I tried this and it doesn't work. Turns out my MacBook was throttling to 30% due to overheating. This happens more frequently if you drive the GPU with an external monitor. Unfortunately the OS does nothing to notify you of overheating and throttling, which is an insanely stupid oversight by apple. I only found out because I noticed that the computer ran fine while running the AC, so I installed an app through Brew called "Hot" which tells you temperature and throttling percentage, and confirmed that this was indeed problem.
This happens when the room is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the CPU is at 3% utilization. Can't find root cause, or if this is even considered abnormal, but the laptop is defective in my opinion.
Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation). It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. It's very sad that this is such a widespread problem and that there is so little public awareness about it - most of the machines like your macbook are indeed defective.
The only solution unfortunately is to do some more research & read reviews which cover throttling & thermal management before you buy your next laptop to make sure you're not buying something that is defective. On my previous Dell XPS laptop the CPU and GPU shared one heatpipe & heatsink. It could handle 100% CPU with an external monitor, but the GPU was much more power hungry and placing any significant load on the GPU made the CPU throttle significantly. Each manufacturer & product has different thermal management solutions and you need to do research before buying to see if a laptop will work for you. You'll also want to see whether external displays are always driven by the discrete GPU instead of the integrated GPU on the CPU - even if not being heavily used, just turning on the discrete GPU creates a fair bit of heat.
Or just buy a gaming laptop if you can accept with the added size & heft - they're often cheaper for equivalent CPU/GPU than the 'premium' laptops like MacBook, XPS, but sometimes don't get the newest features (Thunderbolt, USB-C charging, etc.) as early. One of my friends had a gaming laptop with the same specs as my XPS and when under load his laptop would blow out enormous amounts of hot air from its big vents, whereas the XPS clearly had a much lower heat removal capacity.
Unfortunately this is a very common problem with basically all modern high-end laptops that have a macbook-like form factor (e.g. not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation).
The M1 MacBooks are the outliers here. They go to toe on many benchmarks with e.g. the Ryzen 3700X and even beats it in some areas such as single-thread performance or through dedicated hardware (e.g. matrix multiplication). And the M1 can be passively cooled. After many generations of Intel MacBooks, the M1 MacBook was a revelation.
I am curious though whether they can maintain this in newer models, which are supposed to have 6 (or perhaps even more) high-performance cores. We'll see.
It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor. [...] a gaming laptop if
I feel like towers are under-appreciated these days. A lot of people I see with these overpowered laptops use it plugged into a screen anyway. Why not buy a tower with a Ryzen 5900X or 5950X? It will blow away your laptop CPU and with a high-performance tower cooler, it will stay cool and won't make a lot of noise. Same for GPUs. Every time I hear about people buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU to do machine learning... Just buy a tower and SSH into the machine. Your life will be so much more pleasant.
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
Yes, and that's why it should be illegal for firms to sell broken devices as we can read in this thread. Stop pretending everything can be smaller and prettier, just build stuff that works no matter what it looks like.
Apple is also guilty on the smartphone front. They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now. I remember when "dumb phones" lasted many years and held battery for at least a week... we have let their shiny advertising corrupt our minds and have lost features and created even more environmental disaster as a result.
> They have basically pioneered the "throwaway phone" paradigm we are deep into now.
I'm still using an iPhone 7 for 5 years now without issue, which is longer than any dumb phone I had in the past. Nobody is forced to buy the last iPhone every year, especially since they don't bring a lot of improvements anyway.
And you probably don't even have to make it a whole lot of thicker or weightier to have a better heat dissipation at least these days. Just a little thicker which still keeps it very portable and probably increase grip in fact will get a lot more room for fan/airflow which probably don't increase weight to that degree.
At one point in time I went whole-hog on a 17 inch gaming laptop that I treated as basically a folding desktop, it's this absolutely garantuan ASUS thing where the entire rear of it is one huge heatsink unit for the CPU and GPU. If you intentionally consider it from the design perspective of something that will only be relocated once every few weeks or months, and is certainly a lot lighter than a mini-ITX desktop PC and traditional monitor, it can be a good solution. Sadly, the touchpad on it is nowhere near as well refined as the apple version.
I can comfortably leave that thing spending 8-12 hours to encode a HEVC/H265 codec 4K video without worrying about it melting down.
Even "gaming" laptops have come a decent ways in size/form factor. I picked up a Zephyrus G15 a bit ago and it's pretty portable while having the ability to sink a good amount of wattage.
yeah I just checked and the modern version of my 17 inch laptop monster, which is about 8.1 pounds, is down to 5.95 pounds in a 17 inch version with an intel 11800 something mobile CPU, and geforce 3070 in it. Probably still has a huge external power brick.
I have a 13" M1 MBA and a 16" Legion gaming laptop. They're both good computers for their own purposes but the 230 watt power supply for the Legion is almost as heavy as the MBA (2.2 vs 2.8 pounds). Carrying the computer and the charger together my Lenovo is more than 3x heavier than the MBA.
