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Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

I bought an MBP 16 in January, pretty fully loaded with the max chip, max ram and max gpu at the time, and I cannot recommend you buy this machine or even a newer version of it right now. It’s great, but real battery life is abysmal, it runs very hot, although this has been massively improved by switching from FF to Safari, and I usually have Turbo Booster Pro restricting the cpu to base speed. And, not much uses the GPU. iTerm can, big deal, and Snap Camera does, big deal, but DaVinci Resolve free doesn’t, and neither does Capture Pro or ffmpeg, so it’s all a bit pointless right now. Find a compromise Intel machine for now.

P.S. also: lots of fans.

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To add another point sample –

I work mostly in Chrome, iTerm, Sublime, and Pixelmator on a 2019 16" MBP and haven't had any issues. I was hoping to wait for the larger-screen Apple silicon MBP, but my old laptop didn't hold out. There's been so much negative sentiment around the Touch Bar MBPs that I was bummed to buy one. However, after using it for a few months I'd say that feeling was completely misguided. It's been great.

Hey! Until right now, I never thought to disable turbo boost to make my MBP 16 run cooler or have better battery life. Now that you said it, using Turbo Booster Pro seems a no-brainer for 99% of my daily usage. Thank you!

My question is - is there a similar app that lets me disable the AMD GPU? Again 99% of my work does not require the discrete GPU's power. Disabling it should help run the laptop cooler and enable longer battery life.

Sadly not! There used to be, gfxcardstatus on older macs could force integrated but the only choice now is to force discrete.

This is a pretty popular GPU switching program for Macs with discrete GPUs: https://github.com/CodySchrank/gSwitch

Hey, a new option - thanks, must try it :)

To my delight - it works!

If you plug the powercable in the usb-c on the right the laptop gets less hot so the fans make less noise.

I have the same i9, and I run it 24/7 with two 4K monitors attached, so dGPU always on.

Fans are always going, and with the crapware installed by IT, CPU averages 70C to 90C

Throttles a lot, not a great developer experience.

Hope the successor Mx chip can drive two monitors without taking off, and still compile as well.

I've one too and shelled out almost 3k for it. Now I really regret it cause everyone's saying the Air's are better than the old pros. Mine also runs hot all the time from basic use but it helps that I use external keyboard and trackpad for it.

If OP doesn’t need the max spec chip for the MBP 16, I recommend the i7 spec instead of the i9. I’m using one right now for work and it’s not running as hot as the i9.

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