[HN Gopher] Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal ...
___________________________________________________________________
Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling
Author : angristan
Score : 205 points
Date : 2025-12-28 11:51 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stanislas.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stanislas.blog)
| Neywiny wrote:
| Seems like good work. From what I've heard developing on MacOS
| has not gotten easier over the years. I do question the point,
| though. I suppose there's merit in knowing if your configuration
| causes thermal throttling, but what are you able to _do_ about
| it? There 's no fan profile to tweak or anything. Can you
| undervolt them?
| amelius wrote:
| You can move to a colder place or turn the room temperature
| down.
| nottorp wrote:
| In the northern hemisphere you can just open a window at this
| time of the year.
|
| Remember to put your coat and hat on!
| angristan wrote:
| > but what are you able to do about it?
|
| On Macbooks with fans, I started tuning my fan curve with iStat
| Menus (https://bjango.com/help/istatmenus7/fans/#custom-fan-
| curve) because I noticed the default curve was lagging behind
| and thermal throttling kicked in before the fan even reach max
| speed.
|
| For Apple Silicon specifically, I recently discovered that
| there is a "high power mode" (https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/101613) that allows the fans to run at higher speed. So I
| don't use the custom fan curves anymore, it helped me a lot
| (but it does get quite noisy on a 14" M4 Max)
|
| For a Macbook Air, not much you can do besides closing stuff,
| or elevating the macbook and pointing a fan at it or things
| like that... but yeah it's a bit desperate!
| somat wrote:
| An open question on fan curves
|
| Environment: I am currently playing with a pid control
| function for my gpu fan, that is instead of saying "map temp
| x to fanspeed y"(fan curve) say "set fan to speed needed for
| temp z"(pid control)
|
| Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a
| thermal option? Or put another way, is there something about
| the desired thermal characteristics of a computer that make
| pid control undesirable?
|
| As a final thought, I have halfway convinced myself that in a
| predictable thermal system a map would match a set of pid
| parameters anyway.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > "set fan to speed needed for temp z"(pid control)
|
| Why though? I generally don't care about the specific
| temperatures of my CPU and GPU, just that they don't get
| too warm, so for the CPU (AIO) I basically have "0% up
| until 45C, then increment up to 100% when it hits 90C" and
| the same for the GPU except it's always at 10%.
|
| I guess I could figure out target temperatures, and do it
| the other way, but I'm not sure what the added complexity
| is for? The end results (I need at least) remains the same,
| cool down the hardware when it gets hotter, and for me, the
| simpler the better.
|
| I also have two ambient temperature sensors in the chassi
| itself, right at the intake and the outtake. The intake one
| is just for monitoring if my room gets too warm so the
| computer won't be effective at cooling (as the summers here
| get really warm) and the outtake one is to check overall
| temperature and control the intake fans. In reality, I
| don't think I need to do even this, just the CPU+GPU
| temperature + set fan speed based on that feels simple
| enough to solve 99% of the things you'd like to be able to
| do here.
| somat wrote:
| In my case the gpu fan was not changing speed
| automatically, (something, something, linux) which I
| discovered after an embarrassingly long time of poking at
| other things trying to figure out why my system was
| crashing so much. And now instead of doing the sane thing
| and figuring out how to get the fan speed map to work, I
| thought about it and came to this conclusion "I want my
| temps to be set value, say 45C, why not use a closed loop
| controller to find the fan speed necessary for that temp
| at any load?"
|
| And now am about halfway through building pid fan control
| software and a janky gpu temp simulator so I can get some
| intuition on tuning the pid parameters before I set it on
| my actual gpu. you know, the fun part of computing. But
| now I am worried that perhaps there is a real reason
| nobody does it this way.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Aren't you ultimately gonna have to figure out why you
| cannot change the speed on the GPU, regardless of the
| approach? And then you're just back at square one?
|
| I think no one is doing it that way, because there is
| simply no need for it. Sure, when I'm 3D printing some
| material it sometimes need the heatbed to be exactly 45C
| or whatever, but why would I care about the specific
| temperature of my GPU? As long as it's not throttled when
| GPU utilization is at 100%, I'm good to go.