Gaming laptops are just more-portable desktops to me. I would slip the M1 in a backpack without a second thought. It can even share a charger with my phone. Bringing a gaming laptop anywhere would need to be well justified.
But people seem to use those maxed out 16" macbooks as desktops replacements anyway, always hooked up to monitors. Even though it seems like Apple is not even testing hooking up monitors.
The better comparison would be the 16" MBP and those look to be within about 1lb of each other. If your not going to be using the GPU heavily then you can just use a standard usb-c charger with should be similar in size to the MBP.
> It's just not physically possible to make a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
My 16” Intel MBP has this issue. My 13” M1 MBP does not.
Nothing from VMs to cross-compiling large toolchains has caused throttling in a fanless laptop. And that's while driving a 6k monitor and charging at full wattage.
A question about the M1: can you actually run an x86 VM under Rosetta? A large part of my job involves driving VMs for expensive hardware loaded with dev tools. I thought the answer was "no", which has put me off getting an M1, but just wanted to check.
> not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation
Those also have cooling problems. I bought a bulky one with 3 fans just because it had a nice processor. It couldn't sustain high performance under load for more than 5 seconds even with the fans maxed out. Compiling some code pushes CPU temperatures into the 80-90 ℃ range. Scrolling a chat in WhatsApp Web also overheats my laptop.
I've given up on laptops. If they require cooling at all, the manufacturer did it wrong.
>> a machine that combines high end power hungry hardware, adequate cooling for that hardware, and a compact form factor.
There is. You don't need to keep that hardware running 24/7. That is a problem in the OS and associated software. Apple could disable all these monitoring daemons and accept the tiny delays in starting various things, accept some fan noise, accept a mic that isn't tuned to a room, accept that the computer will take a few extra seconds to wake from sleep, accept that charging won't be lightning fast. But that isn't Apple. That isn't what Apple's customers want. Those seconds are precious. They want everything all services to remain at attention 24/7 ready to attend their slightest need. If that means burning a few extra watts then so be it.
I am not an apple customer. My laptop is currently turned off... properly off. I can live with waiting a few seconds for it to boot because my time is cheap. So is my power bill. And so is my laptop's carbon footprint.
What you say may be right, but it's not really related to the parent's complaint.
If you run a stripped-down distro of Linux, running only the bare minimum, no service listening for anything, no service reporting on anything, etc, the issue still stands if the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work. Say they're working on some big project in a compiled language from the middle of nowhere with unreliable internet, so they can't offload compiling to someone else's computer. Or they're into video, etc.
There are many use cases for a laptop with strong specs. Not everyone has such a use. But the fact is that high-powered components stuck in a small enclosure will have a bad time with thermals.
>>the user needs the beefy hardware for beefy actual work.
Beefy hardware or not isn't the point. My hardware is rather beefy. The delays I speak of are not delays in accomplishing the actual commuting task. I'm talking about those tiny delays in spinning up a piece of hardware. I don't car is my threadripper's 49 extra cores take a few milliseconds to wake up from a deep sleep. I can live with a microphone that takes a second to turn on as I dial a voice call. Once the actual task is going, those little delays are in the past.
But Apple doesn't tolerate little startup/wakeup delays. Apple would rather burn a little power keeping everything ready at a moment's notice.
The MBA's sleep mode is very inexpensive in battery life compared to the advantages. Maybe you don't open your laptop 50 times in a day, but I do, and it's very practical to be able to just pop into a meeting, take the laptop out, and start typing immediately.
New m1 MBP is one of best computers I've ever owned. Recently just sold 2020 i7 16" MBP and it was a dog. Also had 15.4 2018 prior. 2020 constantly had fan running with performance throttling. M1 doesn't break a sweat. Would like more RAM, but rarely sense need.
It would work. However since the product is a laptop with the key word being lap... manufactures actually have to throttle beyond what would be required from a physical standpoint. While laptops can and do emit heat from the top & bottom of the chassis that is actually a negative since you have to prevent the user from causing discomfort/getting burned.
Although this is a somewhat recent development/concern, you could fine and maybe still can find non-Apple laptops from the ~2015 era that will have extremely hot surface temperatures. Any many more laptops were just designed poorly so as the regular cooling solution gets less effective due to dust the keyboard and bottom will become exceedingly hot.
This is why Apple cannot add the thermal pads themselves, there are some regulations around the temperature limits. I never use it on my lap though. And as mentioned in the other comment "erythema ab igne" is a real thing is seems.
I was considering these for work, but most reasonably priced options have a poor display. I think there's a gap in the market for gaming performance with a decent display.
I ended up going with a 4k x1 carbon and been pretty happy so far
My MBP 16" can‘t run my LG Ultrafine 5K (sold by Apple) without fan noise.
Recently I also figured out that "automatic switching of graphic mode" (enabled by default) causes noticeable input lag. If I type text, the last typed character sometimes doesn’t show until another character is typed or I have to wait up to 5 seconds(!).
