I always use the left, because it keeps cords away from the mouse zone, and I can let the cord run straighter to avoid stress (and prevent fraying). What the hell, Apple?
It's a shame right-angle Thunderbolt cables aren't really a thing. I'm using a right-angle USB-C cable for my docked 12" MB which really cleans up the desk space.
This is wild. IIRC, the TB3 ports in right side have lower bandwidth, so I've always plugged everything in on the left.
I wonder if this is the reason my MBP would get sluggish while kernel_task uses a surprising amount of CPU? I always blamed the corporate spyware/antivirus. Maybe I was just charging it wrong
> I wonder if this is the reason my MBP would get sluggish while kernel_task uses a surprising amount of CPU?
This happens to me as well while charging if the battery is below ~50%. Start recharging above 50 and it doesn't happen. At some point I took it to an Apple store for an unrelated issue and they told me that their diagnostics flagged a faulty sensor in the internal charging circuitry. I haven't sent it back yet for repair because of the turnaround time involved, but consider that it could be related.
Yes - there is no cooling on the TB3 controllers, yet they put out a significant amount of heat, which causes a kernel_task internal thread to intentionally throttle CPU (which shows as high CPU usage).
Been driving me mad till I hacked my dock to fit on the right side and connected power on the left, which resulted in better airflow and lower heat generation by the controllers....
Interesting. I've noticed the fans going crazy way more when I use my laptop from bed (charger on my left side) vs my desk, (charger on my right side).
I figured it was the blanket restricting airflow (which I'm sure is still a big contributor). Interesting stuff.
I was talking to a hardware engineer a while back who was heavily criticizing USB-C is because of all the ways vendors can abuse it. Turns out that the USBC port on the Nintendo Switch doesn’t comply with the USB-PD standard, which caused lots of issues for users who had third party charging docks.[0] There were accusations that Nintendo did this intentionally to restrict third-party accessories.
After reading that, nothing I read about USBC surprises me. Sounds like another spec for vendors to abuse and ignore.
The switch has issues, but the bricking was because one of those dumb docks was putting 9 volts on a pin that's supposed to be using 2 volt signals, if I read the spec right. And the switch tolerated 5 volts there, too. Putting more than 5 volts onto the non-power pins is such an obvious violation that I can't blame the spec for that fault.
USB-C is a complete mess. I can’t believe Apple dropped MagSafe for this. They could’ve made all the io ports type C but kept MagSafe for charging with an optional chargeable type C port on the right side.
Couple of dumb-sounding questions after reading the link:
* Left or right side relative to what? Is it my right when looking at the laptop screen?
* Does this have any implications for reliability of Bluetooth transmitters? I use a mouse and keyboard that both plug into a USB-C hub, and sometimes have issues with mouse tracking, or keystrokes not being registered. My WFH setup has these things plugged in on the opposite side they normally would be, and I think I'm seeing this issue a little more frequently than I was in the office.
* I hope so! I use bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and have had similar issue on my MBP 2019 (the latest one). The issues only seem to crop up when I'm at my desk, with the power plugged in on the left side, and the USB-C hub (for external drives and monitor) on the right side. I now have a tiny bit of hope that swapping power and hub might fix these issues.
If you're using a Logitech Receiver (small USB type A RF dongle [0]) plugged into a USB-C hub, interference might be causing your problems[1]. I used to have a setup like that, but after switching to Apple's USB-C adapters (USB-C to USB type A and/or USB-C to HDMI+USB type A) solved problems. Those adapters feature a short cable between the plug / ports, I wonder that's because of the interference?
This is why a "universal" port was a bad idea. Just because a cable looks like it'll fit doesn't mean it will work. Charging ports have fundamentally different requirements from data ports and display ports. I miss MagSafe.
Also, if the overheating issues are true then macOS should issue a warning when charging from an unsuitable port.
> Also, if the overheating issues are true then macOS should issue a warning when charging from an unsuitable port.
It doesn't seem to be an issue with the port being unsuitable - the SE post mentions[1] that the right side similarly increases in temperature significantly when in use. It just doesn't trigger the same throttling behavior.
