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Comment by 72deluxe | Hacker News Reader

Is this specific to certain years only? I have a 2012 non-retina and it is great, but apparently certain years had more problems than others. Would you recommend it for my 2012 model too?

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As a more reliable way to confirm if you have some thermal problem on an older Mac, download and run Intel Power Gadget. That shows the current frequency of the CPU, and when combined with running some program that puts all cores under load, you can see if the frequency drops below what is designed for.

Be aware it isn't always thermal paste that is the culprit. I had a 2012 Retina 15" MBP that was normally 2.6GHz but would drop down to 1.4GHz. That was purely due to the fans and (tiny) vents getting choked up. Solved by opening and using compressed air to clean, no fiddling with CPU paste.

Not sure. But I suspect it is in the more recent years where the thinner unibody has been required to take on more of the cooling duties. So if you are like me and use your laptop on the bed, on your lap etc then you are by design preventing the laptop from cooling properly.

Everything I've seen says thermal paste is only effective at most a couple of years. It is harder to replace on your 2012 model but not difficult:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid...

This is a general issue affecting lots of notebooks from all vendors.

Sure. But what I haven't seen on Windows or Linux is the deliberate high priority scheduling of a dummy process designed to throttle the CPU.

The CPU will throttle itself soon enough after that anyway. The only difference would be that without the kernel throttling it earlier, it can get a bit hotter and last a bit longer before throttling.

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