[fhood]

I don't understand how this happened. Apple is a company that built it's empire on paying a premium for reliability and ease of use.

There have been mistakes in the past, but this is something that should have been caught immediately, which suggests that they were aware of it at release.

Is it just nostalgia goggles telling me that Jobs would not have let these out the door?

[slantyyz]

While Apple's not blameless in the matter, this seems to be more of an Intel issue no?

It appears the i9 isn't a good fit for thin and light laptops (Apple's also not the only one using the i9 in this form factor). Of course, a laptop using this i9 and properly cooling it is not going to be small or pretty[1].

Getting back to Apple, there are a couple of ways of looking at this.

For people who are bursting (as opposed to doing long running sustained loads) the i9 is probably the fastest Macbook Pro you can get. For people who are using optimized media apps like FCP, this is also not necessarily a bad buy, since you'll likely reap the benefits of the faster CPU.

For people who are doing sustained loads and/or running non-optimized apps like Premiere, this is probably not a good Macbook Pro to buy. For people who care a lot about getting advertised baseline clock rates, irrespective of bottom line performance gains, this is also not the Macbook Pro to buy.

For some, it's an easy choice, and for others, it's complicated.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeUlGnNUut8

[ubercore]

> While Apple's not blameless in the matter, this seems to be more of an Intel issue no?

I mean, Apple sourced the chip and shipped the laptop, and you pay Apple. I don't see how you _can't_ blame Apple engineering for this?

[slantyyz]

> I don't see how you _can't_ blame Apple engineering for this?

Which is why I said "not blameless"

[garrettdc]

Thermal properties of the chip and any issues arising from those are pieces that the engineers should have sussed out in the beginning though. If I don't put a heatsink and fan on my desktop CPU, then is that Intel's fault? Of course not.

Hopefully the firmware can take care of the issue for those impacted.

[chemmail]

Intel had to scramble to effectively increase processor density in laptops by 2x and 3x almost overnight when Ryzen came out. They have been resting on their laurels for a better part of a decade. They are also working on the same TDP constraints as before. A considerable feat in such a short time, 2x more cores and 700MHz more turbo.

Looking at the Macbook Pro design, it is suppose to be able to cool the Radeon 560X which has a TDP of 75W with a similar set of fin sizes and fans on the opposing side. This should mean in theory be able to handle even a grossly overpowered CPU. I think they can fix it.

[opencl]

The Apple III had a 100% failure rate because Steve Jobs personally insisted that it have neither cooling fans nor vents.