Looking at an iFixit teardown[2], the ssd chips are located next to the left thunderbolt controller. I wonder if that may be why temperature spikes on the left side trigger more aggressive temperature management than spikes on the right.
[1] Quote: Note that high temperature on the right side appears to be ignored by the OS. Plugging everything into the two right ports instead of the left raised the Right temperatures to over 100 degrees, without the fans coming on.
I had the same issue with a MagSafe 2012 MBPr (throttling when charging). It's just a lack of adequate heat dissipation in Apple's laptops, and with the USB-C ones you suddenly get around it by plugging in on the right side where there aren't enough temperature sensors for it to properly throttle.
The concept of a universal port was perfectly fine, it's just the implementation that is flawed.
And before USB-C and Thunderbolt, "Just because a cable looks like it'll fit" DID mean it will work, at least for what an end-user would have been likely to face.
I think this part of the comment should be highlighted more due to people simply thinking switching to the right side 'fixes' whatever the issue is:
> Note that high temperature on the right side appears to be ignored by the OS. Plugging everything into the two right ports instead of the left raised the Right temperatures to over 100 degrees, without the fans coming on. No kernel_task either, but the machine becomes unusable from something throttling.
Are there any good macbook laptop stands that act as a heatsink as well? My current stand has rubber grips so while there's plenty of airflow under it the heat isn't being drawn away very well. I don't want to add a fan since that would add noise.
I also rate these stands - but it has rubber grips. You're not going to get any heat transfer from laptop to stand, so it's not going to act as a heatsink.
I have the same stand and it does absorb a good amount of heat when the Mac is running at full power (the angle helps there too), albeit not a true "heat sink". The rubber has negligible displacement.
I also like this model. There's a little air gap between the computer and the stand, but being solid aluminum I figure it's going to move a lot more heat away than, say, a wooden desk surface or cloth-covered human legs.
I have this one as well, it does a decent job of wicking heat too, the portion of the stand in direct contact with the laptop is noticeably warmer than the part that contacts the table
Amazon Basics has similar thing that is essentially the same but looks a bit less stylish and costs half of what mStand costs. I've been using it for almost 4 years now and it works great.
Do you mean 100 rpm? 10 rpm isn't really going to do anything. When I last looked all of those "laptop cooler pads" use tiny fans that would either be ineffective or loud or both. I settled on the mStand mentioned above, but as noted it has rubber standoffs that prevent it from acting like a true heatsink.
I mean 10rpm, really! A 10" fan at 10rpm moves about as much air as a 2.5" fan at 160rpm.
You're not trying to move huge amounts of air, since heat transfer from the laptop to the air is pretty slow. You just need enough movement to clear out any hot air that is building up under the laptop.
> You just need enough movement to clear out any hot air that is building up under the laptop.
On a nearly totally different tangent, our own bodies build up hot pockets of air indoors as well, where there's no natural breeze to get rid of it. Getting rid of it creates a surprisingly strong cooling effect where you probably won't need AC for a while longer than you expect - and "air circulator" fans are pretty good at doing it over a whole room, so you don't need to keep a fan directed at yourself.
Any Noctua brand fan will stun you with its silence. I installed four 20mm fans in a network switch to replace its screaming loud factory fans. They're all running ~1200RPM and it now sounds like a small desk fan. A larger format fan running at a few hundred RPM will likely add very little to the ambient noise around you.
Also big fans (bigger than 140mm) are usually running on noisy ball bearings (or roll bearings) while "standard" 120 and 140 fans are often running on silent magnetic suspension.
That was my though too, those thin stands may look sleek but they don't really do anything in terms of heat transfer. If anything it'd be worse since now the machine has nothing to transfer the heat to.
I fee like I've seen a lot of thick steel plates around the right size sitting around in old workshops. You could probably find something cheaply from a scrap dealer.
Thick aluminum or copper seems more rare, I don't know if it's commonly produced.
Been a huge fan of the Roost Stand ever since I got it. There's no heat sink, but there's only four small plastic contact points between the laptop and the stand. My fans are often on when running several Docker containers, but the surface of the top bar never gets that hot.
I have a 2018 13" Macbook Pro.
(I'm in no way affiliated with Roost, I'm just a happy customer.)
