Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

Apple laptops have, and have had for some time, absolutely terrible heat dispersion. I had a 2007 silver Macbook Pro that overheated constantly under any kind of load. It was a huge pain.

View on HN

I can only speak about the 2012 MBP and the 2013 rMBP, neither of which demonstrate any issues at all with dissipating heat.

You example is from 7 years ago. The entire MacBook line has been completely changed, inside and out, since then.

What sort of work do you do on them? The issues I had, and that I've seen others have on MBPs of varying years, occurred mostly in games, video editing, etc. Things that might not be the primary purpose of the product, but nevertheless shoudln't cause it to overheat and shut down.

2012 rMBP (they completely reengineered the heat distribution in the retinas). I've had all CPU cores at maximum load and the GPU churning for extended periods doing heavy video encoding on multiple occasions, it gets pretty hot, and the fans scream, but it's never had actual running issues due to the heat.

Apple addressed these issues, very publicly, giving an anecdote from 7 year old hardware is still not a great data point for the current state of their hardware.

I have no issues with anything except Word. Video encoding and other fairly intensive things run just fine, Word bring the computer to its knees to the point where I can tell if it has been open. A restart is always required.

I mostly do iOS development, which produces very little heat.

I do use it for gaming, however. I've played through Portal 2 on max settings. The aluminum definitely gets hot right above the keyboard near the left top corner, but it has never shut down due to heat.

I run several VM's, Photoshop, and games. Never had overheating result in a mandatory shutdown/reboot.

You'd be very unlikely to with modern CPUs. They generally just throttle back to a tiny fraction of normal performance, unless the heatsink literally falls off (and maybe even then).

> unless the heatsink literally falls off

Or if the laptop was shipped without the screws which hold the heatsink in place (happened to me). The thermal throttling can hold for some time, but it'll reach 100 degrees and turn off, even if you aren't doing anything CPU-intensive.

I'd recommend checking to see that the heatsinks are clear. I was having horrible slowdown on a 2010 MBP that I realized after a lot of hair pulling was due to thermal issues. Pulled the fans/heatsinks, there was a solid mat of dust between the fans and heatsinks. Cleaned those up, and suddenly the fans never even spun up to audible levels.

I have a macbook pro from 2011, a macbook air from 2013 and a retina macbook pro 2014. I had issues with heat dispersion with the macbook air but not with the macbook pro and the retina macbook pro.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com