling large toolchains has caused throttling in a fanless laptop. And that's while driving a 6k monitor and charging at full wattage.
A question about the M1: can you actually run an x86 VM under Rosetta? A large part of my job involves driving VMs for expensive hardware loaded with dev tools. I thought the answer was "no", which has put me off getting an M1, but just wanted to check.
> not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation
Those also have cooling problems. I bought a bulky one with 3 fans just because it had a nice processor. It couldn't sustain high performance under load for more than 5 seconds even with the fans maxed out. Compiling some code pushes CPU temperatures into the 80-90 ℃ range. Scrolling a chat in WhatsApp Web also overheats my laptop.
I've given up on laptops. If they require cooling at all, the manufacturer did it wrong.
>> a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
There is. You don't need to keep that hardware running 24/7. That is a problem in the OS and associated software. Apple could disable all these monitoring daemons and accept the tiny delays in starting various things, accept some fan noise, accept a mic that isn't tuned to a room, accept that the computer will take a few extra seconds to wake from sleep, accept that charging won't be lightning fast. But that isn't Apple. That isn't what Apple's customers want. Those seconds are precious. They want everything all services to remain at attention 24/7 ready to attend their slightest need. If that means burning a few extra watts then so be it.
I am not an apple customer. My laptop is currently turned off... properly off. I can live with waiting a few seconds for it to boot because my time is cheap. So is my power bill. And so is my laptop's carbon footprint.
What you say may be right, but it's not really related to the parent's complaint.
If you run a stripped-down distro of Linux, running only the bare minimum, no service listening for anything, no service reporting on anything, etc, the issue still stands if the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Say they're working on some big project in a compiled language from the middle of nowhere with unreliable internet, so they can't offload compiling to someone else's computer. Or they're into video, etc.
There are many use cases for a laptop with strong specs. Not everyone has such a use. But the fact is that high-powered components stuck in a small enclosure will have a bad time with thermals.
>>the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work.
Beefy hardware or not isn't the point. My hardware is rather beefy. The delays I speak of are not delays in accomplishing the actual commuting task. I'm talking about those tiny delays in spinning up a piece of hardware. I don't car is my threadripper's 49 extra cores take a few milliseconds to wake up from a deep sleep. I can live with a microphone that takes a second to turn on as I dial a voice call. Once the actual task is going, those little delays are in the past.
But Apple doesn't tolerate little startup/wakeup delays. Apple would rather burn a little power keeping everything ready at a moment's notice.
The MBA's sleep mode is very inexpensive in battery life compared to the advantages. Maybe you don't open your laptop 50 times in a day, but I do, and it's very practical to be able to just pop into a meeting, take the laptop out, and start typing immediately.
New m1 MBP is one of best computers I've ever owned. Recently just sold 2020 i7 16" MBP and it was a dog. Also had 15.4 2018 prior. 2020 constantly had fan running with performance throttling. M1 doesn't break a sweat. Would like more RAM, but rarely sense need.
It would work. However since the product is a laptop with the key word being lap... manufactures actually have to throttle beyond what would be required from a physical standpoint. While laptops can and do emit heat from the top & bottom of the chassis that is actually a negative since you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned.
Although this is a somewhat recent development/concern, you could fine and maybe still can find non-Apple laptops from the ~2015 era that will have extremely hot surface temperatures. Any many more laptops were just designed poorly so as the regular cooling solution gets less effective due to dust the keyboard and bottom will become exceedingly hot.
This is why Apple cannot add the thermal pads themselves, there are some regulations around the temperature limits. I never use it on my lap though. And as mentioned in the other comment "erythema ab igne" is a real thing is seems.
I was considering these for work, but most reasonably priced options have a poor display. I think there's a gap in the market for gaming performance with a decent display.
I ended up going with a 4k x1 carbon and been pretty happy so far
My MBP 16" can‘t run my LG Ultrafine 5K (sold by Apple) without fan noise.
Recently I also figured out that "automatic switching of graphic mode" (enabled by default) causes noticeable input lag. If I type text, the last typed character sometimes doesn’t show until another character is typed or I have to wait up to 5 seconds(!).
Turning off "automatic graphic mode switching" stopped the input lag completely, but the battery duration is down from like 10 hours to 3 or something.
Do you use an external keyboard? My MBP struggles to process key presses etc. when my external monitor is plugged in to the HDMI slot immediately next to the USB port.
Using the USB port on the other side works without issues.
I like that they clearly admitted to it, so I know what I'm buying. Other products usually pretend to support anything and let me discover the issues after purchase (like an XPS 15 with a GPU that couldn't actually run games the GPU supported, because of insane thermal throttling).
I'm using it on one of the Pro XDR displays, and it's quite impressive for the cheapest notebook to drive this monster of a pixel-wielding behemoth with zero issues or complaints...
(2732*2048 + 2560*1600 + 6016*3384 = 30,000,000 pixels, although I'm not sure if the iPad receives a pixel signal, or renders its own content)
So it doesn't seem to be a lack of graphics power that causes this limitation.
(Incidentally, the XDR and current-gen iPad pro displays are the first where I get the illusion, when watching high-res video, that there's an actual window in the display and I am looking at a real scene behind it)
Anecdotal reports online seem to indicate displaylink on m1 is fine for everything except gaming including 4k60 video. M1 is not something you really want to do gaming on anyway, especially not with multiple monitors. I’ve done a video conference on my m1 air through a displaylink-connected monitor and I couldn’t tell the difference from having it on the built in screen. I guess it depends what people want to do, but I think for most people most of the time this is a perfectly suitable solution on m1 (not so much on older weaker intel cpu’s though).
There is a bug for 5500M GPU that causes 18W sustained power draw with one external monitor. It should normally be 5W or so.
The throttling is due to your VRM chips overheating. There is no temp sensor for this exposed to the user.
The VRM chips have no cooling. The high GPU watt draw pushes the temps of the VRMs above their thermal limits with no cooling.
The solution is to put thermal pads on your VRMs to dissipate the heat to the backplate. Completely resolved my issue.
Disabling TurboBoost can also help. Running fans at max speed at all times too because Mac is slow to ramp them up when load increases.
Apparently the 5600M doesn’t have this issue and the 5500M bug is fixed in Monterey. But the thermal pad mod is still amazing. Apple couldn’t do it stock, because there are regulations about hot a backplate can get related to risk of burns.
This happens when the room is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the CPU is at 3% utilization. Can't find root cause, or if this is even considered abnormal, but the laptop is defective in my opinion.