I have the 16" Macbook Pro (work issued) and it does get very warm when you are charging and running a couple of monitors (1x1920x1080 and 1x4096x3084) even when not under a massive amount of load.
It's fine because in that situation it's on a stand on my work desk and it's noticeably cooler when not runnig the externals when it's on my lap.
Lovely hardware and it was a good move to switch to a Mac because the team I run had already standardised on macs when I joined the team but its one thing that makes me wish I'd stuck to an equivalent Thinkpad/Fedora if I'm honest.
Hard to beat a Thinkpad with Linux for dev work. a year ago I switched from a mbp to a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and I cringe every time I have to go back to the Mac in order to do something.
Indeed, my personal machine is a T470P (i7-7700HQ/2560x1440 and I upgarded the ram to 32GB) it's a little beast and Fedora Cinnamon is hands down my favourite host OS for development but practicially made me pick a Macbook for work since I'd be getting questions about stuff on a platform I'd never used, I like OSX generally but there are days where I still miss Linux (though iterm2 is phenomenally good, not aware of anything comparable on Linux which is a little ironic).
there is a terminal emulator called terminator. It has a lot of nice features, including split screen keyboard broadcasting. very useful if you have many machines with the same configuration. https://terminator-gtk3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
If you want something incredible, try terminology. It has a few nice commands baked in starting with 'ty' - like tyls and tycat. I'm not going to spoil them for you by telling what they do. Just try it, you are going to love it.
I was just contemplating the idea of someday switching from macOS to Ubuntu. Curious what it is you dislike so much about macOS?
I think the biggest thing I would miss is being able to send texts from my computer. I use that all the time. I and a Windows computer at work for a bit and it absolutely drove me nuts.
>I think the biggest thing I would miss is being able to send texts from my computer. I use that all the time. I and a Windows computer at work for a bit and it absolutely drove me nuts.
That's primarily an issue with iOS APIs (or lack thereof), though. Gotta switch phones as well :)
Dell released an app[1] that allows for this, which supports both Android and iPhone. While in theory it's intended for use on Dells, there are workarounds[2] to get past that check and install it on any Windows computer.
FWIW, Windows laptops (that you can then install Linux on) have had hidpi screens for more than 15 years (!!), and Ubuntu's fractional scaling works really well right out of the box now.
"have had" and "works reliably" are very different things.
Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
Just to add to the anecdata, my MBP would kernel panic ~25% of the time it was plugged into a 4k displayport 1.1 monitor. I'm glad your system is stable, though!
True. I recently picked up Albert [1] on my Ubuntu machine because I was missing spotlight search. So far it works well - it would have been nice if something like it was included by default.
I am forced to use Windows most of the time. The fact that its desktop search is soooo bad is a daily bummer and makes me look forward to opening my MBP.
It seems like part of Microsoft's goal here was to direct traffic to Edge and Bing at the expense of actual usability. See also: the "help system". Luckily there's a lot of third-party stuff to replace the search feature.
I don't understand the people for whom Spotlight works. I tend to open Spotlight, and start typing in the name of a file I'm looking for. Consistently, reproducibly, for many different files, it'll fill in the name of the file at a certain point, but then, if I keep typing that very name, it'll switch to a different match.
That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
Huh, interesting, because that exact problem is one of my key complaints with windows search, while I've never noticed it with spotlight -- and I've been using spotlight daily since Tiger.
Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.
The high-dpi support really is a big deal. No other OS (Windows or Linux) comes close to handling it as seamlessly. I run Gnome in Ubuntu and have got it to a "serviceable" state by being able to set pixel density on a per-app basis by editing launcher files (depending on which display it's running on), but that's not something an average user would be able to figure out (or should have to).
Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.
This was the game-changer for me. When I first saw 2012 MBP Retina I was sold. Build quality is overall so much better than its class, although Thinkpads are solid stuff as well (good enough for the ISS, anyway). The rest of your comment I align with also.
Mac text rendering is blurrier than Windows text rendering (and I have learned of no way of changing that despite my having used a Mac for 10 years).
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
Mac font rendering is also more accurate to the font than Windows. Since MacOS doesn’t hammer glyphs to the pixel grid, font scaling is far more consistent. Windows’ font rendering is part of the reason why their HiDPI support is so janky.
