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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

What can I say as a person somewhat close to electronics engineering:

Look at that single skinny heat pipe, it will get saturated very fast. Second to that, look at those tiny radiators, they are clearly not capable to discharge the full heat flux.

I simply don't see any signs of proper thermal engineering there.

Apple says "we are listening now, and here is a new cooling design," then it comes out to be even less adequate that the old one. I can't think of anybody else capable of trolling up their customers like that.

If anybody wants to dish out something on an order of $1.5m to do a contract manufacturing run for a properly designed full sized laptop, give me a note. I do have some tricks in mind how to make 40W+ CPUs work in a relatively compact case.

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If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down. Or the management/product design group has overridden the input of the people who actually know how to design thermal solutions, because the laptop CANNOT be 2mm thicker.

Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious. At least the 12 inch Macbook from a few years ago which was truly fanless uses an appropriately low powered CPU.

disclaimer: used to do systems engineering for a server manufacturer a long time ago, after you've gone through a dozen iterations of ways to mount skived copper heatsinks on dual socket motherboards in 1U cases, with various fan solutions, you realize that everything that is not acoustically terrible is some sort of compromise. People are trying to put CPU+GPU+RAM packages that are anywhere from 25W to 45W TDP in laptops that are physically too small for them.

That's why I buy gaming laptops for my work needs even though I don't play games. Their heatsinks are generously sized resulting in good thermals and acoustics.

I use a similar trick: I try to find a laptop that comes in both discrete-GPU and integrated-GPU configurations, and both version must share the identical chassis.

This way, when I buy the integrated version, I know the chassis has been designed with the heavier airflow of the discrete-GPU version in mind. If I'm lucky, my integrated-GPU config might even use the identical size heat-sinks as the discrete-GPU version.

That's smart! I'm going to try the trick next time~

That's interesting. Any model you can recommend?

Dell XPS 15's and Precisions 55xx's allow this trick.

You can buy them from the manufacturer with no discrete graphics cards.

I have one with a card which is physically turned off for the same trick.

Do you mean the XPS 13? I've never seen an XPS 15 in recent years without an NVIDIA card. The cheapest XPS 15 from 2019 that I can find still comes with the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, as does my own XPS 15 9560 from 2017.

I'm 2 days late! I'm so sorry!

If you go to dell.com and select one of the more entry level varients you can customise more things:

https://i.imgur.com/deQFdyU.png

In my experience the XPS 15 7390 with the 6c12t cpu with Windows had the fan running very often. Each time a single cpu thread ran at 100% the fan turned on.

The thinkpad T470/T480 dual-pipe dGPU heatsink is a drop-in replacement for the iGPU version, so if you buy the version without dGPU, you can pretty easily double your heatpipes quite cheap.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9ohpyo/psa_t470t4...

Not OP, but from experience I know the Razer Blade Stealth 13 has the same cooling for both integrated GPU and dedicated gpu versions - and it's a very beefy cooling system as is, even with the dedicated gpu the system can stay at full load indefinitely without any issues.

What laptop are you using currently?

Does this trick apply to the 15" MacbookPro (2015)? If so, I guess I'm in luck!

They stopped doing that with the 15" MacBook Pro after 2015 :(

This has been true since the days of desktop computers, too (when laptop wasn't even an option). Gaming specs always make for simply great all-around machines — largely due to component specialization indeed, including thermal outtake.

Note that to this day it's magnitudes of order cheaper to build a desktop for crunching numbers. There's no beating the thermals of that, and thermals = cost either in money or time in this very physically-underpinned market.

I was running video on a Lenovo desktop, CPU was at 100% the whole time, and it didn't heat up or make a lot of fan noise.

I do the same thing for my personal laptops. While it certainly has a few quirks, I've found the Razer Blade to be a good balance between size and cooling performance. It is noticeably thicker than a Macbook Pro, but still light enough to carry around.

but then you end up with a monster of a machine.

Why can't laptop engineers just find a way to break physics, it's not that hard, Einstein did it...

edit: /s

Maybe laptops are not supoosed for heavy lifting...

> If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down.

If that was the gamble, you'd assume that the laptops would thermal throttle way below the physical Tjunction limit. As a matter of fact, they're still allowing themselves to reach very high temperatures even in common usage, despite an undersized (hence, to some extent, less reliable) cooling solution. That's kinda hard to explain as a sensible choice.

That sounds like the same calculated risk they took with the early 2011 MBPs.

I ran my 2011 MBP hot and it eventually bricked. The logic board "post-recall" also eventually bricked too.

The Apple support thread for that issue ran hundreds of pages, so the 44 page thread for the 16" MBP is just giving me bad flashbacks.

> Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious

This doesn't have to be a bad path. Most peoples' CPU use is intermittent, and there's a decent amount of thermal mass around. I'd rather be able to go fast for 5 seconds and then be throttled to speed X by ability to move heat than to be throttled to speed X all the time.

Tech workers and tech company engineering divisions must be a decent chunk of all MBPs sold. And then there’s the pro video people. Where is that assumption coming from? Compiling, rendering, transcoding are all pretty heavy workloads.

Is Apple ignoring this? Or just assuming these workloads are short/bursty enough to not worry about sustained utilization?

Maybe they're making the assumption that people doing super heavy load stuff like that would more more likely be using a dedicated desktop workstation rather than a laptop.

> relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down

Seems like that wasn't working fully, since they report having GPU issues after stress testing the computer (external GPU worked fine). And that is worrying. Is the thermal stress shutdown from OS, or onboard the GPU/CPU?