Turning off "automatic graphic mode switching" stopped the input lag completely, but the battery duration is down from like 10 hours to 3 or something.
Do you use an external keyboard? My MBP struggles to process key presses etc. when my external monitor is plugged in to the HDMI slot immediately next to the USB port.
Using the USB port on the other side works without issues.
I like that they clearly admitted to it, so I know what I'm buying. Other products usually pretend to support anything and let me discover the issues after purchase (like an XPS 15 with a GPU that couldn't actually run games the GPU supported, because of insane thermal throttling).
I'm using it on one of the Pro XDR displays, and it's quite impressive for the cheapest notebook to drive this monster of a pixel-wielding behemoth with zero issues or complaints...
(2732*2048 + 2560*1600 + 6016*3384 = 30,000,000 pixels, although I'm not sure if the iPad receives a pixel signal, or renders its own content)
So it doesn't seem to be a lack of graphics power that causes this limitation.
(Incidentally, the XDR and current-gen iPad pro displays are the first where I get the illusion, when watching high-res video, that there's an actual window in the display and I am looking at a real scene behind it)
Anecdotal reports online seem to indicate displaylink on m1 is fine for everything except gaming including 4k60 video. M1 is not something you really want to do gaming on anyway, especially not with multiple monitors. I’ve done a video conference on my m1 air through a displaylink-connected monitor and I couldn’t tell the difference from having it on the built in screen. I guess it depends what people want to do, but I think for most people most of the time this is a perfectly suitable solution on m1 (not so much on older weaker intel cpu’s though).
There is a bug for 5500M GPU that causes 18W sustained power draw with one external monitor. It should normally be 5W or so.
The throttling is due to your VRM chips overheating. There is no temp sensor for this exposed to the user.
The VRM chips have no cooling. The high GPU watt draw pushes the temps of the VRMs above their thermal limits with no cooling.
The solution is to put thermal pads on your VRMs to dissipate the heat to the backplate. Completely resolved my issue.
Disabling TurboBoost can also help. Running fans at max speed at all times too because Mac is slow to ramp them up when load increases.
Apparently the 5600M doesn’t have this issue and the 5500M bug is fixed in Monterey. But the thermal pad mod is still amazing. Apple couldn’t do it stock, because there are regulations about hot a backplate can get related to risk of burns.
I also recently discovered that something like 12% of CPU on my 2020 macbook air is used whenever I'm in a room with anything greater than perfect silence, by 'coreaudiod', because it apparently is constantly listening to the microphone built in near the keyboard and spending cpu cycles trying to filter out background noise. Apparently running the signal desktop app in the background is enough to keep coreaudiod constantly wasting battery. Because signal is open and has been granted permissions for microphone and speakers, even if no call session is open?
meanwhile, "Slack Helper" is reporting 15% cpu usage just sitting there doing nothing. Imagine the cumulative kilowatt-hours wasted globally by all the CPU cycles spent by slack just to exist as basically a glorified IRC app.
If you really want to see slack waste CPU and battery, leave a channel open that somebody has pasted a high FPS animated GIF into, in the slack window in the background. Easily 35% usage.
> … 'coreaudiod', because it apparently is constantly listening to the microphone built in near the keyboard and spending cpu cycles trying to filter out background noise. Apparently running the signal desktop app in the background is enough to keep coreaudiod constantly wasting battery. Because signal is open and has been granted permissions for microphone and speakers, even if no call session is open?
There’s an app called Micro Snitch [1] that will alert the user when any application activates the microphone or the webcam and tell the user which application is doing it (including Apple’s apps like FaceTime). You could try it to confirm that it is indeed Signal that’s activating the microphone at all times and file a bug report with Signal. Listening in the background is a very serious issue because we don’t expect Signal to do that.
Edit: FWIW, I just remembered that I have Signal and Micro Snitch on an old MBP (running the latest macOS). I have never seen alerts for microphone activation when Signal is running (I don’t use it for calls from the computer). Nevertheless, if the coreaudiod issue is with an app using the mic, Micro Snitch may help.
> I also recently discovered that something like 12% of CPU on my 2020 macbook air is used whenever I'm in a room with anything greater than perfect silence, by 'coreaudiod', because it apparently is constantly listening to the microphone built in near the keyboard and spending cpu cycles trying to filter out background noise. Apparently running the signal desktop app in the background is enough to keep coreaudiod constantly wasting battery.
Are you sure it's the Signal desktop app?
My initial hunch was while reading was that maybe it's your machine constantly listening for a "Hey Siri".
> I also recently discovered that something like 12% of CPU on my 2020 macbook air is used whenever I'm in a room with anything greater than perfect silence, by 'coreaudiod', because it apparently is constantly listening to the microphone built in near the keyboard and spending cpu cycles trying to filter out background noise.
