an other report from someday ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22207018
MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
281–290 of 311 posts
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#282I laughed at OP misspelling “fan talk” in the throwaway account’s name. Then I flagged this, because it’s the third time this past week that someone has tried to rabble-rouse about fan noise with a link to poor data and/or extensive discussion threads with terrible quality data and no summary. A meta-analysis of this discussion would have been super interesting. A link to Apple’s equivalent of a Reddit post is not, e…
LOL, no. I’ve been a HN reader for years, and this MBP fan issue is driving me nuts for a while now, I wanted it to get some attention.
Then I realized I don’t remember my HN password, that’s why the new account.
My name is Antal. K is the initial of my last name.
Glad we cleared that up.
But the last part of your message is noted, thank you. Next time I will do so.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think graphics switching only works when running on battery power. Wonder if there's a way of make it still work when plugged in...
Ahh - probably true. It was annoying me playing world of warcraft and I turned down the settings to shut it up - I forgot that. Not an option if you are using it for your "work" workflow. There must be a kill switch somewhere; I'll have a look.
right - I've had a look and I found https://github.com/codykrieger/gfxCardStatus.
I cloned it and then compiled it with xcode. I found one problem which is a badly encoded file, which I fixed using the file inspector to set the encoding and then saved it. After that it built and runs. On my 16' 2020 MBP it allows me to turn off my 5300M. When I open WOW it refuses to allow the card to be turned off, its web site says that's what it will do with an external monitor too.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#284There isn't anything wrong here. One of the confusing issues is that people say, "I'm only using 15% of my CPU, the fans should not be coming on." What they don't realize, is that using 1 core running at turbo speeds is only going to show up as 15% of the CPU, but draw enough power and create enough heat to trigger the fans! Another thing that some of these posters are not aware of, is that running these temperature/…
Agreed. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I'm curious: Isn't it inherently harder to cool a single turbo'ing core the smaller the core is? Say a core is 1mm by 1mm, and generates 45W of heat in that area, then say it's 0.5mm by 0.5mm and generates the same heat. Apologies in advance for any inaccuracies or misphrasing of the question.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#285Earlier 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.
Do you mean the XPS 13? I've never seen an XPS 15 in recent years without an NVIDIA card. The cheapest XPS 15 from 2019 that I can find still comes with the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, as does my own XPS 15 9560 from 2017.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#286So did they at least fix the keyboard?
yes, it's a lot better. first time a new MacBook Pro shipped with a new keyboard that is actually better to type on.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#287What 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 anybody wants to dish out something on an order of $1.5m to do a contract manufacturing run for a properly designed full sized laptop, give me a note. Something tells me that Apple spent more than $1.5M designing the recent MacBook Pro. It is a bit presumptuous to say "well i could do it better" when referencing an entire team of qualified electrical engineers at one of the largest corporations in the world that…
I suspect you’re quite right, and the engineers knew what they were doing. But the requirements were crap, alas.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#288Earlier 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.
wow, a few years ago i was working in java world, and using intellij on a daily basis. any time i used a 4k monitor, i simply could not type anything or scroll through code without insane delay. i googled it and found a ton of people having the same issue. i could only sanely use intellij if i upscaled my resolution to its highest. is this all interconnected?
Same here, but recent versions are much better. If you take a screenshot when running one of the scaled modes on 4k it's actually rendering at a far higher resolution, which then gets scaled down. Almost 6K IIRC, which on a laptop is pretty much insane.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#289Been using Mac primarily since 2011 and sad to see everything keep declining with Apple's software and hardware quality. When programming an app and its backend with react native/clojure my 2015 Mac Pro gets way too hot and slow. Just built a Ryzen 3600 desktop with 32 gigs of RAM for about 1/4th the price as the cheapest 16 inch Macbook. Windows with WSL2 has been extremely good and I'm satisfied with my development…
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…
Motherboard, CPU, aftermarket cooler, case, RAM, power supply, 256gb m2 ssd all came to about 2500 AED from a computer store in Dubai after some negotiating. Already had a GPU, SSD, monitor, peripherals from my previous dying computer. On Apple's offical website, the base model 16 inch starts at 9999 AED and selecting 32gb of RAM comes to AED 11,679.00.
1680 to go from 16 to 32 GB of RAM. The total I spent on my 16gb x 2 corsair vengeance LPX 3200 DDR4 RAM was no more than 650 AED. What false claims am I making? You do the math.
I've become extremely dissatisfied with Apple's direction and felt frustrated being locked into the MacOS ecosystem because until recently there was no alternative that I was happy with. If they'd just make a new Macbook Pro with sufficient cooling and a normal keyboard I would have been satisfied.
I built it to replace my dying 9 year old gaming PC, having absolutely no idea that it would become my primary development machine. I just gave WSL2 a shot with pretty low expectations from my experience with WSL1 and just kept using it.
My main point to make was not about just about the hardware itself, but about Windows finally becoming a viable alternative for the work I'm doing.
Re: MacBook 16-inch Fan Noise (2019)
#290Earlier 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.
That seems unrelated; I think Mac OS is the only place where non native resolutions use GPU-accelerated scaling. The other operating systems just set whatever resolution you asked for and let the monitor handle it. This seems to be excessive GPU use when simply connecting an external monitor at its native res.
I can speak from personal experience that NVIDIA GPUs will use bilinear scaling on Windows to display non-native resolutions on displays that don't have built-in scalers. This isn't a rare situation either. As far as I know, every display with a G-SYNC module inherently does not support display-side scaling. Also worth noting, NVIDIA lets you choose whether to use their scaler or the display's scaler.