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Warm up your MacBook (2019)

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Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#111

Post by aeyes »

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.

You can't tell me that this wasn't known by Apple before shipping the product. Why did they not provide adequate cooling for the CPU?

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#112

Post by bartread »

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…

On a laptop that old it might be worth opening it up to blow all the dust out with a compressor or air duster. I’ve often found that to work wonders on old MacBook Pros.

The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#113

Post by asimovDev »

nottorp wrote: post #84
asimovDev wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am mostly in PHPStorm with several projects open + sometimes I have Xcode and/or Android Studio open as well

Haven't used PHPStorm but I know Android Studio does a lot of stuff in the background so I wouldn't be surprised if other JetBrains IDEs do the same. Although PHP isn't compiled...

There's still indexing, linting and code analysis tools running as well as multiple Docker containers (those are pretty much idle outside of running tests or migrations to be fair) and whatever else it could be doing in the background.

I spend 95% of the time with just PHPStorm and other stuff like the terminal, slack and ticketing open. And the browser of course (safari). Xcode and Android Studio are rarely opened. Mostly when I want to test out something in the apps that isn't on testflight / firebase yet.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#115

Post by dunham »

dangus wrote: post #36
Analemma_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that running on Rosetta 2? Rosetta 2 does (or did, maybe it's removed now) a fine job running x86 code on Apple Silicon, but boy was it cycle-hungry to do it.

Apple Silicon is not really the simultaneously silent and quiet and cool system it was in the M1 days. If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan. MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool. Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willing…

I probably should have clarified that I'm on an M1 then (a macbook pro, so there is a fan). I didn't realize the newer ones get warmer.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#117

Post by pja »

aeyes wrote: post #111
pja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You can't tell me that this wasn't known by Apple before shipping the product. Why did they not provide adequate cooling for the CPU?

This was a laptop, so cooling was very constrained. The fans can only be so big & you can only shift so much air in & out of a MacBook.

I presume Apple knew perfectly well but wanted the halo product to sell to those people who will always pay extra for the perceived “top of the line” product. Once Intel branding had created an i9 that was a bigger number than an i7, then Apple was going to sell it.

It was faster than the i7 after all: just not for very long!

My entirely speculative theory is that the poor thermal characteristics of that era of Intel CPUs didn’t really become apparent until quite late in the development process & by that point Apple had probably committed to buying a fair chunk of Intel’s output.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#118

Post by gitpusher »

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…

> On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5...

Hold my beer. I'm going to run Qwen on this 3rd-generation iPod... somewhere my partner can see

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#120

Post by jorgeleo »

bartread wrote: post #112
jorgeleo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a laptop that old it might be worth opening it up to blow all the dust out with a compressor or air duster. I’ve often found that to work wonders on old MacBook Pros. The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.

I have personally replaced the battery a couple of times already... but a good clean up is a good idea
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