|
| KISS :)
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| This could be total nonsense and I am definitely out on a
| limb here, but I remember from my amateur crypto mining
| days (almost 15 years ago wow) that keeping everything
| relatively consistent is better for the longevity of your
| hardware (GPU/CPU mainly). Some people obsessed over
| getting temps as low as possible but that's not very
| productive, diminishing returns and all of that. There is
| just generally a healthy temperature to keep things
| operating at most of the time, coupled with how hard you
| push the component in question (while not putting too
| much strain on your fans either). Basically:
| swinging/fluctuating is not good, consistency is good.
|
| Again though I could be totally off. I just remember that
| being spread around as "conventional wisdom."
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Basically: swinging/fluctuating is not good,
| consistency is good.
|
| Yeah, I'd understand not wanting to go between 0C and 90C
| over and over. But my GPU idles at around 35C, maxes out
| at 85C or something, and going back and fourth will
| surely be preferable than staying with a single
| temperature but voltage clock the card. Especially
| considering performance.
|
| But again, I'm using my card for ML, number-crunching,
| simulations and VFX, you might be right that the use case
| of cryptocurrency mining prefers a different thermal
| profile.
| The_President wrote:
| You're speaking the truth, as this is not nonsense - it
| is correct. At the micro level, thermal
| expansion/contracting is occurring across the variety of
| the circuit board materials and components. Hot is fine
| (not too hot), but it is the consistency that makes for
| longetivity.
|
| I limit power consumption profiles and clock speeds
| unless higher power is required, and combine that with an
| oversized cooling system - keeps regular temps
| consistent.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Yeah that was my understanding as well. Basically it
| comes down to how much you are warping/straining the
| materials. It all seems rather intuitive to me but this
| is not my area of expertise and just because something
| makes sense doesn't mean it's correct lol
| kec wrote:
| PID loops work best when you have active control for both
| heating and cooling. PIDs are also best when you have a
| single optimal point you're aiming at, there's a kind of
| fundamental mismatch here in that there isn't really a "too
| cold" for your system, you're just aiming to keep the
| system below an upper limit while hopefully keeping fan
| noise to a minimum (otherwise you'd just send it and run at
| max 24/7).
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| A simple PID wants to keep it at a setpoint, but it's
| easy enough to layer a target change on top of it, some
| hysteresis so it's not pulsing on and off, perhaps with
| control authority depending on the the target, etc. but
| then that gets complicated and usually manufacturers
| aren't going to expose those sorts of tunings to the
| user.
|
| For most people a fan curve is more obvious to work with
| and it's largely good enough without the irritating
| behaviors insufficiently tuned control loops can exhibit.
| mveety wrote:
| > Question: is there a reason pid type control is never a
| thermal option? Or put another way, is there something
| about the desired thermal characteristics of a computer
| that make pid control undesirable?
|
| I've only every seen something like this in _really_ high
| reliability equipment because they 're worried about
| repeated thermal expansion causing cracks in the
| boards/solder joints. There is, often, heaters available
| for use if the temperature gets too low. For most equipment
| I think that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze so it
| isn't done.
| tyre wrote:
| It would be cool if the bottoms of MacBooks weren't flat and
| instead wavy or rippling to increase surface area. There are
| probably a lot of cool designs (ayyyyy) you could machine in.
| Marsymars wrote:
| There are laptops like that (e.g. the fanless Lenovo
| Chromebook Plus 14). No idea if it was actually engineered
| like that for thermal reasons.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Is there a value to increasing surface area on the top or
| bottom case of a MacBook? I'd imagine most of the thermal
| management is achieved by fan-directed airflow through the
| internal heatsinks and convection through the keyboard.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I wanted this app to exist. Now it does!
|
| I sometimes face thermal throttling because a process has gone
| wacko, and all I have to do is kill it. But first I have to
| notice it.
|
| I rarely notice until half my battery is gone!
| Neywiny wrote:
| You know what, fair point. I know because my fans go haywire
| (except that one time my fans decided to just not work until
| I ran some incantations. The joys of Linux). If you're
| passively cooled, you get no feedback on CPU load. Makes
| sense.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yeah I'm on a MacBook Air, so no fans.