I always thought that Microsoft's commitment to keeping old binaries running on new versions of Windows is the reason their HiDPI support is suboptimal and that if you use only apps that use the latest text-rendering API, the experience is great.
How would making the pixel grid finer exacerbate the problems with a strategy of hammering glyphs to the pixel grid?
> The high-dpi support really is a big deal.
I honestly don't understand this. I owned a Retina MacBook Pro (2015) for a while and my current (Lenovo) laptop has a 4k screen, but I don't think I've ever actually cared about the increased pixel density. The only thing it's ever done for me is increase heat production, decrease battery life, and decrease compatibility (there's Mac software that isn't Retina compatible too, and it looks at least as bad as on Windows).
I use 24 inch monitors at 1080p all day and I can see the pixels if I look, but images still look plenty good and text is super readable. I switch between this pixel density and my Pixel 3 XL and while I can definitely notice the difference in density if I look, my productivity isn't affected whatsoever by having a less dense screen. Is everyone else putting their face 2 inches from the screen every 5 minutes just for the sense of satisfaction they get from not seeing the pixels?
> Apple has done a great job with their window manager
I think that's a pretty massive stretch. I haven't used a Mac as my primary machine for a few years now, but I've been watching the window management get worse and worse over the years. It used to be you could have a grid of Spaces and proper intuitive window management, but now Maximize is hidden behind the Fullscreen button. Virtually everyone I've watched use a recent version of macOS either has everything fullscreen, uses one window at a time with 4" of spacing around it because it's a pain to properly size the windows, or has 7 different apps installed to fill in missing features that have been around in Linux for as long as I can remember and in Windows since Windows 7.
I find text visually less fatiguing at high-DPI even though I have no problem reading it on my 24" 1080p secondary monitor. I don't think it's a matter of productivity as much as comfort (though maybe comfort indirectly affects productivity).
I agree with everything you said about the more recent releases of MacOS. Maybe I was being too generous in my previous comment - it really does seem optimized for very small laptop displays, so that's probably why they have recently placed so much emphasis on fullscreening everything (and also why they got rid of the Expose grid - horizontal swipe works better on a laptop trackpad).
You don't understand because you are the kind of person who buys a laptop with a 4k screen and thinks that's an asset, who thinks 1080p monitors and that aspect ratio are acceptable, etc.
In other words, you've never had a large high-dpi monitor setup with multiple screens large enough to appreciate it. And you haven't ever been an advanced enough Mac user to learn keyboard commands and the various ways to manage windows.
Could you tell me a bit more about your experience of Linux with a high res display? Are you using the built-in screen of a laptop? Would you mind sharing the model, or do you have any recommendations/advice regarding laptops with high resolution displays that can work well with Linux? Basically, is there any hope of emulating the experience of a macbook Retina screen under modern Linux? Do you know if there are any groups / momentum in the linux development community working on this?
I recently bought at 49” ultrawide monitor. Both my MacBooks can drive the native resolution in Windows but not MacOS. Apple refuses to fix their broken driver or even acknowledge it is a problem.
Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal.
It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it.
I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.
That was suggested in some of the forum threads I read. It doesn’t solve the problem though. It just scales the image up and provides the same quality I have now. There were also some suggested profile hacks which I think is what SwitchResX does.
You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either.
The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD.
The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
That's how I felt when I used a Mac for work. Linux doesn't work just the way I want right out of the box, but neither did the Mac, and at least Linux gives me the tools to change and fix the things I didn't like.
Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.
Exactly. I would love to use Linux, but switching back to the traditional-resolution laptop screens after working on the high-res MacbookPro screens is not something I ever want to do. It would be fantastic if Linux came to support it well.
The fan on my 13" MBP (2017) rarely kicks on unless I have an external monitor plugged in. I've been told that it has to engage the discrete graphics card to power my external monitor (only 24" / 1080p), and that's what causes the extra heat. Unfortunately, with the external monitor the fan is on all the time. I almost wish my work environment weren't so quiet, because then I wouldn't hear the fan kick on.
