[jltsiren]

Blaming Intel is a poor excuse. Apple could have done some actual design and built a laptop around the hardware they had. But they didn't want to. Instead, they ignored the reality, stuck to the flawed design, and shipped mediocre laptops several years in a row.

[microtonal]

I agree, but I think they didn't care. For some years, some Apple execs believed that the iPad was going to replace the Mac. After that they knew that the Apple Silicon Mac was nearby, so they probably didn't want to make an investment in a 'legacy' platform. Did suck for all the people who bought one.

[cameronh90]

Perhaps, but pretty much every high performance Intel laptop between 2017 and 2023 is exactly the same unless it's in an heavy, enormous and unpleasantly loud gaming chassis. Supposedly the Core Ultra Series 2 are an improvement but I haven't tried one yet.

For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.

(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)

[nextos]

Apple is generally really good at trying to keep their machines silent. When they originally transitioned to Intel, their Core 2 Duo laptops were both cheaper and more silent than the competition. As a Linux user, that's one feature from Apple I'd like most manufacturers to copy.

Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.

[cameronh90]

It’s a company laptop that runs Windows, and the newer BIOSes now block undervolting because of the plundervolt mitigations.

I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.

Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.

On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.

[hinkley]

Intel has never been good at thermals.

[trane_project]

I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.

[ginko]

Pentium M's were magical when they came out.

[mrweasel]

Apple had the design ready for an Intel chips that didn't arrive. Rather than revisiting their design they opted to just chuck the chip into a design that couldn't accommodate it's thermal characteristics.

[apt-apt-apt-apt]

I spent way too much time figuring out that around 53W is the maximum that the last Intel MBP can sustain over longer periods before the VRM (converts power for the CPU) poops out and throttles you.