Warm up your MacBook (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#81

Post by crote » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:46 AM UTC

asimovDev wrote: post #65

crote wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unironically, yes. My M3 Macbook Pro's palm rests get uncomfortably warm during regular IDE use. It doesn't get hot enough to spin up a fan, but it is enough to be distracting.

interesting. for me only the bottom and the top part above the keyboard gets warm during my work. 16inch model. Is yours the 14inch one?

14 inch, running primarily IntelliJ IDEA and Firefox. Around 10% CPU use most of the time, with of course the occasional spike for compilation.

It's not hot, but with 22C ambient it is enough of a rise to be annoying.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#82

Post by niklasbuschmann » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:51 AM UTC

> openssl speed

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#83

Post by kotaKat » Thu, May 28, 2026, 9:52 AM UTC

why_at wrote: post #22

sunrunner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just do the trick in reverse, surely? yes no > /dev/null

No you have to get the yesses back out cat /dev/null | yes

You might have to load in maybe.so for that to work though.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#84

Post by nottorp » Thu, May 28, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

asimovDev wrote: post #76

nottorp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the 14 inch and i've never felt it go warm. I think the real question is what IDE we're talking about.

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...

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#85

Post by Tade0 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

dasKrokodil wrote: post #69

Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?

The battery might need warmup, but it would have to be significantly below freezing outside to affect it.

Electrolytic capacitors can freeze up but again, you'd need a Yakutia-like environment for it to actually pose a concern.

Lastly I've heard of circuit boards warping from going from really cold to really hot, but those were power components.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#86

Post by traceroute66 » Thu, May 28, 2026, 10:15 AM UTC

To be fair, the fundamental problem here is the author's resting of wrists to type.

This applies to any computer, Apple, Windows or Linux. Desktop or laptop.

If your typing on any computer is dependent on you resting your wrists whilst typing then it is indicative of poor typing technique and/or posture.

And ironically the very thing you think you're trying to prevent by resting your wrists (carpel tunnel and/or strain) is likely to be aggravated by over-reliance on wrist wrests due to the added pressure on the wrist.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#87

Post by dnnddidiej » Thu, May 28, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC

kingjimmy wrote: post #24

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

Warming it up. For the eventual electron app it'll be running.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#88

Post by mexicocitinluez » Thu, May 28, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

Slightly quicker way to do this is opening Microsoft Teams.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#89

Post by nickdothutton » Thu, May 28, 2026, 11:13 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #80

Modern Macbooks have this issue, the other day I realised I had never heard the fans of it run, so I was wondering if they actually worked. Found a web based benchmark tool that will run your CPU and GPU at 100% each. While temperatures went up to 90 degrees science... still no fans. Ended up installing a different utility to manually set the fan speed to confirm they worked. I don't know what they did but it's good.

May I introduce you to local LLMs?

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#90

Post by reitzensteinm » Thu, May 28, 2026, 11:24 AM UTC

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 scorching hot as they failed to shut down. But that happened to my Mac all the time, too.

The M series though is incredible. I can’t imagine buying a Windows laptop now.