8-core CPU, even presumably with HT off after all the recent Intel vulnerabilities, makes me laugh after my personal experience with my late 2016 MacBook Pro 13 touch bar with fastest (at that time) i7. During normal browsing especially with plugged charger, it was heating so much that something in the keyboard was unglueing. The space bar and 'c' produced different clicking sound. I was quite unhappy with that since it was my first experience with Apple products. I took it to Apple Store, they replaced the top part (with keyboard), it fixed 'c' and 'space', but issue appeared in '~' and 'tab'. I took it again to Apple Store, they replaced top part again. And again same issue with different keys. I took it there again, since replacing top case didn't help they proposed to replace whole laptop. I agreed. New laptop had the same issue again so I had nothing to do but wait when Apple will acknowledge the issue. They didn't but started to replace keyboards because of key stucking issue, so I requested a fix again and finally they managed to fix it...
Using Safari with an adblocking extension that makes use of WebKit’s native content blocking capabilities makes an enormous difference when it comes to heat and power draw. I’ve tried Chrome and Firefox with uBlock Origin and both are considerably more demanding in CPU use while not being that much faster. Where Chrome and Firefox has my fans ramped up to 60%, Safari has them running at 10% or switched off.
Really wish both Google and Mozilla would press pause on feature development for a couple of years and make efficiency the top priority.
Any recommendation on a good adblocking extension for Safari on MacOS? I've been using KaBlock but I've not found a great source that meaningfully compares the existing options.
It costs a couple bucks but Wipr does pretty well and gets regular updates.
Another nice bonus to content blocker extensions like these is that they’re just JSON rule lists that Safari compiles into bytecode and runs against pages as they load. The extensions are barred from access to everything, meaning they can’t be bought up and turned into Trojan horses.
Everything thermal throttles, that's what turbo is.
The issue last year was because Apple was applying the thermal throttling in such a way as to make the average performance of the CPU significantly lower than it needed to be by throttling too much, too quickly then recovering to too high of a clock speed too quickly thus ping-ponging between a very fast/high/hot state and a very low/cool state. In many cases the CPU would drop down below 600mhz for me for periods of time.
A proper setup will have a graph with a brief (~30s) burst to turbo max followed by a thermal throttle slightly below what the system can sustain followed by a recovery to the max sustained clock speed at just below the thermal limit.
e.g. 4.2ghz for 30s to 2.2ghz recovering to 2.6ghz sustained.
The exact profile is highly workload dependent but a properly designed system invariably follows that general profile.
Sure, performance will increase, I'm not arguing with that. I was just refering to my own experience. Personally, particarly this issue, made me use servers/clusters more, so data analysis or massive code compilation I do remotely, and for me 'Pro' now means a stable OS, good screen, good touchpad, good sound laptop which just runs IDE and browser (and occasional small Python tests of algorithms in Jupiter).
P.S. I'm not a picky person. I work in a quiet office so even my colleague noticed the issue without me pointing. At the beginning I really wanted to fix the issue. Later it was rather for 'feedback' and a matter of principle.