I feel like GPUs don't thermal throttle as gracefully as CPUs do. I have a desktop GPU and when it's at its max temperature for too long, eventually the graphics driver crashes. Meanwhile, CPUs are perfectly happy to run with inadequate cooling; they just thermal throttle.

I worry that it might actually be a software issue. GPU clock starts running slowly, software assumes that it will be running faster, two commands are issued but only one is processed, driver gets confused, driver crashes.

> because the laptop CANNOT be 2mm thicker

Well, they did make the 16" a fair bit thicker than the previous models.

> if anybody wants to dish out something on an order of $1.5m to do a contract manufacturing run for a properly designed full sized laptop, give me a note.

Something tells me that Apple spent more than $1.5M designing the recent MacBook Pro.

It is a bit presumptuous to say "well i could do it better" when referencing an entire team of qualified electrical engineers at one of the largest corporations in the world that has near limitless resources.

Especially coming from such a qualified background as "a person somewhat close to electronics engineering".

I worked in OEM electronics since 2007, and spent almost entire career in roles around manufacturing. And yes, when cookie cutter OEM laptops were making money, I did them too.

> It is a bit presumptuous to say "well i could do it better" when referencing an entire team of qualified electrical engineers at one of the largest corporations in the world that has near limitless resources.

Well, they still clearly screwed up. Challenge that.

I does not take to be a genius to understand that this scrawny cooling system could've performed much better if it had adequate heatpipe size, radiators, and air pathway optimisation.

So you are the missing link in their hardware team? If you have the answers, go work for them. You probably wouldn’t even have to interview, just tell them in your cover letter than you are better than 1000 of their hardware and materials science guys. While you’re at it, you might as well offer to rewrite the operating system as well, because why not?

As far as “clearly screwed up,” I’m not sure how clear that is. A few people on a forum complaining about something out of hundreds of thousands of those computers sold. In all of the rigorous professional reviews, this “screw up” hasn’t been mentioned. Not sure exactly what the screw up was, that fans turn on? On a huge, high end, powerful laptop?

I suspect you’re quite right, and the engineers knew what they were doing. But the requirements were crap, alas.

So, explain the keyboard fiasco?

16" keyboard is great?

After 3 years of broken keyboards...

Summoning all of your experience as "a person somewhat close to electronics engineering", you deliver this gem:

> I simply don't see any signs of proper thermal engineering here.

I hope you're joking. If not, you have a nauseating level of conceit.

I appreciate his remark. He should pop open Asus machines and make videos of himself criticizing them, conceit and all.

Erm yea or maybe don’t put high wattage, almost-desktop-class, processors in a laptop. People need to decide if they want a comnputer for easy portability or a desktop or pseudo-desktop.

Modern Intel notebook processors like these are likely running close to 80W and 65 steady state - They've got up to 8 cores to do this. Measurements by Notebookcheck seem to suggest that the MacBook Pro is already doing fairly well compared to PC OEM solutions, especially given the size of the enclosure and the fact that unlike Asus in the Zephyrus, they're not using 12V server level 60dBa fans in a laptop.

Where I think the MacBook Pro could do better is if they adopted more of a vapor chamber strategy for the heatsink, but as you mentioned the radiators are probably going to be the limiting factor, seeing as there's really not a huge temperature delta going on here.

I suppose one strategy could be to perhaps up the fan speed yet again, maybe at the cost of a little bit more noise, and use heat sinks with fins as finely pitched as the MacBook Air. Of course this will make the heat sink more heavy and expensive, but given the robustness of old Thinkpads that did not go easy on the copper, it could work.

I want the ThinkPad T500 cooling system back; the owl-wing shaped fans, the adequately sizes pipes, all that jazz.

> Apple says "we are listening now, and here is a new cooling design,"

They also keep at "oh, look how thin it is" even though the vast majority of people stopped caring 5-7 years ago. Make it thicker, but with better cooling, better storage, better GPUs etc.

Worse still, they do it across the line. "We painted ourselves into a thermal corner with MacPro" says Apple and keeps releasing iMacs (and iMacs Pro) with sealed aluminum enclosures, and making them thinner and thinner.

> Make it thicker, but with better cooling, better storage, better GPUs etc.

They literally did all of that in 16 inch.

> They literally did all of that in 16 inch.

Well, would be a wonder if they would still be using 2017s i7, wouldn't it? So, accepting natural or following common improvements should be nothing to brag about.

Besides that they obviously still fail with the second point, otherwise this whole issue would not exist.

Original unibody Macbook Pros were 2.5cm (0.98 in) thick.

Retina Macbook Pros were 1.7cm (0.71 in) thick.

Touchbar Macbook Pros, 1.55 cm (0.61 in) thick.

And they "made it thicker". They are now a whopping 1.62cm (0.64 in) thick.

Yes they made it thicker, but as you see, without much gain. They just made it look thicker, with an innuendo that this is for better thermals, while in reality it isn't.

My opinion is that MacBook Pros turned into consumer machines somewhere along the way and the overwhelming majority of buyers use them for Facebook, Youtube and Mail.app. I imagine Apple has a vast amount of metrics on this. None of these use cases require better thermals, so Apple engineers the devices accordingly.

I don't recall my 17" Powerbook G4 ever having thermal issues but how many people would buy a ~$5000 base spec MBP today? See Mac Pro.

My guess is the extra thickness is for the non-butterfly keyboard.

The 16" model has far thermals and performance than they 15" model - even while using the exact same CPU.

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