| angristan wrote:
| Indeed, that's why apps like iStat Menus, Stats, Sensei etc
| (for macOS at least) are very useful, I keep the CPU usage
| and power usage in my menu bar at all times, this is very
| useful on battery. For example I know that my Macbook Air
| idles at ~2W-5W, so if I'm doing nothing special and it's
| using 15W, a process is doing some funny stuff
| nicoburns wrote:
| > but what are you able to do about it
|
| Quit some apps probably. I often have a bunch of stuff running
| in the background that I haven't bothered to close yet. It also
| sounds like it'd be good for detecting software that's gotten
| stuck in a busy loop or similar.
|
| And/or possibly take a tea break while it chills out.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > but what are you able to do about it?
|
| Depends on the environment, back when I had a MacBook, they
| still had fans, but the new ones are all passive, I think. So
| then the surface (or lack of it) below it would matter the
| most. If you keep it in your lap, on top of a hairy blanket,
| it'll be a lot effective at getting rid of the heat compared to
| if you have it sitting on a stone table, as just one example.
|
| Edit: Seemingly the split of Air/Pro being passively/actively
| cooled seems to still apply today, so then checking fans, their
| performance and intakes/outtakes for _chaff_ tends to be the
| best way, if you have a Pro.
| saagarjha wrote:
| MacBook Air is passive, MacBook Pro is not
| hu3 wrote:
| New macbooks still have fans. Depending on the model.
| vunderba wrote:
| I've been using Macs-Fan-Control since I picked up a Mac M1 a
| few years back and it works great. It lets you control the fan
| RPM based on CPU Core values.
|
| I adjusted it to ramp the fans up at more conservative values
| because otherwise during intense usage periods it would hit
| 90C+.
|
| https://github.com/crystalidea/macs-fan-control
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I use TG Pro on my Macbook Pro to auto-cool my Mac. It drives
| me crazy that Apple lets your Mac burn to a crisp before
| kicking on the fans.
| varenc wrote:
| Is Apple actually letting the Mac burn to the point at which
| it has damage or other negative consequences? I've definitely
| observed they delay the fans until they're absolutely needed,
| but I trust their thermal management to not actually cause
| harm. (besides a warm lap)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I'm not sure, but I know I'm not the only one who is
| concerned about how hot it can get long before the OS kicks
| on the fans.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1kmacsf/macbook_pro
| _...
| sys_64738 wrote:
| brew install stats
| nazgu1 wrote:
| There is a problem/bug with thermal pressure notifications. Did
| you stumbled upon such issue with your app?
| https://github.com/macmade/Hot/issues/73
| angristan wrote:
| Ah! Yeah I did notice that using
| `ProcessInfo.processInfo.thermalState`, the state didn't update
| unless I restarted the process (reproducible even with a swift
| script). But this issue doesn't happen with the technique I use
| right now (the thermald notification)
| nazgu1 wrote:
| Thanks, I will check your approach. And your app as well,
| looks beautiful and useful.
| angristan wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words :)
| twilo wrote:
| You can just ping your CPU usage to the menu bar and monitor
| that. I have CPU and total system wattage up there so I always
| know if something weird is going on.
|
| https://github.com/exelban/stats
| angristan wrote:
| Yeah! That's how I initially suspected that it was thermal
| throttling because I saw in iStat Menus that my wattage was
| going down for a constantly high CPU usage
| rkagerer wrote:
| This would be a really useful thing to indicate via an
| unobtrusive LED on the chassis somewhere.
| echoangle wrote:
| Why would you take an LED over something on the screen? The
| notification is only really relevant while the laptop is open,
| and the screen is going to be on anyways.
| alexford1987 wrote:
| There is no way Apple would do this on a MacBook Air, which is
| able to be passively cooled because of the type of use
| cases/users it is primarily designed for, most of whom never
| hit throttling. The light would only confuse almost everyone.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Another thing to keep in mind with MacBook Pro models or any
| other device that has fans... if you have cats, dogs or other
| heavily shedding animals, you _must_ regularly (for me, once a
| year, for people with German Shedders more like once a quarter)
| open them up and thoroughly clean them.
