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Warm up your MacBook (2019)

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Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#91

Post by pja »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #90
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 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.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#92

Post by embedding-shape »

alexwwang wrote: post #72
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…

Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.

> Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise

So every time you do HTTP calls? Nothing there should spin up your fans, unless you use an agent with an horribly broken TUI, I've heard there is a few of those out there. But remotely calling LLM APIs really shouldn't be taxing on your local device, something somewhere is wrong/bad if that's what you're seeing.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#93

Post by alexwwang »

embedding-shape wrote: post #92
alexwwang wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.

> Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise So every time you do HTTP calls? Nothing there should spin up your fans, unless you use an agent with an horribly broken TUI, I've heard there is a few of those out there. But remotely calling LLM APIs really shouldn't be taxing on your local device, something somewhere is wrong/bad if that's what you're seeing.

If the horribly broken TUI you mentioned is OpenCode, I’d say yes. That’s exactly what I am experiencing.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#94

Post by Filligree »

alexwwang wrote: post #72
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…

Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.

Is it a local LLM? Sibling seems to be assuming remote, but I have trouble imagining a TUI that inefficient.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#95

Post by embedding-shape »

alexwwang wrote: post #93
embedding-shape wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise So every time you do HTTP calls? Nothing there should spin up your fans, unless you use an agent with an horribly broken TUI, I've heard there is a few of those out there. But remotely calling LLM APIs really shouldn't be taxing on your local device, something somewhere is wrong/bad if that's what you're seeing.

If the horribly broken TUI you mentioned is OpenCode, I’d say yes. That’s exactly what I am experiencing.

Sure, if that's what you're using, then that's definitively buggy, unless it's doing compilation or something actually using your resources, just making HTTP calls shouldn't be heavy for your computer. Claude Code was mainly what I was thinking about, as it similarly broken, but I'm sure there are more out there as most of them seem vibe-coded at best.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#96

Post by Filligree »

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?

It increases the chance of solder cracks, which is one major cause of failure. Thermal cycles in general will do that, however, and home computers are designed to survive a lot of them.

So overall it’s not something I’d worry about.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#97

Post by alexwwang »

Filligree wrote: post #94
alexwwang wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.

Is it a local LLM? Sibling seems to be assuming remote, but I have trouble imagining a TUI that inefficient.

No. Simply the rest api call in opencode tui. I don’t know why maybe the mbp is too old, at least it served 6 years +.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#98

Post by carlosjobim »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #90
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 scorchin…

Apple hardware quality on the laptops was bottom tier during the 2016-2019 "butterfly" era. There's no denying.

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#99

Post by crefiz »

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.

Care to share the name of both tools? Cheers

Re: Warm up your MacBook (2019)

#100

Post by blackoil »

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…

Those were John Ive era laptops where form ruled function. Poor thermal, less ports, less keys were all features.
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