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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to have to try one of these keyboards in an Apple Store, when they can open again. It just doesn't seem possible the folding mechanism and attach/detach system work that well. This and the new Airs just seem too good to be true. I'm not saying I'm a doubter, as such. Clearly apple have dropped some very important balls in the last few years, but wow. This stuff looks good.

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It seems to me that cooling is the ball that has been dropped on the new MBA. I haven’t seen one opened up yet but the heatsink design from last time (2018/2019) didn’t use a heat pipe over the CPU, it just kinda forced air to be drawn over it.

From this video: https://youtu.be/hB1aP2OnUJA we can see it quickly gets to 100c and stays there despite ramping the fan up. So while a quad core that can turbo up to 3.5/3.8ghz sounds awesome, for heavy sustained performance it looks like it’s definitely going to be clocking down to 1.5ghz or so.

This isn’t a surprise to me but I think some people just see 3.5/3.8 quad core and think this is going to be right on the heels of the MBP 13

Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design.

That said compared to other notebooks, MacBooks in similar tiers tend to benchmark quite well regardless of the thermal throttling.

I bought the MBP 16” and when I work with an external monitor it’s like having a hair dryer on. I wish I could just go back to a desktop machine again.

It might be worth looking into an egpu if you mostly notice it on an external monitor

External monitors force the use of higher-power discrete graphics. See an adjacent comment about eGPU if you want to control this better.

Edit: admittedly, this is a bit like returning to a desktop...

I’d be fine with having an eGPU at the office actually. That’s where the noise gets most out of hand and annoys my coworkers. It’s just a bummer to sink even more money into this machine.

The concensus seems to be this is a GPU related driver or OS bug.

Trying changing resolutions or scaling or refresh rate. 2K moniter are supposedly worse than others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265235

It is a joke that a high end machine has such a glaring issue. Then again, Apple got away from selling terrible terrible keyboards that were not easily replaceable for years.

Interesting! Thanks for the link. Not one of my coworkers is getting the 16 after hearing how noisy it is, and they ALL were planning on upgrading. Let’s hope a future software update might improve it.

Why not both?

For 60% of the cost of my MBP 16, I built a liquid cooled Ryzen 9 3900Z beast with 64GB of fast RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, RTX 2080 GPU, driving two 4k displays.

I run nixOS on it, my MBP only sees the light of day for things that absolutely require macOS, or when I’m out and about.

For normal, mostly stationary dev (Go, Rust), the desktop is miles better.

It’s been forgotten that PC parts are commodities.

I have the exact same issue on my 16". So much so that I've started preferring using my much smaller iPad as the second screen using the sidecar feature instead of my main 4k monitor.

Although I love everything else about the MBP 16, this issue drives me crazy.

> Apple has always been more content with letting CPUs throttle themselves rather than cooling them properly or using processors that can't be effectively cooler in their physical design.

Why would you do that?

To me it seems to be more so that Apple designs for Intels listed TDP and that’s it. The CPUs in the MBA are 9/10w and that is what it can handle sustained and staying slightly above base clock so not technically thermal throttling. Most of the time iirc Intel doesn’t list per core boost only the highest possible boost.

So for example the CPU is rated at 1.1ghz base and up to 3.5ghz boost. In the thermal throttling video we see it hold steady at ~10w and ~1.5ghz sustained. As far as Intel/Apple is concerned this isn’t thermal throttling because it is still higher than the base clock. Previously they would list all core boost clock and I think if it fell below that it would technically be thermal throttling

> It just doesn't seem possible the folding mechanism and attach/detach system work that well.

Also my first thought, but then I remembered the new monitor stand. The monitor attaches with magnets and by all accounts the movement mechanism works very well. Odds are they took what they learned there and applied it on a smaller scale here.

Yeah but the stand is much larger, the question is what can be achieved in the tiny sausage!

Why would the air be too good to be true. It's all the boring stuff everyone has been asking apple to do.

Exactly.

The keyboard doesn't ship until at least May, so no rush when the stores open again, but it may not be until May when they open, so...

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