Have you tried sampling the process to ensure that it is actually doing this? If it is, it's likely that Signal is leaving open a recording session and it shouldn't, and given that the app is open source, it should be fairly easy to find where it is doing this. I am sure they would be very interested in such a report, considering the privacy implications of leaving the audio system up when it shouldn't be.
The coreaudiod issue might have to do with apps that use the mic "priming" it by keeping it active even when there's no call. Some chat apps do this to avoid the 1-2s delay associated with turning on the mic, so audio starts streaming as soon as the call starts.
Keeping the mic active when you’re in a call but have the mic muted is acceptable and understandable. At any other time, it would make me think the app is recording everything and shipping the recordings to the friendly neighborhood TLA agent. Joining a call on Zoom/Teams/whatever already takes a few seconds, so there’s no excuse for this “optimization”.
macOS Monterey is going to make it more obvious in UI when an app is using the microphone. Hopefully sunlight is a good disinfectant and acts as a forcing function for apps to fix up their behavior.
> Imagine the cumulative kilowatt-hours wasted globally by all the CPU cycles spent by slack just to exist as basically a glorified IRC app.
Conversely, imagine the global kWh saved by some micro-optimization to a key system call like malloc. Perhaps the biggest positive impact a single developer can have on our climate is to improve the efficiency of frequently used pieces of code. Even tiny optimizations would add up.
The Mac allocator is terrible. Presumably there's some backwards compatibility reason but it's much much slower than Glibc, tcmalloc or jemalloc. I'm not sure about Windows.
Hi, I work at Signal on calling. Opening the mic while not in a call would be a serious bug, so I looked into it. I ran Micro Snitch and verified that it only sees the mic as active when you are in a call with someone (if you're in a group call and alone, keeps the mic off; if you're calling someone and they haven't answered yet, it keeps the mic off).
So I don't think it's an issue with calling.
However, if I hit the "record audio message" button and then hit cancel, I can get it to stay open until I close the app and restart it. I will report this bug to my coworkers at Signal that work in that area of the code.
Could you try and see if this problem is caused by the voice recording feature? For example, if you quit Signal and start back up, does the bug go away? If you start a voice recording and cancel it, does it come back?
I needed some excessive CPU load to stress test a program's tolerance to scheduling contention, so I reloaded my chrome slack tab every 15 seconds. It worked surprisingly well...
I have Signal open on my M1 MacBook Air, and coreaudiod is using 0.0 CPU. The app itself uses anything between 1.5 and 8% CPU just for being open though, mostly the renderer process. That's true even if the window is minimised or hidden.
With Slack open, coreaudiod also sits most of the time at 0%. Animations, scrolling and generally just using the app can make it go up to 30-50% for a few seconds, between the GPU and the renderer processes.
I have a lot of nostalgia for PCI sound cards from the late 90's and early 2000's. That being said, I am happy that PC audio has been simplified to just minimally buffered DACs and ADCs, or a digital interconnect. Things actually just work without having to futz with ugly skinned proprietary software.
My 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro (2.3ghz i9/64gb ram) becomes unusable with 2 of the LG 5k monitors plugged in (one on each side). Worst MacBook I have ever owned.
There is a fix coming for the 5500m heat/wattage issues in the next OS thankfully. The MacOS drivers for RDNA are apparently just crap. This problem wasn’t present on the Vega GPUs, and it isn’t present while booted into Windows. To think this lasted all the way through Catalina and Big Sur is insane.
I would also like to know that. AFAIK the 5500 has the same driver issue as the 5300, but even without a fix its baseline consumption with an external screen plugged in is about half of the 5530's.
Hopefully the fix applies to both models but I'm not holding my breath.
I concur, I have a similar setup. Most expensive computer I've ever owned. It just throttles at the drop of a hat. I worked through it all with the apple techs, jumped through hoops for many hours and provided detailed diagnostics. They dismissed me with "throttling is normal, there's no problem".
In the real world, my 2017 MBP performed better just because it didn't throttle. Ridiculous.
As for the supposed 'Low power mode' in Monterey - I'm not convinced that isn't just turning on throttling manually.
There are two kinds of throttling going on. CPU and VRM.
CPU is normal - prevents CPU temps going above 100C.
The issue is VRMs which have no cooling. And no public sensors.
The fix is to add thermal pads to your VRM chips to dissipate the heat to back plate. Entirely solves all throttling issues. Cleaning fans should help too.
My 2019 Macbook air becomes unusable when I plug in any external display... or let the battery fall below 20%... or have 2 electron apps open... or if I look at it funny
To be perfectly fair with you though; I have a Dell Precision with a Xeon CPU (E3-1505m v6) and an nVidia GPU (k1200m) and it can’t output _one_ 5K display.
I think it’s possible your expectations are a bit optimistic here.
Maybe but it worked fine on my previous one (2016 I think but could be wrong). I would do the thermal pad mod if I wasn’t planning on trading it in as soon as the new ones come out.