|
| The amount of fur that manages to squeeze _everywhere_ is insane.
| vunderba wrote:
| Husky/Pyr owner here - I have to systematically blow out all of
| my electronics because she molts enough fur to start my own
| Etsy brand of stuffed animals.
|
| The _WORST_ thing, though, is that all her fur makes its way
| into all my musical instruments, including underneath each
| individual key of my upright piano (now effectively a felt
| piano).
| the_black_hand wrote:
| My 2017 macbook is basically brick. Crazy how just opening chrome
| sets off fans like a jet engine. How much cpu can checking gmail
| really use?
|
| Foolish me is considering buying a new macbook this year. I have
| no choice because Apple and Microsoft will do everything in their
| power to ship the shittiest personal computing products every
| year.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| The butterfly keyboard of that era was a large enough signal,
| to me, that high quality engineering results were compromised.
|
| They produced a laptop that you can't type efficiently on??
| That misses key strokes?! I had to slow my typing on those
| keyboards!
|
| So, imagine the incredible contempt I have had for Apple for
| failing such a basic delivery. Still, their new silicon
| machines managed to turn my opinion around -- quite the 180.
| The speed improvement is genuinely remarkable, and the modern
| build quality otherwise seems excellent to me.
|
| It's worth another try imo.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| I'm sorry you're saddled with an Intel Mac. The Apple Silicon
| Macs really changed everything. Clearly Apple is capable and
| willing of shipping extremely good and performant hardware,
| even though historically they haven't always done so. I do
| blame Intel for their monopoly on mediocraty for the late-10s
| Macbooks though.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Now put Linux on it. Just like new!
| throwaway270925 wrote:
| Yeah, 2016-2019 were severely cooling constrained
| unfortunately.
|
| If you want to keep using it (maybe not as your main machine)
| there are some workarounds and fixes:
|
| The simple software only way is to deactivate Turbo and/or HT.
| Less performance but also less power use meaning less heat. And
| checking gmail or browsing the web you probably wont notice
| much of a difference.
|
| Or you can open it up and add thermal pads to your VRMs,
| finally giving them adequate cooling. Just dont touch the
| bottom of your macbook afterwards or rest it on your bed or
| couch, that thing can get hot!
| dplgk wrote:
| I recommend taking the bottom panel off and cleaning out dust
| from the fans and air ports
| marksomnian wrote:
| Site appears to be hugged to death, repo is:
| https://github.com/angristan/MacThrottle
| angristan wrote:
| Oops, I fixed it, I have not very important Cloudflare Workers
| in front of the blog (which is on Cloudflare Pages) and somehow
| they were in fail closed mode and not fail open :(
| brikym wrote:
| I have had back luck with them intermittently losing routing.
| Sometimes re-creating the worker fixes weird issues.
| angristan wrote:
| This one is my bad, I've exceeded the 100k free reqs/day
| (for https://stanislas.blog/2025/02/redirect-dead-links-
| hugo-imag...), and I didn't enable the setting to bypass it
| over that limit
| edwardtay wrote:
| Nice work! This is a practical tool that fills a real gap. A few
| thoughts:
|
| 1. Have you considered adding historical tracking/graphing? Being
| able to see throttling patterns over time would be super valuable
| for understanding workload impacts and diagnosing thermal issues.
|
| 2. What metrics are you pulling to detect throttling? CPU
| frequency scaling, temperature sensors via IOKit, or something
| else? Would be interested in the technical details.
|
| 3. Integration with menu bar apps like iStat Menus or Stats could
| be useful - or even just exporting metrics to a format they can
| consume.
|
| 4. For M-series chips, have you noticed different throttling
| behavior compared to Intel Macs? The efficiency/performance core
| split makes this more complex.
|
| 5. Any plans to add alerts/notifications when throttling occurs?
| Or maybe even automated actions (like pausing backup processes
| when thermal throttling is detected)?
