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Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

stanislas.blog

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Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#61

Post by tyre »

angristan wrote: post #4
Neywiny wrote: post #2

Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point, though. I suppose there's merit in knowing if your configuration causes thermal throttling, but what are you able to do about it? There's no fan profile to tweak or anything. Can you undervolt them?

> but what are you able to do about it? On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus ( https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve ) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed. For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/…

It would be cool if the bottoms of MacBooks weren’t flat and instead wavy or rippling to increase surface area. There are probably a lot of cool designs (ayyyyy) you could machine in.

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#62

Post by angristan »

brikym wrote: post #56
angristan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, I fixed it, I have not very important Cloudflare Workers in front of the blog (which is on Cloudflare Pages) and somehow they were in fail closed mode and not fail open :(

I have had back luck with them intermittently losing routing. Sometimes re-creating the worker fixes weird issues.

This one is my bad, I've exceeded the 100k free reqs/day (for https://stanislas.blog/2025/02/redirect-dead-links-hugo-imag...), and I didn't enable the setting to bypass it over that limit

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#63

Post by scottlamb »

> I know it’s thermal throttling because I can see in iStat Menus that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts goes down.

There's another possibility. If your battery is low and you've mistakenly plugged it into a low-power USB-C source (phone charger), you will also see 100% CPU usage, low power usage, and terrible performance. Probably not the author's problem, but it's been mine more than once! It might be worth adding something to detect this case, too. You can see your charger power under "System Information"; I assume there's an API for it also.

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#64

Post by angristan »

scottlamb wrote: post #63

> I know it’s thermal throttling because I can see in iStat Menus that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts goes down. There's another possibility. If your battery is low and you've mistakenly plugged it into a low-power USB-C source (phone charger), you will also see 100% CPU usage, low power usage, and terrible performance. Probably not the author's problem, but it's been mine more than once! It migh…

Interesting, yeah iStat Menus reports the wattage of the charger, sometimes I've charged my mac with like a 5 or 10W charger and I didn't have that issue But now that rings a bell, I think a coworker had that issue recently. I wonder why that happens

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#65

Post by hinkley »

scottlamb wrote: post #63

> I know it’s thermal throttling because I can see in iStat Menus that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts goes down. There's another possibility. If your battery is low and you've mistakenly plugged it into a low-power USB-C source (phone charger), you will also see 100% CPU usage, low power usage, and terrible performance. Probably not the author's problem, but it's been mine more than once! It migh…

While I have definitely done this a few times, one of my MacBooks could draw more power than the power supply could deliver and there was a particular computer game that I discovered I could “only” play for about five hours before the laptop shut itself off. Because it was having to draw supplemental power from the batteries to keep up.

IIRC the next generation of MacBook was the one that came with the larger power brick, which didn’t at all surprise me after that experience. Then they switched to GaN to bring the brick size back down.

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#66

Post by Marsymars »

tyre wrote: post #61
angristan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but what are you able to do about it? On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat Menus ( https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-curve ) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max speed. For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that there is a "high power mode" ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/…

It would be cool if the bottoms of MacBooks weren’t flat and instead wavy or rippling to increase surface area. There are probably a lot of cool designs (ayyyyy) you could machine in.

There are laptops like that (e.g. the fanless Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14). No idea if it was actually engineered like that for thermal reasons.

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#68

Post by bigyabai »

Arn_Thor wrote: post #50
the_black_hand wrote: post #30

My 2017 macbook is basically brick. Crazy how just opening chrome sets off fans like a jet engine. How much cpu can checking gmail really use? Foolish me is considering buying a new macbook this year. I have no choice because Apple and Microsoft will do everything in their power to ship the shittiest personal computing products every year.

I'm sorry you're saddled with an Intel Mac. The Apple Silicon Macs really changed everything. Clearly Apple is capable and willing of shipping extremely good and performant hardware, even though historically they haven't always done so. I do blame Intel for their monopoly on mediocraty for the late-10s Macbooks though.

Now put Linux on it. Just like new!

Re: Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

#69

Post by Bad_Initialism »

It won't run on a MacBook Air M1 running Sonoma. Only Tahoe.

Come along with me! We'll destroy the planet so fast that we'll all be cinders before you know it.

All we have to do is gobble the marketing speak so fast and make everything shiny and new, and we'll all be dead before you can say "Greta Thunberg."

Come die with me for thin and for stylish. Kill the animals with me for "sleek".

Die. With. Me. Now! I made an app!

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