Hacker News Reader

Comment by rehemiau | Hacker News Reader

Louis Rossmann made a video[1] a while ago presenting how badly optimized is the cooling on new MacBooks. In short: Apple prefers their MacBook CPU and GPU to run hot and thermally throttle so that the user is happy because the machine is quiet, and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgeh7ZJRhZU

edit: Bear in mind these videos are about new MacBooks so there's no way to predict their usual lifespan. And I'm not saying all of them die after 2-3 years. Apple is simply optimizing for the 90% of users here, people doing mostly web browsing and using Microsoft Office. This does not put a sustained load on the CPU/GPU so these users will be fine.

View on HN

>and then, more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years.

Conspiracy theory BS. MacBooks don't die after "2-3 years", and they retain much better resale value than Wintel laptops too.

That said, Apple could very well prioritise quiet over full-speed.

> more importantly, Apple is also happy, because when it overheats often it has a shorter lifespan so you’ll have to buy a new MacBook after 2-3 years.

And yet, MacBooks tend to be extremely reliable for many years.

I switched from a MacBook Air to a similarly spec’ed (4260U vs 5200U) Thinkpad a couple of months ago, and noticed a vast performance difference when playing games. When playing games the processor gets up to 85C, but doesn’t throttle. It’s either that or Linux is a lot better for gaming than macOS.

Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your device especially for longer sustained periods unless there's some glaring design defect as happened to Nvidia.

So that's actually pretty well optimized.

> Running your CPU hotter doesn't significantly affect the lifespan of your device

Maybe, but I've seen reliability formulas with fifth powers of temperature, namely for equivalent ageing of devices.

And 14nm fabrication processes don't exactly improve my expectations of durability ...

It helps if you know 14 nm fabrication isn't really 14 nm. The biggest culprits are electrolytic capacitors and the lipo batteries but the batteries are far away and the other components are cooled by the air headed into the fan so neither will actually reach anywhere near the temperature of the CPUs. Apple also doesn't skimp on components like this especially when it's a core and obvious part of optimizing for noise so I wouldn't expect it to have an appreciable impact on the lifespan of the device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com