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My 2015 13" MacBook Pro spins up fans hard just to check email. Maybe it's the aftermarket OWC Aura Pro SD I've got in it? As soon as I run VS Code with a Firebase emulator it starts throttling down.

I'd love to get this Airjet thing installed in it to see if it makes a difference.

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With that laptop now being 8 coming up on 9 years old, I wouldn’t be surprised if its thermal paste has dried out, which means that heat isn’t being transferred away from the CPU into the heatsink as effectively, resulting in the fan running harder. If you want to keep it going a while longer it might be worth picking up a tube of Arctic MX-4 and replacing the stock paste, cleaning out any accumulated dust in the process.

The Intel Macbooks had woefully underdesigned cooling solutions. They're also less efficient than the model demonstrated here.

This "airjet" is a kind of almost solid state fan using membranes to generate airflow. They may be able to perform similarly to normal fans with less noise and a smaller physical footprint, but they still need to get that air moving through a heatsink somehow. I don't think it'll work for laptops that are designed to thermal throttle after a few seconds.

A 2015 MacBook is also approximately 10x less powerful at max capacity than a 2023 laptop, so it has to work much harder to achieve the same result.

I have the 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro. I've loved this thing and it's worked great while letting me play a couple of the Mac supported steam games ever since I purchased it. But man I empathize with you about the fans turning on almost immediately after turning on. Lightroom finally became unusable because the slider changes would lag for every single photo and Xcode no longer supports iOS 17.

I jumped to a 16" M1 Max that I found at a pretty decent sale price. You won't regret it if you can swing the cash. The fans have only turned on when I've played Civ 6. I think they maayyy have turned on during Lightroom use but I'm not so positive.

It's said because my old 15" still operates, hardware wise, without any issues. I plan to turn it into a linux or a windows machine to play other old computer games.

You can roll back to a pre-mitigation, pre-apfs build of MacOS (≤10.13.2) to restore performance.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/103239

Or, switch to Linux and use mitigations=off.

The 2015 models used 4th gen Intel chips which ran quite hot. And the cooling system on those models is super noisy.

Just get an M1 Air on sale, second hand, or refurbished. It will be night and day.

I have a 16” M1 Pro as well and it’s night and day. But I still love my little 13” 2015 Pro- there’s something comforting about it.

Get an Apple Silicon Mac. The latest Sonoma beta has a bug that makes every WebView use 99% CPU all the time, and the fans don't even spin :)

When was the last time you opened it? In my experience it is just dust/hair in the fans.

I have a 2019 16" i7 pro and a M1 Air. The 16" is always warm even just idling, and the fans go when you do anything more intense that basic terminal tasks.

Air gets warm only with some long compiling.

My 2012 17" MacBook Pro video card died about 2017 but even then and even when new the fan was on a lot. HD was SSD, lots of RAM, discrete GPU but overall the thing was toasty.

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