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Comment by ricardobeat | Hacker News Reader

The amount of people running any kind of workload that stresses M3 this much, are not choosing a Mini or MBP instead, and doing this on their laps, must be infinitesimal…

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Normal office workers giving presentations while sharing video in a conference room over HDMI while simultaneously streaming the meeting over Zoom will absolutely push the thermal limits within five minutes.

An M3 won’t even come close to breaking a sweat doing all of those things.

Hell, add in multiple intensive browser tabs, a few large Excel sheets, and VSCode open to a large Rust project with rust-analyzer running and still, the processor will hardly even get hot. I’ve done all of this on an M2 with zero problem whatsoever.

Oh how I wish that would be true.

> I’ve done all of this on an M2 with zero problem whatsoever.

I mean it probably depends on a bunch of details, you probably wanna use a video conferencing tool which uses hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.

This has been my experience. My 15" M2 Air has never gone off the deep end on these tasks. Cool and quiet during streaming and heavy multitasking.

To be fair, I felt compelled to spend hundreds of dollars extra on 24GB and 1TB to address the swapping and IO constraints that exist at the 8G/256GB price point.

Not everyone in the world is a passive Netflix content consumer and this problem is even affecting the Pro series.

And most people also aren’t running synthetic benchmarks, which is practically the only way you’re going to hit these limits short of parallel compilation of a large project. If that is you, by all means, buy the Pro (or a desktop); as the article states, this is about the Air throttling, not the Pro.

We are talking about the MacBook Air, not MBP.

Oh now I see you edited your post. Do you have any reference that this is affecting the pro series? I just got an M3 Max-based MBP for work and everything seems to work great so far.

Use an M3 Max to render in Corona or even Keyshot. Try to work in Fusion360 on an even moderately featured design. It goes nuclear fast.

That's not a "problem", it's by design. As long as cooling extracts enough heat to keep the system running at full speed, it is doing its job well and the heat is the result of that. Until we start using photonic processors or something, there is no way around physics. It's a wonder we can even do that on a tiny laptop in the first place.

> even affecting the Pro series

Care to give any examples? My work M1 Pro gets moderately hot only when IntelliJ starts indexing multimillion line codebase.

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