PSA, if you're doing investigations like this: there's two important parts to "proving" your hypothesis. One is you look at the experimental results and then ensure that matches your hypothesis, which is what this answer does here. The second is that you remove confounding variables and actually figure out what the real cause is. For an analysis like this, I find it quite disappointing that nobody actually went back to find the actual code that was the culprit and ensure that it was indeed what was causing the issue. Until then, you can show all the fancy graphs you want implying correlation, but you're really no better than "deleting Chrome makes my computer faster"–possibly correct, but you really haven't proved what you set out to.
This has been a known (albeit apparently not well known) issue/solution since the first USB-C macs were introduced. The cause is the placement of internals and sensors and their proximity to the ports on each side.
You can “prove” (demonstrate) it without opening the case by taking a stock MBP, putting it under medium load that’s enough to generate heat without other factors, then compare fan speed and performance with power on each side. They’re noticeably different without changing any other factor.
And since the case itself is part of the thermal management design, you can feel relatively comparable heat generated by charging on both sides at the edge of the case above the keyboard. Obviously that’s not scientific, but it’s a pretty good clue there’s something else happening. Luckily, this is a known phenomenon and people have already done the legwork you’re asking for.
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. People have looked at the sensor placement and conjectured that kernel_task CPU usage is related to it doing some sort of throttling. It's a good hypothesis! But nobody has finished the job by going through a trace and actually checking that the kernel is doing that. That's the missing portion I'm asking for.
> conjectured that kernel_task CPU usage is related to it doing some sort of throttling
Well it’s definitely doing some different thermal management depending on the port side you use. And performance definitely differs between those cases. Whether it’s technically throttling is kind of immaterial to whether this solution is meaningfully useful, in my opinion.
I’m fairly certain I’ve seen an article somewhere with someone going through the trace and showing that kernel task is just spinning it’s wheels, generating artificial business to dump load.
I cannot conceive how Mace became defacto development devices. They're always heating up, their implementation of POSIX is sketchy at best, their peripheral support is horrendous in the name of aesthetics, and the keyboard is atrocious.
This is not to say that there are better alternatives. I have a Dell laptop running Manjaro, which is the second worst laptop experience I've had by far (the first was my 2019 Intel Macbook Pro). I ordered a ThinkPad P15 AMD Ryzen 7, which hasn't shipped yet (its been 2 months).
And recently I've discovered how horrible my network is at home and I doubt I can build a desktop unless I route ethernet wires through the walls. (Can't do that).
I wish there was a better solution for a Linux laptop which was sturdy, worked well (sleep, hibernate, wake from lock, bluetooth, wifi), and had a good screen and a lot of external ports.
> I wish there was a better solution for a Linux laptop which was sturdy, worked well (sleep, hibernate, wake from lock, bluetooth, wifi), and had a good screen and a lot of external ports.
MacBooks have a great form factor (that's just a personal preference, but I believe that most people like it), including keyboard (except a butterfly one), hardware actually works (bluetooth, wifi, sleep), and OS is more consistent and less buggy than Windows from XP/Vista days.
POSIX is not properly implemented, but that doesn't matter to the majority of developers. macOS shell feels like using Linux, with some differences, and mostly used developer toolchain work as expected (RoR, Python, Nodejs, .NET, PHP, etc.)
Similarly with microcontrollers, most Linux tools and toolchains (for AVR, ESP32, ARM) just work out of the box, and can be easily installed via brew. Whereas on Windows you either have native builds for Win32 (which are harder to acquire and you cannot easily script them with bash), or you need to run a Linux VM, since WSL2 doesn't support USB passthrough.
> POSIX is not properly implemented, but that doesn't matter to the majority of developers
The non-GNU versions of popular command line tools and running Bash 3.x ends up being a nuisance. Scripts that work fine on WSL 2, native Linux and CI (also Linux) end up not working on macOS. It usually comes down to some flag not existing or working the same on macOS' version of [INSERT_POPULAR_CLI_TOOL] or a Bash 4.x feature not existing so you need to do things a different way. As someone who often writes shell scripts getting macOS compatibility feels like having to support IE 6 back in the good old days of web development.
>And recently I've discovered how horrible my network is at home and I doubt I can build a desktop unless I route ethernet wires through the walls. (Can't do that).
There are PCIe wifi cards or USB wifi adapters for desktops...
If you are building a new desktop there is even motherboards with wifi built in
You dont have to use ethernet cables for a desktop! And where did you get this notion from???
Sounds like the best for you is to build a desktop or buy one as you are using laptops and desktop replacement anyway.
Thats said, ethernet is the best experience. With covid video calls it gets pretty obvious who has bad wifi and who has crystal clear ethernet wires (◕‿◕)
Many realtek wifi adapters cause issues on Linux, and require buggy kernel modules. You should do some research before getting a wifi adapter. I just repurposed a wifi extender to be a wireless "bridge" from wifi to ethernet.
