Ask HN: Should one buy Intel-based Macs now?

My company assigned me a 16" MBP with gobs of memory and all that. I am sitting here right now with an extremely light set of applications running, CPU is 98% idle, I've got a 4K 27" monitor and the MacBook is in clamshell mode. Plugged in and fully charged. Ambient temperature is 25C and CPU temp is 60C.

Both fans are running loud enough to notice: 2600RPM, about 27%, and that's about average when it's not asleep. It's too loud to watch a quiet movie without headphones.

If I had full control of my kit, I would seriously consider ditching the 16" MBP in favor of a 27" iMac just in the hope that the cooling system isn't a complete disaster.

As for the ARM question, I am very much looking forward to buying an ARM Macbook Air (or whatever) for personal use.

But since I have no idea exactly when one will show up that does what I need; and since I expect the Intel Macs to be supported for many years to come; and since especially for a desktop it's also quite nice with other OS's; I wouldn't hesitate to buy an Intel Mac if I needed one.

Just not the damned 16" MacBook Ventilator.

I'm in the same boat. I'm kind of done with Mac though because Catalina broke a bunch of VST's I used and Live 9. I'm not paying for an upgrade on Ableton Live because an OS upgrade. It's not even that old. Live 1 still installs on Windows just fine. I guess Catalina is getting us used to all the stuff breaking and never working on ARM. People really expect someone like Propellerheads Reason to work on ARM? It doesn't even have 4k support. Mark my words, there is going to be big name music software that will never work on Arm. They'll just turn in to Windows only support. At least then they don't have to rewrite their software every two years for Mac. These codebases go back decades.

I had to downgrade to Mojave but how long is that actually going to work. Stuff moves too fast on Apple. I can install old deprecated software and Windows and it boots up just fine. Cakewalk Project 5 for example and load up projects that are 15 years old. All of the old Cakewalk VST's still work fine on Windows but stopped working on Mac at Yosemite. It's just pitiful. If I wasn't a mobile developer I would have dropped Mac in a heartbeat.

I would also strongly recommend avoiding the 16inch dungbook. I was issued one about a month ago by my office, and it's... not good.

It runs hot as hell and has some serious charging/graphics issues.

My company has issued about 40 of them, about about 12 have had to be returned to apple for graphics problems.

In general, I would not buy the first iteration of a major new Apple product. If you look back the first Macbook Air, first iPhone, first iPad, first Apple Watch... the third or fourth iteration absolutely blew away the first.

So this seems like a great time to get the latest Intel Mac. By the time you're ready to replace it, Apple will be past iteration #1 of the ARM Macs, hopefully well past it.

The reason I started running it in clamshell mode, after years of keeping my 13" open, was the the GPU would massively overheat when running an external monitor, so I'd have the fans running at well over 50% all the time in that case. Clamshell fixed it at the time.

Seems to play nicer with my other (Dell) monitor but when I was using Garage Band (only on the external monitor!) it got so loud I had to quit GB and let it cool down... and I still never went over about 20% CPU. The fans are pretty normal when I only use the built-in monitor, but the case still gets way too hot to rest on my legs.

I'll try the right side power, thanks for the tip!