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moralestapia
Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.
dajonker
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
tom_
I left my Mac Studio running at 100% CPU on all cores for 14 hours, and the case ended up noticeably warm to the touch. It is possible!
asdff
Try increasing to 10 cores. Works on my m3 pro.
ale
Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty
jvuygbbkuurx
I just need to build our monorepo
Onavo
I think any next.js project will do the trick
amomchilov
How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?

All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?

ericpauley
The uncomfortable fact about the mentioned Wisconsin winters is that inside dew point tends to be quite low.
vibcdingenjoyer
I’ve always been told to let electronics and musical instruments slowly warm up in their case after bringing them inside. Supposedly reduces the chances of condensation forming.
1e1a
Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.
Scubabear68
Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.
reboot81
Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook
HDBaseT
For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.
mark242
npm install
lifestyleguru
That's so 2019... Wasn't the JavaScript era the good old times? Nowadays you're not even able to run these glorious LLMs locally...
waterhouse
Multithreaded:

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null
kingjimmy
"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "

they're doing what to my CPU????

dnnddidiej
For those without spacebar heating?
daneel_w 

  while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done
kristianp
Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.
Hobadee
I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?
splittydev
Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.
jerlam
I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).
ralphc
I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.
mcfedr
yes only writes y, not the whole word yes
smarks
Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.

After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.

The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.

villgax
This is now running Cyberpunk or an LLM locally
diimdeep
Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction

  ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i in.mp4 \
    -vf "fps=6,format=yuv420p,scale=960:-2:flags=lanczos" \
    -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 -crf 32 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset fast \
    -c:a libopus -b:a 82K -application 2048 \
    -c:s mov_text \
    out.mp4
can go more crazy with this soup

  -x265-params "keyint=800:min-keyint=24:scenecut=20:ref=8:bframes=16:b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=80:rd=4:subme=5:deblock=1,1:aq-mode=3:aq-strength=0.4:psy-rd=0.4:psy-rdoq=1.0:qcomp=0.7:qg-size=64:rect=1:amp=1:strong-intra-smoothing=1:limit-modes=1:limit-tu=4:rdpenalty=2:tu-intra-depth=4:tu-inter-depth=4:me=star:no-allow-non-conformance=1" \
Traubenfuchs
In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…
lifestyleguru
Me the same... sometimes I "accidently" switch on the camera during calls and ask people why they're confused.
fastjack42
Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)