> I wish there was a better solution for a Linux laptop which was sturdy, worked well (sleep, hibernate, wake from lock, bluetooth, wifi), and had a good screen and a lot of external ports.
Have you tried Pop!OS? It SHOULD have most of those features, including a custom power management system. I haven't tried it but am seriously considering to find time and do it, base ubuntu + i3wm isn't cutting it for me anymore.
The keyboards they've been using since the flawed butterfly mechanism are imo quite good to type on (16" 2019 model here, the first one to reintroduce the scissor switches iirc). Sure, not as good as older MacBooks (or ThinkPads, etc), but totally acceptable among the modern laptops.
I suspect there's another related reason for high kernel_task % CPU: your battery is very low and your charger is underpowered. It seems to throttle your CPU usage to avoid exhausting the battery while charging, and this throttling shows up in the same way as thermal throttling.
I discovered this by accident when I plugged my MBP into my phone charger instead of my laptop charger. I need to mark the cables somehow, or replace the phone charger with a laptop charger just in case...
I bought a bunch of 45W+ USB-C chargers and put one in every room of the house. They're only about $20 each on Amazon. All of the family computers and phones can be charged on any of them. It's nice not to think about it.
Don't use third party chargers on A1706 or A1708 MacBook Pros. Doing so will kill a charge IC. It's well documented and I fix one or two of these logic board faults every month.
You're putting a lot of faith in a $20 thing from Amazon, especially for something as crucial as the charger. Which brand have you put your faith in for these adapters?
I think your concern is overblown. They're all different brands, bought at different times, with the oldest an "Innergie" brand bought in 2016 and the newest a "Nekteck". Over those years, they've charged 5 different laptops and 4 different phones. No problems with any of the cables or devices.
This answer keeps clogging up my results researching my high kernel_task issues.
This answer being over enthusiastically given even after thermal throttling could reasonably be ruled out is one thing - but it seems like there’s also no real way to troubleshoot this type of issue (what sub-process is going wild?). Best I could find was a command to list the RAM usage of kernel modules.
the 13" ones cool themselves fine. They can usually keep the CPU at higher power for longer than other ultrabooks. The 15" models definitely have worse thermals than the competition though.
The 15in/16in ones actually have better thermal cooling than the competition. You can usually get the 16in i9 to boost to 60w turbo, which is 30% more than you can get an XPS 15 to do.
My 2018 MacBook Pro will throttle if you try to use both the GPU and CPU under full load.
My 2017 Dell XPS 15 would throttle if you looked at it. And the coil whine could be heard across the room.
My 2021 M1 MacBook Air is completely silent and barely gets warm under full load. It only has 8GB of RAM and outperforms the XPS and MacBook Pro. It also cost less than half those machines.
The m1 is very early still for compatibility, also doesn’t have 32 to 64 GB Ram. That might work for you but not everyone is the same.
Looking forward to seeing the new 16” MBP with Apple silicon, but I suspect ubiquitous software compatibility will be 3 or 4 years away similar to when Apple switched from PowerPC to intel
Yes, everything I use is already M1 compatible. And unless you need to run multiple VMs the 8GB of RAM doesn't seem to be an issue for anyone. What do you use that isn't compatible?
MacBook Pro 2019 has been the worst investment I have ever made. Since the day one it has been heating up and gives 2 hours battery backup. Apple has been useless in solving issue even though I got extra 2 years apple care. After 3 visits to their service outlet, all 3 said that our diagnostics shows no issues. It’s like we investigated ourselves and found ourselves innocent.
Finally when I went for the 4th time and switched on my Mac and made the guy touch the top panel(it was burning up) he agreed to check and fix it. After keeping the laptop for 2 weeks and replacing the screen and the top of the keyboard, the problem persists and I am out of options.
What’s the point of buying an upgraded version with i7 and 16gb if it over heats with simply a couple of tabs open on Firefox. smh
I think that’s sort of what the kernel_task usage is now: it’s minimally documented, but I guess the scheduler is now designed to attempt to throttle the system it it’s overheating.
No "special skills" are required. My 2018 MacBook Pro has 6 Pentalobe screws and the bottom cover pops off allowing you to access everything. You can purchase Pentalobe screwdrivers easily on the internet.
I didn't know that Docker desktop could be an issue.
The "app" I have the most problems with are Google Chat, and that just runs in the browsers.
One other issue I've seen is window server eating 150% CPU when using an external monitor. For some reason it works just unplugging the monitor and plugin it back in.
No, I think they're referring to the pre-installed ads on the start menu. Oh wait, that's Microsoft. Or maybe it is the utter failure of a control panel (Bluetooth, ACPI, Audio) that is still a crash-fest with Focal Fossa.
Let's face it, everything with a GUI now sucks. Hard.
There's some truth to this but I don't think it was necessarily intentional. It must have been an "all hands on deck" situation getting M1/Rosetta ready.
I'm PO'ed either way. My 2019 16" has been plagued with this issue.
