The 2019 macbook ironically had better heat dissipation than the previous generations, but it's still pretty bad.
We can blame Apple for using chips that are too intense for their laptops, and we can blame Intel for making garbage chips that can't really perform in real world cases while spending a decade not bothering to innovate. Apple at least is moving away from Intel as a result of all of this, and I'm really impressed with how well the M1 transition has been going.
Ehh. I take the view that Apple has been intentionally sandbagging their laptops for a while to facilitate an ARM transition.
Not to say that M1 isn't amazing, but I think Apple has been preparing for this for a while and needed to make sure it would succeed even if their ARM CPUs weren't quite as groundbreaking as they turned out to be.
Or longer, really; while everyone, of course, loves the 2015 MBP, they're mostly thinking of the integrated GPU one; the discrete GPU version was pretty thermally challenged. Arguably Apple's real problem with the post-2015 ones was that Intel stopped chips with fast integrated GPUs, so Apple put discrete GPUs in all SKUs.
While I don't think it's a likely theory, 5 years from "we should do it", to design, to testing, to preparing fabrication at scale, to design of the system around it, etc doesn't sound unreasonable. I would be really surprised if Apple decided the Arm migration after 2015.
Are there any benchmarks you can point to that have a similarly spec'd laptop (ideally similar size & weight too) that would show that Apple is sandbagging?
Possibility 1: Apple was making do with what Intel gave them, because their profit margins didn't care and they were busy naval gazing into their post-Jobs soul
Possibility 2: Apple had a master plan to intentionally torpedo performance in order to make their future first-party chips appear more competitive
Apple could have had good thermals with what Intel gave them, they just didn't because they seem to value "as thin and light as possible" as opposed to "pretty thin and light, and with sane thermals". Even then they seem to make straight up poor decisions around cooling a lot even when doing the right thing wouldn't affect size/weight. Do they just not have engineers on staff who are good at this or something?
It's absolutely possible to do high end Intel in a compact laptop with relatively good thermals - look at thin Windows gaming laptops for plenty of examples of this (and these have way beefier GPUs than macbooks too).
It's worth noting the engineers actually seemed to get management to allow the 2019 model to be _thicker_ with more thermal mass than the earlier models. But in a sense, Intel's chips have never been amazing for laptops.
The power draw drains batteries, and the heat is... very annoying at best. I have used a couple ThinkPads and a Dell XPS over the past 5 years too, and all of them had the same issues where they'd constantly be pushing out very hot air, and the battery life was never more than 4-6 hours.
What Intel supplied was the bigger problem, but Apple was definitely not trying to make the chips perform well. They were hitting thermal limits constantly, and more directly toward "sandbagging" the recent macbook airs have a CPU heat sink that isn't connected to anything and has no direct airflow. They could easily have fit a small array of fins that the fan blows over, but chose not to.
I've seen the video that makes that claim but it's just plain wrong, if you look at an Intel Air the whole main board complete with heat sinks lives in a duct formed by the rear section of the chassis.
Some air goes over it but it's not enough with the tiny surface area. A proper block of fins would have done so much more while still being small and light.
If it’s that easy, do you have an example of another vendor doing it? It seems like Intel would love to highlight, say, Lenovo or HP to say Apple was cooling it wrong.
Apple is actually just really terrible at thermal design, simple as that. It's surprising, because you'd kinda expect them to at least be slightly competent (like they are in other areas), but they're just not.
They've gotten around it with M1 by building an entirely new chip that's power efficient enough that it practically doesn't need good thermal design to perform near it's peak. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, but it's also hilarious that Apple had to go this far to cool a chip properly.
Yes, we knew that design was common - that’s why that PC fan made the video picking it as a point of criticism – but that doesn’t tell us whether it’s as big a deal as being claimed. That would require some benchmarks running for long enough to see substantially greater thermal throttling, higher CPU core temperatures, etc.
> I take the view that Apple has been intentionally sandbagging their laptops for a while to facilitate an ARM transition
That's just not a defensible position to take.
Intel's inability to execute a node transition has led to a situation where for years their only way to increase performance has come at the cost of major increases to power and heat.
>Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.
Compared to other amazing Intel laptops of similar form factor ? All Intel laptops are insanely loud and generate tons of heat for any reasonable performance level. They are just generation(s) behind in process, plus they start from an architecture designed for servers and desktops and cut down, Apple went the other way so it's reasonable they will do better on thermals and power consumption.
I bought a 2019 Core-i9, top of the line, and plugging a non 16:9 resolution screen into it out of clamshell mode causes the GPU to consume 18W, and basically cause the system to unsustainably heat-up until it starts throttling itself.
It's clear they have hit a limit of what they could really do with Intel's top of the line processors from a thermal perspective, with the form factor they want to deliver.
Now I have sort of an expensive paper-weight sitting next to my M1.
