After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.

The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.

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.

I had (and still have) a 4k external monitor. Naturally I wanted the MBP to drive the monitor with a resolution that took advantage of all the pixels. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU power consumption would produce enough heat to run the fans even if the rest of the system was completely idle! If I set the output to full HD the GPU would cool down and the fans would turn off. But full HD on a 4k monitor is a waste.

It was very strange. I could drive the monitor at 4k but with the image upside down, and the power consumption would be low. But flip the image right side up and it would run hot and turn on the fans.

It took a couple weeks of fiddling, but I finally found a combination of refresh rate, resolution, image orientation (right side up!), and cabling that let me drive the monitor at high resolution without running the fans. What a pain.

(I used iStat menus to monitor GPU power consumption. At “good” settings it consumed about 5w. At “bad” settings it would consume 17w. At a bad setting you could immediately see the various temperatures go up and the fans spinning up to compensate.)

Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.

You can't tell me that this wasn't known by Apple before shipping the product. Why did they not provide adequate cooling for the CPU?

Intel just reenacted IBM's history with Apple, particularly the G5 era. That CPU was instantly a no-go for anything mobile. In workstations it was cranked ever higher with very poor power-frequency scaling, needing water cooling for the beastly 200W idle power consumption and close to 1kW full throttle.

That went well so was a perfect role model for Intel's i9.

Installed Linux mint Xfce Edition for lightness, installed ollama, start to test different models. Gemma4 e4b runs perfectly fine, exposed it to the network, connected to it with my current notebook and use vs code codex to start to run inference.

For about 30 minutes of bliss, this setup work at a reasonable speed... then the MBP shut it self down. It was so hot that it trigger the safety mechanism, the fans sounded like the laptop was about to take off.

I though on leaving it on inside the fridge, but then the WIFI wouldn't reach.

On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5... the experiment didn't work as intended, but it did work.

The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.

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.

they're doing what to my CPU????

Also, pour one for the death of the analog speedo. Peg the needle, no more!

Edit: https://sasakaranovic.com/projects/diy-analog-resource-monit...

All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?

  yes no > /dev/null

  cat /dev/null | 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.

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

I think the real question is what IDE we're talking about.

I spend 95% of the time with just PHPStorm and other stuff like the terminal, slack and ticketing open. And the browser of course (safari). Xcode and Android Studio are rarely opened. Mostly when I want to test out something in the apps that isn't on testflight / firebase yet.

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.

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null

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

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.

  while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done

      yes yes

(All joking aside, this is why I have a MacBook Pro. Compilation easily hits the Air’s thermal limits and the performance boost on the Pro with its fan is impressive.)

  ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i in.mp4 \
    -vf "fps=6,format=yuv420p,scale=960:-2:flags=lanczos" \
    -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 -crf 32 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset fast \
    -c:a libopus -b:a 82K -application 2048 \
    -c:s mov_text \
    out.mp4

  -x265-params "keyint=800:min-keyint=24:scenecut=20:ref=8:bframes=16:b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=80:rd=4:subme=5:deblock=1,1:aq-mode=3:aq-strength=0.4:psy-rd=0.4:psy-rdoq=1.0:qcomp=0.7:qg-size=64:rect=1:amp=1:strong-intra-smoothing=1:limit-modes=1:limit-tu=4:rdpenalty=2:tu-intra-depth=4:tu-inter-depth=4:me=star:no-allow-non-conformance=1" \

If you get a MacBook Air it will get quite toasty at throttling limits. After all, it has no fan.

MacBook Pro models and Apple computers in general tend to favor quiet operation over keeping the laptop surface cool.

Many PC gaming laptops go out of their way to keep warm air off the keyboard deck with a high willingness to use fan noise to accomplish that since the assumption is that you’re resting your hands on the computer for an extended period and you have headphones on for your game anyway.

In the specific case of the i7-7700T, the "T" suffix for Intel CPUs usually means you have mainstream desktop silicon with arbitrarily reduced long-term turbo limits, intended to be used in small form factor PCs with limited cooling capacity. Its limitation to 35W sustained and official Tj max of 80°C are artificial and essentially fiction, and the same silicon will readily do 91W sustained with a Tj max of 100°C as seen on the i7-7700K.

Processor temperature under load tells you almost nothing about the power draw or efficiency of the chip, because the temperature can be controlled to almost any value desired through a combination of varying cooling effort and varying clock speeds.

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.