Same, it’s so frustrating not being able to run a cut down dev setup (webpack, backend, vscode and browser with one tab open), no other programs running… and also an external monitor.
Without about 15 mins it grinds to a halt, and nothing I can do about it except research other laptops with better cooling
MacBooks of different kinds were plagued with overheating issues for many years. I still remember daily struggle trying to keep 2011 Pro running cool. Eventually, Intel's inability to provide power efficient and performant CPUs on schedule led to Apple dedicating themselves to producing their own chip.
So, it is because of constant overheating issues we have M1 now.
2019 was the year they released the 16” MBP and redesigned the keyboard to be a slimmer version of the pre-butterfly design. That’s a lot of industrial design to put into phoning it in.
Well they lost me. I ordered a Thinkpad through IT and am moving to Linux for my main after multiple presentations in front of hundreds of people that went south due to throttling. I'm not gonna get fired due to apple incompetence (or greed if you are wearing the tinfoil hat).
Just wished I had better control on AMD GPU being used whenever I plug in a display for my MBP16, just ramps up the fan for no reason while my Air is just sipping away on the same display with iGPU..
Unlike Windows based machines, MacBooks always use the AMD GPU when an external monitor is plugged in. I forget the exact reasoning, but it is the way Apple designed these machines.
In 2016 when they were redesigned I don't believe the intel IGPU could drive 4k @ 60hz, and Apple also wanted compatibility with the LG 5K display they partnered with. The best solution was to just force all external displays to be routed thru the AMD GPU.
I've seen articles about the low-power mode being rolled out to macOS Monterey, even for intel Macs. Hopefully that can reduce power consumption. I've also decided to do a thermal pad mod for the VRMs+inductors to reduce throttling, avoid higher top-side temperatures & lower fan noise.
I’d been running two 4K monitors off my MacBook Pro and noticed high cpu usage and a non stop fan in the afternoons when the room got a little warmer. Turns out the integrated gpu is struggling and the cpu spends more cycles handling cooling management.
This got annoying enough that I invested in an external gpu (not cheap!!) which resolved my issues. I get it — 4K and 5K monitors require much more graphics processing and a MacBooks integrated gpu can only do so much.
Having a normal 2014 i7 4790k desktop + dedicated GPU that thread is hilarious.
Just buy/build a desktop PC and you can hook up everything. I have 3 1440p monitors with a 1070ti and its great. The fan turns off under 55C and it is under that for normal desktop usage.
I also have a Lenovo T490 from work. Using internal Intel GPU 2x 1440p monitors is fine. Dunno wtf Apple is doing.
Imagine not being able to hook up external monitors...
Old school hackers, military generals, special forces paratroopers, and space shuttle astronauts who are sensitive to social status use a GRiD Compass.
>Development began in 1979, and the main buyer was the U.S. government. NASA used it on the Space Shuttle during the early 1980s, as it was powerful, lightweight, and compact. The military Special Forces also purchased the machine, as it could be used by paratroopers in combat.
>Man in a Briefcase: The Social Construction of the Laptop Computer and the Emergence of a Type Form
>Abstract
>Dominant design discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s presented the introduction of the laptop computer as the result of 'inevitable' progress in a variety of disparate technologies, pulled together to create an unprecedented, revolutionary technological product. While the laptop was a revolutionary product, such a narrative works to dismiss a series of products which predated the laptop but which had much the same aim, and to deny a social drive for such products, which had been in evidence for a number of years before the technology to achieve them was available. This article shows that the social drive for the development of portable computing came in part from the 'macho mystique' of concealed technology that was a substantial motif in popular culture at that time. Using corporate promotional material from the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester, and interviews with some of the designers and engineers involved in the creation of early portable computers, this work explores the development of the first real laptop computer, the 'GRiD Compass', in the context of its contemporaries. The consequent trajectory of laptop computer design is then traced to show how it has become a product which has a mixture of associated meanings to a wide range of consumers. In this way, the work explores the role of consumption in the development of digital technology.
>[translated:] The Grid Compass was made of black lacquered magnesium alloy.
>Among its most remembered features, there is the fact that the paint went away after a while, due to the weight and dimensions that did not allow it to be too delicate with its transport. And so the dull black splintered, revealing the shiny metal beneath.
>Grid Compass - Bill Moggridge Design
>The Grid Compass was a status symbol, the flag of that tribe of people who wanted to show the world that they can never really disconnect from work.
>Owning it was cool.
>But even cooler was having chipped it, because it was the unmistakable sign that one not only possessed that thing, but actually used it.
Me too! I can't find a citation and don't know if it's true, but decades ago I heard a rumor that a Mossad agent's magnesium alloy GRiD stopped a bullet! Try that with a MacBook Air.
The GRiD was so well built, and they were so popular with the military, that rumor was totally believable.