|
| One use case: this would be great for developers running heavy
| builds or ML training. Knowing when your machine is throttling
| helps decide whether to optimize code, get better cooling, or
| just wait it out.
| widhhddok wrote:
| The account that posted this comment seems to be a bot account
| - and one that doesn't even read the article in it's context.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| One thing that annoys me about LLMs is how they say stuff
| that's dumb but sounds smart. For example:
|
| > Have you considered adding historical tracking/graphing?
| Being able to see throttling patterns over time would be
| super valuable for understanding workload impacts and
| diagnosing thermal issues
|
| Would it actually though? Is anyone going to ever check if
| their laptop was throttling at 6pm yesterday evening and then
| remember what they were found at that time and try to
| "understand workload impacts"? It's the type of thing that
| might come in kinda useful once in a while, not "super
| valuable". Idk, I notice this trend with LLMs a lot. Often
| what they say just doesn't really make sense when you think
| about it.
| angristan wrote:
| Agreed, half of these questions are answered in the post.
| Also, looking at the account's comment history confirms that
| it's karma-farming with comments or something like that
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Mac fan control seems to track component temps which is pretty
| nice
| e40 wrote:
| He could get notarization and code signing for free if he puts it
| into Homebrew. I would love to get it via that distribution
| mechanism.
| angristan wrote:
| Oh really? TIL, I thought it was dependant on the app
| developer. I can look into it, thanks!
| xenonite wrote:
| This is great to hear.
|
| Is there a similar free way for getting Windows signatures?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| This is the type of software you hope Apple will "Sherlock" and
| bake into the OS!
| gigatexal wrote:
| neat! got it installed. thank you.
|
| you could easily put this in the App Store (maybe?) and I'd have
| thrown a few bucks your way.
| tombert wrote:
| I had the 2019 Macbook Pro i9, so I think a function to determine
| thermal throttling could be written very simply:
| function isThermalThrottling() { return true;
| }
|
| Seriously, I loved that computer for the most part but I was a
| little annoyed that I paid a lot of money for the i9 CPU just to
| get worse performance than the i7.
| merb wrote:
| I had that problem as well. Especially when connected to two
| external monitors. I did not love the machine and the M1 Max
| was such a big upgrade because of that and I could upgrade to
| the m3 max later and give my m1 to somebody else. Both apple
| silicon machines are going strong for a long time I guess.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I had a Mid-2015 MacBook Pro with an i7 and I still ran the
| fans at full speed at all times (actually above full speed). I
| had a couple fan failures due to that, but otherwise I think it
| was worth it.
| j45 wrote:
| 2014-15 were among the best macbooks ever made. All laptops
| fail eventually from pushing them extremely hard.
| lbourdages wrote:
| I had that laptop and it is the worst computer I have ever
| owned. As soon as you booted the fans would start spinning.
| There were sometimes kernel panics when plugging or unplugging
| Thunderbolt devices.
|
| I have an M1 Max MBP now and it has been absolutely perfect.
| thedougd wrote:
| Same! Still have it as a side machine.
|
| My favorite and most painful issue was a bug in USB charging.
| Sometimes it would fail to charge from my monitor (USB-C) yet
| it would believe it's connected. The battery would eventually
| run to zero and the machine would shutoff without warning. No
| low battery warning would be shown because it believed it was
| charging however it was not. Resolved with my M3.
|
| Also fun with that generation is that you can't plug in a
| dead laptop and start using it right away. Takes about ten
| minutes of charging before you can power it on.
|
| Also fun, it would not establish power delivery with my
| monitor in this state. I'd have to plug it in with a regular
| charger to bootstrap it. Also resolved with my M3.
|
| Now that it's aged, the super capacitor for the clock no
| longer holds charge and the time is usually wrong on cold
| boot. I wish that was serviceable.
| tombert wrote:
| I had heard of the super capacity issue, and while mine had
| not shown any symptoms of that I decided to sell it before
| it did.
| tombert wrote:
| The laptop it was replacing was a terrible Asus computer that
| literally started falling apart and delaminating after about
| six months. It felt like it would break a bit more every time
| I touched it. Asus themselves was wholly unwilling to do
| anything about it, and they acted like I had been juggling
| with the damn thing when all it ever did was live on my desk
| or next to my bed.
