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Warm up your MacBook (2019)

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Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#101

Post by philistine »

blackoil wrote: post #100
smarks wrote: post #55

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occ…

Those were John Ive era laptops where form ruled function. Poor thermal, less ports, less keys were all features.

Form always ruled function with Jony Ive, but he always had a good eye for the way compromises shook out. During that era, Ive was creatively checked out but Cook kept him on to maintain the stock price.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#102

Post by jorgeleo »

smarks wrote: post #55

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occ…

i decided to do an experiment and try to run an LLM in my old 2013 MBP. i7, 16 gb mem, 1 tb hd.

Installed Linux mint Xfce Edition for lightness, installed ollama, start to test different models. Gemma4 e4b runs perfectly fine, exposed it to the network, connected to it with my current notebook and use vs code codex to start to run inference.

For about 30 minutes of bliss, this setup work at a reasonable speed... then the MBP shut it self down. It was so hot that it trigger the safety mechanism, the fans sounded like the laptop was about to take off.

I though on leaving it on inside the fridge, but then the WIFI wouldn't reach.

On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5... the experiment didn't work as intended, but it did work.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#103

Post by close04 »

pja wrote: post #91
reitzensteinm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling. My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery. I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorchin…

The i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC. Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.

> Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.

Intel just reenacted IBM's history with Apple, particularly the G5 era. That CPU was instantly a no-go for anything mobile. In workstations it was cranked ever higher with very poor power-frequency scaling, needing water cooling for the beastly 200W idle power consumption and close to 1kW full throttle.

That went well so was a perfect role model for Intel's i9.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#104

Post by alexwwang »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95
alexwwang wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the horribly broken TUI you mentioned is OpenCode, I’d say yes. That’s exactly what I am experiencing.

Sure, if that's what you're using, then that's definitively buggy, unless it's doing compilation or something actually using your resources, just making HTTP calls shouldn't be heavy for your computer. Claude Code was mainly what I was thinking about, as it similarly broken, but I'm sure there are more out there as most of them seem vibe-coded at best .

Yes. Whatever *code, the same when they are working. The node.js backend is awful.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#105

Post by mfro »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #90
smarks wrote: post #55

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occ…

I had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling. My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery. I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorchin…

It was a truly ridiculous idea to put an i9 in any laptop. That generation of i9 is difficult to cool even with liquid cooler systems in big ATX cases.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#106

Post by vibcdingenjoyer »

amomchilov wrote: post #6

How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside? All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?

I’ve always been told to let electronics and musical instruments slowly warm up in their case after bringing them inside. Supposedly reduces the chances of condensation forming.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#108

Post by andrewstuart2 »

imp0cat wrote: post #62
kingjimmy wrote: post #24

"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... " they're doing what to my CPU????

Fully utilize. Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!

Now that's a fun microcontroller project idea. An analog dashboard for ram/cpu/whatever. I'm sure it's been done.

Edit: https://sasakaranovic.com/projects/diy-analog-resource-monit...

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#109

Post by smarks »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #90
smarks wrote: post #55

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occ…

I had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling. My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery. I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorchin…

Oh yeah, I forgot about the graphics.

I had (and still have) a 4k external monitor. Naturally I wanted the MBP to drive the monitor with a resolution that took advantage of all the pixels. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU power consumption would produce enough heat to run the fans even if the rest of the system was completely idle! If I set the output to full HD the GPU would cool down and the fans would turn off. But full HD on a 4k monitor is a waste.

It was very strange. I could drive the monitor at 4k but with the image upside down, and the power consumption would be low. But flip the image right side up and it would run hot and turn on the fans.

It took a couple weeks of fiddling, but I finally found a combination of refresh rate, resolution, image orientation (right side up!), and cabling that let me drive the monitor at high resolution without running the fans. What a pain.

(I used iStat menus to monitor GPU power consumption. At “good” settings it consumed about 5w. At “bad” settings it would consume 17w. At a bad setting you could immediately see the various temperatures go up and the fans spinning up to compensate.)

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#110

Post by tacomagick »

jorgeleo wrote: post #102
smarks wrote: post #55

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occ…

i decided to do an experiment and try to run an LLM in my old 2013 MBP. i7, 16 gb mem, 1 tb hd. Installed Linux mint Xfce Edition for lightness, installed ollama, start to test different models. Gemma4 e4b runs perfectly fine, exposed it to the network, connected to it with my current notebook and use vs code codex to start to run inference. For about 30 minutes of bliss, this setup work at a reasonable speed... then…

Could be in need of a thermal paste refresh etc.?
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