Also own a 16" MBP. I use a kernel extension called Turbo Boost Switcher to control heat. The battery lasts 25% longer with turbo boost disabled and the machine never feels warm. I enable turbo only when rendering audio from my DAW or for long compiles. The machine otherwise never feels slow. Big win.
I'm dreading the day MacOS formally blocks kernel extensions.
Apple isn't under legal obligation to expose equivalent functionality to userspace. Time will tell if they're moving kexts or blocknig them. My money's on blocking them.
The developers of Little Snitch have confirmed that, at the very least, network filtering would work in userspace via the new Network Extension framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677849
And in userspace, you can only do what the APIs allow. Unless there is an API for directly manipulating the CPU Turbo Boost system, you're S.O.L. when kextload is dead
Totally agree - Turbo Boost Switcher has dramatically changed how I use and like my 16" MBP - no more fan noise, no more burning fingers or blanket, and practically no noticeable difference in performance (e.g. Destiny 2 runs fine with it off).
Has it come to this? We used to have physical turbo buttons, now we have soft un-turbo buttons. I think the grim reality in WFH is that laptops just really still suck compared to desktops for running dual monitors, an A/V feed with OBS, and 80 tabs across two browser windows along with a few other apps open. That load would have my i7 8th gen at 70-80%, but has my Ryzen 7 at maybe 10%. Not throwing away my laptop anytime soon, but I'm learning to love the desktop platform again.
I believe the 16" got a significant bump up in its discrete graphics card, and I'm pretty sure it kicks on whenever you plug in a second monitor, no matter what else you're doing. That card has been by far the greatest driver of heat/fan speed in my usage; more than the CPU.
Does anyone know if this also affects MacBook Pro 13” with only two Thunderbolt ports on the left (the ones without Touch ID)? Are these ports the same as the laptops with three ports? If yes, does this mean we (MBP13” users) have no solution?
It's incredible to me that Apple has maybe 10 major products and they somehow can't focus on any of them not named "iPhone". Between the keyboards, thermal issues in the previous Mac Pro, ignoring the iPad's software, and other issues I've probably forgotten, what exactly is their dysfunction?
I feel like they did make investments in MacBooks, just not the kind I want. I care less about a thinner laptop. Keep the same thickness with a nicer screen and overall build quality. Apples focused abit too much on aesthetic over function, but with the recent 16” MacBook, they’re making course corrections.
Personally I can’t figure out my development workflow on Windows. I tried the Linux subsystem stuff and IO was just too damn slow. 15 minutes to install a few package dependencies. For a while, I ended up running Ubuntu on another machine that I would SSH into for all my side projects just so I have my trusty zshell and all the nice package managers and other build tools.
It’s not OS dependent. It’s just that doing it on Mac let’s me focus on the problem I want to solve vs non value add stuff like just getting things configured.
I’m relatively fast using zshell, vim, iTerm, tab space to quickly search and open a file or program, adding things to my .zsh rc file, quickly installing packages, etc. In Windows, everything is slower, and I generally feel disoriented.
Something as simple as running docker wouldn’t work on windows. Apparently I need Windows 10 Pro edition... and I had the license too but upgrading would fail and rollback. It’s things like this that add up.
iPhones are >5x the revenue of Mac sales, and probably much more than that for profit:
"For the fiscal year 2019, the company's iPhone business accounted for approximately 54.7% of total sales; the company's Services segment made up approximately 17.7% of revenue; Mac sales generated 9.8% of total revenue; Wearables, Home and Accessories segment comprised 9.4% of the company's sales; the iPad accounted for 8.1% of the company's sales."
So what? iPhone making a ton of money isn't a good excuse for why my laptop made by one of the richest companies in the world is a worse experience than my old MacBook Pro.
It's incredible to me that MacBooks are considered professional-grade hardware in the silicon valley hivemind, between crippled functionality thanks to the form-over-function design and outright defectivity as described in this article.
Haven't noticed this on my 2018 15" i7. My monitor at work (2160p) and home (1440p ultrawide) are placed to the left of my laptop and always use both left TB3 ports for charging and display
I discovered I could charge two MacBooks on one charger by daisy chaining them, for some reason I didn't expect that to work. The second laptop didn't charge very fast if at all, but you can keep working while you left your charger at hame.