|
| It was the third Asus computer I had owned that broke way
| earlier than it had any right to, and I swore a blood oath
| that I will not buy another Asus product.
|
| Point is, considering how terrible that laptop was, "annoying
| thermal throttling" was still a considerable upgrade, so I
| loved it in spite of it.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I am writing this comment from a 2019 i9. I have to charge it
| from the right hand ports. I think that is dumb, but it did
| solve the issue. I have no idea how I came to that conclusion
| (i almost certainly read about it somewhere), but there were
| certainly a couple of weeks where it was driving me crazy.
|
| A dumb thing for sure. I still like macos better than windows
| and I'm heavily invested in a production workflow with logic.
| Moving to linux would be my next move, but after making that
| dumb change it's quite a functional machine.
| auscompgeek wrote:
| It was definitely a relatively well known problem with the
| 2019 MBP on the internet at some point. I found a Reddit
| thread linking to a news article about this. https://www.redd
| it.com/r/mac/comments/vi3grj/you_should_char...
|
| It was so much of a problem that at work we added a check
| that you were charging from the right ports to our internal
| doctor script (think like `brew doctor`).
| tombert wrote:
| FWIW, I replaced that MacBook with a Thinkpad (AMD Edition)
| about a year, and i have been extremely with it. Not only was
| it one of the easiest Linux installs I have ever had, but the
| hardware feels solid, the keyboard (while not one of the
| legendary classic Thinkpad keyboards) is nice to type on, the
| 4K screen looks nice, and everything just feels well built
| and snappy.
|
| Outside of the terrible speakers, it is a nearly perfect
| computer. I don't really mind a crappy speaker on a laptop
| since it usually lives on mute and when I need decent-enough
| quality audio I will plug in headphones or Bluetooth to a
| speaker, but YMMV.
|
| Still, if this computer ever breaks then I will likely buy
| another thinkpad.
| j45 wrote:
| You were not alone.
|
| The epic takedown post of the issue on stackexchange which
| proved it is below, I ended up at it from somewhere on social
| I think.
| j45 wrote:
| There is one pretty epic stackoverflow post that AI searches
| probably won't find.
|
| It turned out a lot of the thermal throttling (kernel_task
| usage) on the i9 macbook pros went away if you plugged in the
| power on the right side, instead of the left.
|
| Why turned out to be a chip (thunderbolt I think) that didn't
| have enough cooling.
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...
|
| One could also put quiet cabinet fans under the i9 Macbook Pro
| to make it draw air away and run markedly faster. [1]
|
| That, combined with the keyboard failures, meant I could put a
| wireless keyboard on top of the laptop keyboard and use it,
| with fans underneath.
|
| This is how I took it to the Apple store for warranty repair,
| which made a point of it having a pretty massive design flaw.
|
| I asked them this if it was a feature of all macbooks when you
| buy the fastest ones to have to cool it the right way and not
| use the keyboard in case there might be dust in the air. The
| laptop was way too overspecced.
|
| The i9 laptops were made far too thin to cool themselves
| appropriately in any situation, full stop.
|
| All to say, if I could detect which USB-C port was pulling
| power in, on those laptops, I could guess pretty accurately
| what will happen on that i9.
|
| It's sad to know the M4 Max Macbook Pro has the same issue,
| even though the laptop is thicker. Doesn't make me want to
| upgrade anymore.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-MULTIFAN-Receiver-
| Playsta...
| atymic wrote:
| Found https://github.com/macmade/Hot which works for my intel mac
| :)
| tamimio wrote:
| Thanks for sharing it, will try it now. I found an iMac 2017
| the other day at the thrift store for $20, it's been very good
| so far but will see if it throttles or not.
| scottlamb wrote:
| > I know it's thermal throttling because I can see in iStat Menus
| that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts goes
| down.
