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MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

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Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#121

Genuinely curious: I don't work in the space of CAD, video editing or any other field that people tend to use to justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet. Do these really do anything a sufficiently equipped laptop from anyone else can't? Plenty of options with latest gen Intel and Nvidia 10xx series are out there for less insane prices. Granted, I don't see many…

> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned…

I have a handful of laptops but by far my most reliable have been my macbook pros. I'm writing this on a mid-2010 mbp that's run like a champ since day one. I also have a 2014 mbp for work, but I really like the 2010. It's not a skinny ultra-portable but it's not a tank either. It only runs hot when I have it hooked up to a large display. Eight years with no notable problems for a daily driver is pretty good in my eyes.

I agree completely on the touchpad. I picked up an XPS13 that I'd intended to use as a replacement. The touchpad is as good as I've had on a non-Apple product, but it's still not on par with Apple. On the otherhand I've started playing with OpenBSD with ratpoison & qutebroswser and it's pretty remarkable how far you can get without a touchpad at all.

A couple years ago I wouldn't have considered anything but an mbp, but with the recent touchbar and butterfly keyboard shenanigans I would absolutely consider something other than an mbp. I hope Apple comes to recognize that reliability is more important than super skinny unrepairable machines.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned…

Have you taken the Surface Book 2 for a spin? Pricey, but gives the MBP a good run for its money, and does a couple tricks the MBP cannot, such as having an excellent touch/pen surface for a screen. Real ports, including SD card. The outstanding downside is, of course, the abominable Windows 10.

I have, and to give Microsoft credit, it's the closest thing to a MBP I've ever used. That said, it still doesn't just quite feel as polished (the touchpad isn't as accurate, for one). But if I had to use a non-Apple laptop, I would probably go for a Surface Book.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#123
post #19

Dave Lee's youtube video is a withering takedown, presented dispassionately. His argument is such a slam dunk that the article concludes with stunned disbelief, speculating that maybe there's "something wrong with the MacBook Pro with Core i9 chip that Lee received". Yes there's something wrong with it, that was the exact point of his video. Do people really think he just got a lemon?

> Do people really think he just got a lemon?

Well, other sites have done benchmarks... have any of them reported it being slower than last year’s model?

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#124
post #109
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? They're CPUs. They're designed to run instructions. Intel's chips spend more energy on the really fancy stuff like huge reorder buffers and extensive speculation. They get higher IPC at lower MIPS/watt. An i7 isn't going to run iOS more slowly than whatever Apple calls their latest ARM SoC. It _is_ going to blow its lid without a big ole heatsink brick on there and a fan too, which is why smartphones use ARM co…

Not all instructions (or instruction sets) are equivalent.

They're not that different, either. It's been a long time since high-performance cores were executing the instructions as fetched and not translating into µops. The stuff Intel does on their chips works on ARM too. People are doing it, and it's working[0]. That makes a hell of a lot more difference on throughput than what ISA is implemented.

[0] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1316/a-look-at-caviums-new-hi...

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't strike me as particularly noteworthy/unexpected.

You don’t think it’s unreasonable that a laptop should work in daylight?

A 15" laptop's body could easily be absorbing 75 watts of heat from the sun, equivalent to running both the CPU and GPU of a MacBook Pro pegged at 100%.

I think throttling in this scenario is a reasonable tradeoff, much more so than overengineering the cooling solution to handle it and thereby increasing cost, weight and bulk. Sit in the shade.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> justify the MacBook Pro's ludicrous pricetag that has some shiny numbers on the tech specs sheet If you think people buy MacBook Pros because of their tech specs, you are missing the point. MacBooks are by far the best general purpose, well-rounded laptops on the market from a build quality perspective. Everything from the screen to the touchpad to sleep/hibernate (and, until recently, the keyboard) is finely tuned…

Have you taken the Surface Book 2 for a spin? Pricey, but gives the MBP a good run for its money, and does a couple tricks the MBP cannot, such as having an excellent touch/pen surface for a screen. Real ports, including SD card. The outstanding downside is, of course, the abominable Windows 10.

How often do you rely on the touch screen? I know it seems like a naive question, but I have an older surface pro and I rarely used the touch screen. The machine itself was bulkier than an iPad or Nexus9, so I tended to use those instead for tooling around and mindless consumption. The surface pro was pretty much useless for actual work unless I had a second monitor, actual keyboard, and trackpad.

I do native Windows dev for a living, but I have no urge to pick up a machine with a touch screen unless it's a tablet. Is a touch pen/surface actually useful in day to day work?

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#128
post #75

This madness is something Apple can only blame themselves for. It's Steve Jobs' ploy to kill the laptop market. He didn't need the laptop market, he had the iPhone, he knew of the iPad when he demo'd the Macbook Air. Today the entire Mac revenue https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... is below 10%. See, he have started the thin craze and everyone copied. But noone needs a thin laptop. There's…

When I bought my Lenovo P50 I was unpleasantly surprised by its weight and thickness after having used MacBooks before. However I did get over it pretty quickly and swapping out batteries so I can keep working is awesome. I do need the power.

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#129
This problem is easily solved by just having an external cooling solution like a USB fan tray that sits under the MacBook, and only when you are doing some heavy tasks.

In normal day to day use most people will not do enough processing to be affected by thermal issues.

Keeping the form factor of a MacBook is much more important than eliminating every thermal edge case. People take for granted how much we’ve improved on old big and heavy laptops (with worse performance even).

Re: MacBook Pro with i9 chip is throttled due to thermal issues, claims YouTuber

#130
post #114

The biggest shock for me with these laptops came when I tried to do some light gaming. I'm not talking about recent titles either, my 2017 MBP gets bought to the brink by KSP at minimum settings with no mods. I understand that I would be quite rightly criticised for trying to run something like Fortnite but we're talking about a game here with roots in 2013. The hardware they put inside the later models has no hope i…

KSP can lag on my desktop with a 1080ti. Don't feel too bad.
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