The Nintendo Switch charger only puts out 39 watts, and I think the Macbook Pro charger puts out 96 watts, so it makes sense that it would charge slowly.
I've only ever plugged my LG Ultrafine 5k into the right hand side of 2016 15 inch, but I find that if the room is warm (perhaps > 22 degrees C) I have 'kernel_task' apparently maxing out my CPU. Anecdotally until I discovered that aiming a fan at the underside seemed to make this problem go away. It doesn't seem to happen (that I remember...) when the big screen isn't plugged in.
I've had this problem too for a while now with my MBP 2017. The left ports can't be used for charging at all. The moment I plug in the charger, the fans start running at full speed.
I 'm having issues even on one of the right side port. I can't use it for anything. If I plug in my monitor, It shows me "USB Accessories Disabled" error. If I plug in my HDD, it just doesn't work. I've tried resetting the SMC and PRAM. Anyone had similar experience ?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadMy work from home setup has me on the left side, instead of right.
Switched sides back, it's left me alone.
It's -crazy- to think this is a real issue.
I wonder if this is the reason my MBP would get sluggish while kernel_task uses a surprising amount of CPU? I always blamed the corporate spyware/antivirus. Maybe I was just charging it wrong
I recall this being an issue with 2016 and 2017 models (edit: just the 13" models), not sure about more recent ones.
Do you know if recent 13" models still have slower ports on the right side, though?
This happens to me as well while charging if the battery is below ~50%. Start recharging above 50 and it doesn't happen. At some point I took it to an Apple store for an unrelated issue and they told me that their diagnostics flagged a faulty sensor in the internal charging circuitry. I haven't sent it back yet for repair because of the turnaround time involved, but consider that it could be related.
Been driving me mad till I hacked my dock to fit on the right side and connected power on the left, which resulted in better airflow and lower heat generation by the controllers....
I figured it was the blanket restricting airflow (which I'm sure is still a big contributor). Interesting stuff.
After reading that, nothing I read about USBC surprises me. Sounds like another spec for vendors to abuse and ignore.
0: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/03/could_switchs_non-...
USB-C is a complete mess. I can’t believe Apple dropped MagSafe for this. They could’ve made all the io ports type C but kept MagSafe for charging with an optional chargeable type C port on the right side.
* Left or right side relative to what? Is it my right when looking at the laptop screen?
* Does this have any implications for reliability of Bluetooth transmitters? I use a mouse and keyboard that both plug into a USB-C hub, and sometimes have issues with mouse tracking, or keystrokes not being registered. My WFH setup has these things plugged in on the opposite side they normally would be, and I think I'm seeing this issue a little more frequently than I was in the office.
* I hope so! I use bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and have had similar issue on my MBP 2019 (the latest one). The issues only seem to crop up when I'm at my desk, with the power plugged in on the left side, and the USB-C hub (for external drives and monitor) on the right side. I now have a tiny bit of hope that swapping power and hub might fix these issues.
[0]: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/unifying-receiver-usb [1]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/io/uni...
Also, if the overheating issues are true then macOS should issue a warning when charging from an unsuitable port.
It doesn't seem to be an issue with the port being unsuitable - the SE post mentions[1] that the right side similarly increases in temperature significantly when in use. It just doesn't trigger the same throttling behavior.
Looking at an iFixit teardown[2], the ssd chips are located next to the left thunderbolt controller. I wonder if that may be why temperature spikes on the left side trigger more aggressive temperature management than spikes on the right.
[1] Quote: Note that high temperature on the right side appears to be ignored by the OS. Plugging everything into the two right ports instead of the left raised the Right temperatures to over 100 degrees, without the fans coming on.
[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Touch+Ba...
And before USB-C and Thunderbolt, "Just because a cable looks like it'll fit" DID mean it will work, at least for what an end-user would have been likely to face.
My work monitor only has 60W USB-C PD anyway (home does 100W).
> Note that high temperature on the right side appears to be ignored by the OS. Plugging everything into the two right ports instead of the left raised the Right temperatures to over 100 degrees, without the fans coming on. No kernel_task either, but the machine becomes unusable from something throttling.
