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MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

discussions.apple.com

271–280 of 311 posts

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

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.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#272
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/rfLcGc

that's a 2 year old CPU

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#273
post #14

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 ad…

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 act…

> 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.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#274
post #256
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Je…

I use RubyMine and Webstorm simultaneously on a daily basis with three 1440p monitors (one of which is an ultrawide) and my laptop screen on.

I have absolutely zero lag.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#275
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. Any model you can recommend?

Dell XPS 15's and Precisions 55xx's allow this trick. You can buy them from the manufacturer with no discrete graphics cards. I have one with a card which is physically turned off for the same trick.

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.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#276
post #28

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 qu…

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.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#278

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. Thing…

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.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#279

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 fir…

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 l…

Try NixOS. Declarative specification of your whole system. Super easy to maintain.

Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)

#280
post #155
post #28

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 qu…

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.

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...

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