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If you are going to call it a professional machine and charge a minimum of 3000 dollars for it with the I9 and around 7000 dollars with the max ram and storage options. It should not throttle to this degree.
 
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Does making the laptop thicker necessarily improve its cooling, other than the small amount of added surface area? I'm asking cause I don't know. Maybe if you add more fans, requiring it to be thicker.

Thing is, the previous CPUs worked fine with the design they had, and they aren't going to release a thicker laptop than previously.
The "Pro" moniker is meaningless if the machine is actually designed for Joe & Jane Coffee Shop. If Apple released this product knowing the hidden limitations, it pretty much tells me they no longer care about serving the (admittedly small) market for creative professionals.
 
If you follow the gaming notebook forums much at all you'll see that the 6-core 8th gen chips are very difficult to cool properly even in much thicker frames than the MacBook Pro offers. Seriously, the Notebookreview forums are full of people upset that monstrous gaming notebooks aren't able to cool these chips properly, especially if there's a discrete GPU also pumping heat into the system.

As soon as I saw that these Macs had been released with these new CPUs I started wondering what kind of cooling magic Apple might have worked to make it possible. The answer seems to be: none. The laws of physics are the laws of physics and if these chips run hot in 1"+ thick systems with massive heatsinks and fans, what chance do they have in something as thin as a MacBook Pro?

The Retina series systems are all too thin to support these hotter chips! But, the older Unibody frame could be made into a design that could support this chip. The needed space to do it is in there, but even that has its limits too!

Many hardware designers are not expert enough in thermal cooling dynamics to know how to move the heat off and out.

Part of the problem is the pancake fans are just not efficient in cooling in the way they are mounted.

While way off base here for reference a jet engine is an ideal design at the air flows though it. Now take a sheet of metal spaced a few feet in front and in back of the engine in the line of the air flow both the engine will over heat and the plate at the rear would get very hot!

Now look how the MacBook as well as most other modern laptops are designed. Its the same! Blocking the natural flow of air which moves the heat away. While I'm not suggesting we pack jets in our systems, the point here is the system needs to focus first on the cooling then plug the rest of the gear in to the frame.

But, thats not how designers have been working on laptops for years so they haven't learned the limitations of the old designs. Now its clear they need to rip up the old designs and start afresh with a new vision on cooling these hot beasts otherwise the limit of the laptop is set as it can't support these chips.

I for one think it can be done! Its just the rigidness of the old ways thats stopping it!
 
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The CPU (i9) used in the Mac has a ceiling on the die of 100C. DTS monitoring has an error ratio of +/- 5. Therefore the CPU temperature should never really exceed 94.

Right, but his comment was in the context of the test of throttling of my CPU, not in the context of the i9.
 
I don't think you really know if your computer is running at 100% capability, 100% of the time.
It happens all the time when transcoding video from one format to the other. This sort of work is the reason some one would spend put to 7000 dollars for a laptop. I work on a movie set and we render video for hours at nearly 100% cpu usage for 20 minutes or more at a time. Would have been nice to count on this laptop. Again, I don't think that is too much to ask when the cost is at this level.
 
If you are going to call it a professional machine and charge a minimum of 3000 dollars for it with the I9 and around 7000 dollars with the max ram and storage options. It should not throttle to this degree.
The storage option is irrelevant. If Apple wanted -- and thought there was a demand for the 4TB option in the MacBook 12"... you could probably fit it in... it would cost $4500+ but it would not fit the marketing of a "pro" moniker. In other words the size and price of storage is completely irrelevant.
 
Nothing wrong with thin and powerful as long as the former doesn't come at the cost of the latter.
That's correct, but that doesn't seem to be the case with the current MBP. And the iMac Pro, well, it could probably have been cheaper, and most surely more upgradeable, had it been less thin.
 
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By "balanced perspective" you mean "eat any sh-- YouTuber or the press makes up about Apple".

Seriously, go live in your bubble.

Dude...You are as biased as it gets. So question was fair. I also dont understand why OSX does not kick in fans earlier but waits till nearly 80C. That would be reasonable short term option to keep temps under some control
 
The thing is these MacBooks were designed for quad core i7s not hexacore i9s. I think this situation is similar to what happened with the 2011 MacBook Pros that had the Core 2 Quads and discrete GPUs. They had originally been designed for the Core 2 Duos. I think the extra heat from the CPUs was what caused the Radeons to keep failing in those.

Correct! The design was reused with very little adjustment for the hotter chips.

In addition we the users are also to blame! As we have moved forward so quickly with much more compute hungry apps that also pushed these systems as a whole beyond what they were designed to support. Some of this is Apples fault for not adding enough headroom in the design to cover the movement into heavier graphics and compute driven apps.
 
So what? You pay for the newer chips but don't get any of the benefits because they throttle it down?
Seems like false advertising. Like saying an 8-cylinder engine but only 4 will work.
 
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Macbook Pro needs a redesign ASAP.
The touchbar gimmick was totally useless and the awful butterfly keyboard was a disaster in both MacBook Pro and 12” Macbook.