It is solid metal with lots of airflow underneath.
You're not trying to move huge amounts of air, since heat transfer from the laptop to the air is pretty slow. You just need enough movement to clear out any hot air that is building up under the laptop.
On a nearly totally different tangent, our own bodies build up hot pockets of air indoors as well, where there's no natural breeze to get rid of it. Getting rid of it creates a surprisingly strong cooling effect where you probably won't need AC for a while longer than you expect - and "air circulator" fans are pretty good at doing it over a whole room, so you don't need to keep a fan directed at yourself.
Thick aluminum or copper seems more rare, I don't know if it's commonly produced.
https://svalt.com/products/cooling-stand
Then I realized, that was "without fans".
$260 for a laptop stand.
I have a 2018 13" Macbook Pro.
(I'm in no way affiliated with Roost, I'm just a happy customer.)
Roost: https://www.amazon.com/Roost-Laptop-Stand-Adjustable-Portabl...
It's fine because in that situation it's on a stand on my work desk and it's noticeably cooler when not runnig the externals when it's on my lap.
Lovely hardware and it was a good move to switch to a Mac because the team I run had already standardised on macs when I joined the team but its one thing that makes me wish I'd stuck to an equivalent Thinkpad/Fedora if I'm honest.
I think the biggest thing I would miss is being able to send texts from my computer. I use that all the time. I and a Windows computer at work for a bit and it absolutely drove me nuts.
That's primarily an issue with iOS APIs (or lack thereof), though. Gotta switch phones as well :)
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-mobile-connect/ab/dell-...
[2] https://hothardware.com/news/dell-mobile-connect-installatio...
Every Windows and Linux machine I've used has had issues with individual apps, and most of the time I've plugged them into things that cross multiple scaling factors simultaneously, they've have had rather significant issues (when it isn't just "issues with everything except device-native"). I haven't had an issue with that at all in a few years now on my Mac, and I plug it into literally 10x more screens and configurations.
https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert
That is, if the name is `abcdefgh` and I type `abc`, then it'll complete it; but if momentum carries me and I type `abcd`, then it'll drop the desired file entirely off the list of suggestions, and give me a different, non-matching one.
Well, that's not quite true, for a few years after spotlight was released it would get slow after a while, so I mainly stuck with Quicksilver. Eventually spotlight got faster, but I never had that particular problem with it, even though I very regularly have that particular problem on Windows.
Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays. It's just a shame their OS is otherwise such a walled garden, and their hardware is a bad joke ($6k for an 8 core desktop with a years old GPU and no storage, come on.) It really boiled down to a "pick your poison" scenario for me and I sided with the OS (and hardware) that lets me tinker to my heart's content.
Worse, if for some reason you want to change the size of the elements on the display, the only way I know how to do that on a Mac (namely, to use System Preferences :: Displays to change the "resolution" to some value other than "default for display") makes the text much blurrier. I don't have a Retina display on my Mac, but someone who does claims that even on Retina, he prefers Windows because of the blurriness of the Mac
In contrast, if you can be somewhat picky about which apps you use, text on Windows is just as sharp no matter how big or small you configure the elements on the screen relative to the default size.
(In most Mac apps, it is easy to adjust the size of the text in the main pane, but all the other text and all the other non-textual elements, e.g., icons, stay at the default size.)
>Apple has done a great job with their window manager and support for varying DPI between displays.
That might be true, but the Mac does a poor job accommodating sub-par or non-standard human visual systems (and I would guess that people who cannot easily control how far their eyes are from the screen -- e.g., people living in a small van -- would find a Mac frustrating as well relative to Windows).
How would making the pixel grid finer exacerbate the problems with a strategy of hammering glyphs to the pixel grid?
I use 24 inch monitors at 1080p all day and I can see the pixels if I look, but images still look plenty good and text is super readable. I switch between this pixel density and my Pixel 3 XL and while I can definitely notice the difference in density if I look, my productivity isn't affected whatsoever by having a less dense screen. Is everyone else putting their face 2 inches from the screen every 5 minutes just for the sense of satisfaction they get from not seeing the pixels?