|
| There's another possibility. If your battery is low and you've
| mistakenly plugged it into a low-power USB-C source (phone
| charger), you will also see 100% CPU usage, low power usage, and
| terrible performance. Probably not the author's problem, but it's
| been mine more than once! It might be worth adding something to
| detect this case, too. You can see your charger power under
| "System Information"; I assume there's an API for it also.
| angristan wrote:
| Interesting, yeah iStat Menus reports the wattage of the
| charger, sometimes I've charged my mac with like a 5 or 10W
| charger and I didn't have that issue But now that rings a bell,
| I think a coworker had that issue recently. I wonder why that
| happens
| hinkley wrote:
| While I have definitely done this a few times, one of my
| MacBooks could draw more power than the power supply could
| deliver and there was a particular computer game that I
| discovered I could "only" play for about five hours before the
| laptop shut itself off. Because it was having to draw
| supplemental power from the batteries to keep up.
|
| IIRC the next generation of MacBook was the one that came with
| the larger power brick, which didn't at all surprise me after
| that experience. Then they switched to GaN to bring the brick
| size back down.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > I know it's thermal throttling because I can see in iStat
| Menus that my CPU usage is 100% while the power usage in watts
| goes down.
|
| When I read this I wondered "Why isn't core temperature alone
| not a reliable indicator of thermal throttling?". Isn't that
| the state variable the thermal controller is directly aiming to
| regulate by not letting it exceed some threshold?
| angristan wrote:
| My M4 Max Macbook Pro can run for a while at like 105degC and
| fans to the max before throttling, when it starts throttling
| it doesn't exceed that threshold, and then the temperature
| goes down for a while before throttling stops
| wincy wrote:
| I have an M1 MacBook Air and do a once weekly virtual D&D
| session with some friends. I hook it up to my 4K monitor, and I
| assumed it had to do with that. It kept becoming a slideshow
| (unless I put an ice pack under it!) and I realized it's
| because the battery life is so good it's the only time of the
| week I charge the thing, so charging the battery was making the
| poor laptop a hot mess that was thermal throttling like crazy.
| This is with a nice dock that can push around 100W, so it isn't
| necessarily an underprovisioned charger.
|
| I started charging it an hour or two before our session, and
| the issues stopped.
| j45 wrote:
| Try cabinet fans under it, will be life changing.
| tonymet wrote:
| I hope this great tutorial encourages more developers to build
| native apps. Still the best development and consumer experience .
| Bad_Initialism wrote:
| It won't run on a MacBook Air M1 running Sonoma. Only Tahoe.
|
| Come along with me! We'll destroy the planet so fast that we'll
| all be cinders before you know it.
|
| All we have to do is gobble the marketing speak so fast and make
| everything shiny and new, and we'll all be dead before you can
| say "Greta Thunberg."
|
| Come die with me for thin and for stylish. Kill the animals with
| me for "sleek".
|
| Die. With. Me. Now! I made an app!
| angristan wrote:
| I merged https://github.com/angristan/MacThrottle/pull/2 to
| make it work on macOS 15. macOS 14 probably works, feel free to
| try it out and open a PR to lower the required version if it's
| the case
| ksec wrote:
| I really wish Apple uses Vapour Chamber cooling for next MacBook
| Air M5.
|
| On my MacBook Pro, I have come to the conclusion that Apple
| priorities low noise level over heat dissipation. And I have my
| Mac fan control to have a _minimum_ fan speed.
| motoboi wrote:
| Hypothesis: it's not the CPU, it's the USB controller saturating
| the thermal mass.
|
| So instead of the CPU or GPU going bonkers, the body gets too hot
| and they lose thermal dissipation capacity for the normal usage
| and then overheat and then throttle. They go 100% on the graphs
| because the throttling reduces frequencies and then load becomes
| too heavy.
|
| Experiment other adapters and monitors.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Switching which side I charge my 2019 mbp i9 effectively solved
| my throttling issues, so your premise might be correct as I
| understand it.
| Coeur wrote:
| That's interesting, could you tell me more? Like which side
| and port (front/back) was throttling, which side and port was
| not? Were you using a power supply to charge or was the mbp
| connected to a display? Did it only throttle during charging
| or also during while fully charged? Thanks!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-28 23:00 UTC)