I don’t understand why Apple is so stubborn and refuse to accept they messed up.

They are doing great with iPads and iPhones,Watch and Airpods etc but when it comes to Macbooks they have really lost the plot.

They need to go back to move forward here! Get off the Thin is In bandwagon as it does not have a place in the real PRO market. Go back to the older 2012 Unibody frame with ports & MagSafe put in Retina if not better display, the needed cooling system to support such a hot chip (and the GPU) I would even like to see a 17" model brought back.

Maybe we need to start a GoFundMe page to show Apple how serious we are collectively.

I could see taking this system guts putting it into the needed body frame to support the cooling it needs and address the keyboard issue as well.
 
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I don't get all the people making excuses for Apple on this.

If they sell me a computer with an 8950HK in it, then that 8950HK should be able to perform at up to 4.8Ghz but at a minimum of its 2.9Ghz base clock.

That's all there is to it: the 8950HK's specified operating range under load is 2.9 to 4.8Ghz.

If I go to configure a new Mac on the Apple website right now, this is what I see as a $300 upgrade:


2.9GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz
If I sit down to work at my computer at it can't operate reliably under load at something between 2.9Ghz and 4.8Ghz then it's defective. Period. End of story.
 
The throttling is no surprise to me. A "Pro" laptop should be able to run for extended periods at 100% utilisation, most laptop companies are guilty of making Laptops so thin that the cooling systems cannot achieve this and have to throttle performance. The fact is that with cooling solutions currently available a laptop needs to be big chunky 1 inch+ thickness to run without throttling. There will always be compromises between performance and bulk of laptops. Look at the design decisions taken by laptop companies especially Apple to make a machine thin and svelte looking, want powerful cpu well you can have it, but its throttled, want powerful GPU, well have a 560x if you want something more powerful then get a EGPU, oh and there are no room for ports in the chassis either. It does strike me as comical that if you want a laptop from Apple with real "Pro" graphics then you have to go for a EGPU, surely a thicker laptop would be less bulky and weigh less than lugging around a Macbook Pro and EGPU and that way CPU could be throttled less and you could have a real Pro grade GPU.
 
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Exactly. If you are so worried about portability of the device then I would suggest you are not a 'PRO' user. You are probably using your mac for writing documents in a starbucks with your perfectly groomed beard, ironic tattoo and drinking a skinny no-foam, almond milk, pumpkin-spiced latte. ;)
i like MBP because they’re light for the screen size.
idk, i’d like it to weigh 1lb.. or even lighter.

not sure how that somehow translates to me not being a pro. ?
 
Another thing to take in mind with these hot running Macs is one I've just experienced with my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (2.7 i7).

I'm now on my second replacement display due to a mottled appearance in some colours. The verdict? I'm putting away my MacBook Pro into a protective sleeve whilst it's still too hot (and just using PhotoShop / Illustrator / Dreamweaver etc). They've now recommended I wait until the Mac is cool before putting it in its protective bag!

I can't imagine how long you'd have to wait for these new Macs to cool down!
 
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one thing is true: ask anyone in an apple store a question where the answer is anything other than "it's awesome, we're awesome, everything is wonderful and BOY am I'm I lucky and happy to be here and aren't you so lucky you walked in!", and they start to twitch. It's kinda Stepford-ee that way.
 
I have the same issue on my 2014 MacPro (6-core). It normally runs below 90F (32C); but as soon as temp rises above 110F (45C), the CPU throttles down: render times at 130F (55C) are bout double. Solution: turn on air-conditioning when doing a 6hour rendering job. Had the exact same prob with my 2008 MacPro - throttling is a done by CPU in order avoid meltdown (servers do a thermal shutdown; google it!).

Yeah INTEL: my 2008 was consuming 1500W (with video card); and my 2014 is down to 500W - still away too much: it has no display, and only SSD hard disk. So why do we need 500W; just to move some electrons around in the core?
 
Dude...You are as biased as it gets. So question was fair. I also dont understand why OSX does not kick in fans earlier but waits till nearly 80C. That would be reasonable short term option to keep temps under some control
The Youtube person did a FAIR review (IMHO) and seems to have other people indicating the same situation. The i9 should not throttle to lower than the previous generations i7 on the most CPU intensive task - period. Applications that don't tax the CPU -- is irrelevant since you don't buy a supposedly more powerful machine if the current generation handles the task with ease.

The question is why? Is this just teething problems and "fixable"? Is it a problem with the wrong profile being used for the fans? Apple is nothing if not absolutely not aggressive in spinning up the fans (based on the temps they allow the iMac Pro before spinning them up)... Is this a thermal paste application problem from early assembly line issues? Could they switch off AVX and the iGPU when the CPU approaches limit (i.e. dGPU only) thereby reducing the heat generated? With someone like Anandtech testing - even if they confirm the issue they would have the clout to likely have Apple respond to them and figure out the issue (like the Consumer Reports should have done instead of a fiasco it was).

Even with all that I have stated, it is a valid observation / review. It needs to be followed up on -- not disregarded by attempting to impune the messenger ... when as far as I can see he has been honest in his current assessment.
 
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