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Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

These machines are a complete joke for anyone doing “Pro” work. Endless thermal throttling driving CPU frequencies down to 2.4Ghz, low GPU performance, it’s utter bullshit.

I’ve spent $5k on maxed out machines for my engineers, and it’s been a complete mess. Half of them have had to switch to a Windows machine as their primary so they can work without staring at a compiler spinning its wheels.

Maybe an Mx Pro will live up to the legacy of the 2012 era, but Apple’s obsession with thinness and mediocre cooling doesn’t give me much hope for pro users.

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Absolutely this. I have a 16'' mbp and it constantly throttles, even when I manually set the fans to full blast and use a cooling pad. There's no way to sustain the 45 watt tdp for more than a few seconds.

Anecdotally, my outdated i5 quad core is much snappier than the mbp i7 8 core because it can go all out at 69 watts/max boost for hours and not throttle for a second.

Disable turbo boost. Throttling is not directly linked to any temperature sensor, and turbo boost almost instantly causes throttling, which then takes some time to return to normal because of a back-off algorithm.

I’ve used the software that lets you modify all the CPU flags and nothing helps. Killing turbo boost sucks, having a frequency in the 3.0Ghz+ instead of 4.4Ghz+ is brutal when you are single thread bound.

This is exactly it, the thermal ceiling leaves almost no room to use the full 45 watt TDP. The fact that this problem isn’t a huge PR nightmare shows just how “pro” the typical buyer’s workload is.

> switch to a Windows

Why not Linux?

WSL2 is nearly Linux. File IO is a bit slow compared to native Linux and if you want to call a Windows application running on localhost from within WSL2 it's a bit tricky but otherwise it works very well.

I spent years developing in WSL and while it’s decent, it’s still not fool proof. Recently I’ve made the switch to pure Linux work stations and I have the opposite to offer:

I’d rather config WINE to run a Windows app then configure and play with WSL. It’s a great tactic but Linux DE’s are so polished these days I think WSL is a poor choice.

As soon as Visual Studio can run on Linux I will gladly switch but currently my backend tooling is Windows only and WSL2 is godsent to connect .NET with cloud tooling.

WSL1 was not well designed. If you only worked with WSL1, you would be surprised how well WSL matured.

I’ve worked with both.

WSL2 is quite a bit better than WSL1 imo, speaking as someone who has used both a fair bit. Especially now that GPU, GUI, and audio support are available on Insiders. Some tasks still don't work very well, like connecting to external devices or anything that needs systemd (like installing snaps), but by and large I've found it harder and harder to justify dual booting Linux with WSL2 available.

I thought dual booting would be a pain but what actually happened is that migrating was mostly pain free these days and I haven’t booted the Windows install for any reason.

For one - most employers don't provide any option for Linux work laptop and installing a new OS on windows machine is not allowed

Way too much software that is either Windows or macOS only. We make games so there isn’t really the choice.

Tip: Run `sudo watch -d -t -n1 thermal levels`.

Throttling occurs when these values go over 100. Throttling is not directly linked to temperature. There is some kind back-off algorithm that means that even if you trip this thermal throttling threshold, it will take some time before throttling is disabled. Even if you CPU returns to a normal temperature.

Also, disable turbo boost.

Why did you choose Macs initially? Did you have a need for iOS development?

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