This has some stories about spooky GRiD users, like Admiral John Poindexter, who was a bit of a hacker:
>Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD compass
>Introduced in 1982, the GRiD Compass 1100 was likely the first commercial computer created in a laptop format and one of the first truly portable machines. With its rugged magnesium clamshell case (the screen folds flat over the keyboard), switching power supply, electro-luminescent display, non-volatile bubble memory, and built-in modem, the hardware design incorporated many features that we take for granted today. Software innovations included a graphical operating system, an integrated productivity suite including word processor, spreadsheet, graphics and e-mail. GRiD Systems Corporation, founded in 1979 by John Ellenby and his co-founders Glenn Edens and David Paulsen, pioneered many portable devices including the laptop, pen-based and tablet PC form factors.
>Key members of the original GRiD engineering team -- Glenn Edens, Carol Hankins, Craig Mathias and Dave Paulsen -- share engineering stories from the Wild West of the laptop computer. Moderated by New York Times journalist John Markoff.
(At 32:37 they mention an external 5 1/4" floppy disk peripheral that was returned for service with a bullet hole, and the "Scrubbing Bubbles" software they wrote for the government to erase the bubble memory in case of emergency.)
The overheating problem on my MBP was so bad and so pathetically common, that I had to take drastic and expensive measures, which work pretty well.
I tried various laptop cooling stands, and they were cheap and plastic and had shitty fans that hardly pushed any air, and didn't help.
So I got a solid aluminum laptop stand without a fan, which conducts heat much better than plastic, and I bought four sets of stick-on heat sinks (some large and some small), and stuck them all over the back of the aluminum laptop stand on the surface that touches the bottom of the laptop.
Then I bought a very powerful and quiet inline ventilation fan (the kind you use to pump air out of the bathroom), and analog speed dial (make sure you get an AC speed control for an AC fan, or a DC control if you get a DC fan) and some big wide round air tubing, and I set the fan in the opposite corner of the room (or outside the room with the door open) where the noise it generates is harder to hear, and ran the tube up to the cooling-fin encrusted back of the laptop stand, where it quietly blows lots of air on the back, and cools the stand and laptop quite effectively.
I usually run it at the lowest quietest setting "1", but can turn it up to "10" to cool it down quicker when it's overheating.
If anyone's interested I can provide links to the actual products I bought. Desktop and laptop fans were just not powerful enough, and very loud and clumsy, and it sucks to have the fan itself right next to you instead of in the next room. But the inline room ventilation fans are much more powerful and quieter and adjustable, but more expensive, and the flexible air tube lets you position the fan far away from the computer.
I was losing so many hours of work due to overheating that it was well worth investing in all the equipment to really cool it down.
Here are the small and large adhesive heat sinks, which are sold for 3d printers (I got two packs of each size: 16 eur total for 40 small ones, 16 eur total for 8 big ones):
CTRICALVER Aluminium Heatsink, Black Heatsink, Thermal Adhesive Pad Cooler, for 3D Printer, Pack of 10 (20pcs)
CTRICALVER Thermal conductivity of the radiator, heat conduction measures L40 mm x W40 mm x H11 mm, pack of 4
The fan was 185 eur, and the AC speed control was 35 eur or so, and I wired it myself with a switched plug for a couple euros. There are many models of fan, some AC and some DC, that move various amounts of air per minute, with fixed or three or variable speeds, that make different amounts of noise, but I shopped around and am pretty happy with the mid-range one I got. (S&P is a European brand so YYMV.)
Soler & Palau TD-500/150-160 Silent 580/430m3 Air Conditioning Fan + REB-1N AC speed control
The aluminum stand was 36 eur:
NULAXY Laptop Ständer, Einstellbar Notebook Ständer, Ausblendbar laptopständer Kompatibel für alle 11-17 inches Notebooks: MacBook Pro/Air, Dell
The next step I'm planning is making an air filteration system by taping together some filters like this DIY box fan air purifier, but using the powerful inline fan instead of a weak box fan:
I haven't decided what kind of filters to use yet: cheap high flow central air conditioner filters, or more expensive HEPA filters, that restrict the air flow more. The fan is quite powerful so I'm pretty sure it can handle the HEPA filters, but I haven't tried yet. Maybe that's overkill. But after wasting so many hours on overheating, overkill is kind of the point.
I wonder how much of this and other thermal issues with MacBooks are just a marketing stunt to better sell m1 devices.
Not that m1 needs that kind of marketing, Apple yet again set the standard for best laptop on the market, possibly for another decade, but I can totally see these anti-intel subversions being discussed somewhere deep in the catacombs of the mothership.
Are you implying that they built in artificial stunt thermal issues in those 4 year old laptops, so that they can use that as marketing to sell more m1 devices 4 years in the future?
Yes. It’s one of the main selling point of m1 - being faster than intel and colder than intel. M1 is just a continuation of their A line which exists for a decade, so it’s not like it was a stab in the dark.
This happens when the room is over 80 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the CPU is at 3% utilization. Can't find root cause, or if this is even considered abnormal, but the laptop is defective in my opinion.