> Apple has done a great job with their window manager I think that's a pretty massive stretch. I haven't used a Mac as my primary machine for a few years now, but I've been watching the window management get worse and worse over the years. It used to be you could have a grid of Spaces and proper intuitive window management, but now Maximize is hidden behind the Fullscreen button. Virtually everyone I've watched use a recent version of macOS either has everything fullscreen, uses one window at a time with 4" of spacing around it because it's a pain to properly size the windows, or has 7 different apps installed to fill in missing features that have been around in Linux for as long as I can remember and in Windows since Windows 7.
I agree with everything you said about the more recent releases of MacOS. Maybe I was being too generous in my previous comment - it really does seem optimized for very small laptop displays, so that's probably why they have recently placed so much emphasis on fullscreening everything (and also why they got rid of the Expose grid - horizontal swipe works better on a laptop trackpad).
In other words, you've never had a large high-dpi monitor setup with multiple screens large enough to appreciate it. And you haven't ever been an advanced enough Mac user to learn keyboard commands and the various ways to manage windows.
Workaround is to provide two inputs to the monitor and run it in picture by picture mode. This is ok but when waking from sleep MacOS gets confused about what monitors windows were on and the arrangement of the panels. This has always been a problem and why I got away from dual/multi panels in the first place. MacOS support for that has always been abysmal.
It’s one of the first examples of Apple gear not “Just working (tm)”. I suppose it’s my fault for not buying a monitor with an Apple logo on it.
I find myself wondering why I deal with the headaches in MacOS. I switched because it was easy. Now Apple is making it hard. At this point fighting with Linux actually appears to be easier than using MacOS.
You can also option-click on the scaled options in display manager and get more options but none of those are reasonable either.
The whole reason I use Macs is because I don’t have to constantly hack and fiddle with them. At that point I may as well install a Linux or BSD.
The software quality from Apple was never great but it is really falling off a cliff recently. It’s getting to a point I wonder why I pay the premium.
Granted, my monitors are 1080p and 720p (ugh), so I haven't had to wrangle with high DPI issues, which does not sound fun.
I'm dreading the day MacOS formally blocks kernel extensions.
Apple isn't under legal obligation to expose equivalent functionality to userspace. Time will tell if they're moving kexts or blocknig them. My money's on blocking them.
Marco Arment suggests that it's possible that Turbo Boost Switcher might not: https://marco.org/2020/01/13/macos-low-power-mode-redux
Ref : https://marco.org/2020/01/13/macos-low-power-mode-redux
Until Apple does this, I'm happy with my Turbo Boost Switcher Pro purchase.
Is that a typo?
If not: I'm intrigued! Which monitor is it?
Personally I can’t figure out my development workflow on Windows. I tried the Linux subsystem stuff and IO was just too damn slow. 15 minutes to install a few package dependencies. For a while, I ended up running Ubuntu on another machine that I would SSH into for all my side projects just so I have my trusty zshell and all the nice package managers and other build tools.
Can you elaborate? How is your dev workflow os-dependent?
I’m relatively fast using zshell, vim, iTerm, tab space to quickly search and open a file or program, adding things to my .zsh rc file, quickly installing packages, etc. In Windows, everything is slower, and I generally feel disoriented.
Something as simple as running docker wouldn’t work on windows. Apparently I need Windows 10 Pro edition... and I had the license too but upgrading would fail and rollback. It’s things like this that add up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
"For the fiscal year 2019, the company's iPhone business accounted for approximately 54.7% of total sales; the company's Services segment made up approximately 17.7% of revenue; Mac sales generated 9.8% of total revenue; Wearables, Home and Accessories segment comprised 9.4% of the company's sales; the iPad accounted for 8.1% of the company's sales."
https://www.investopedia.com/apple-s-5-most-profitable-lines...
To be distinctive they need to be different and that carries risks, but mostly they pay off very well.
It's a little scary just how often xkcd is relevant.
I 'm having issues even on one of the right side port. I can't use it for anything. If I plug in my monitor, It shows me "USB Accessories Disabled" error. If I plug in my HDD, it just doesn't work. I've tried resetting the SMC and PRAM. Anyone had similar experience ?
tl;dr: charge on the right, monitors on the left.