[icedchai]

I felt 2012 - 2015 Intel Macs were pretty decent: the first Retina MacBook Pro, the iMac 5K, for example. It definitely went down hill with the Touch Bar and the MacBook Pros with the Core i9 chips. Those seemed like they were constantly throttling, fans sounded like a jet engine...

[dwaite]

IMHO that is because Intel wasn't delivering chips meeting the specs they promised. Once you dropped it into a system and put a thermal/cooling profile in, the new chip didn't really perform better than the old one.

On the lower end, Apple just stopped releasing updates because there was no useful advantage to new chips.

On the high end, Apple was fighting between their desire to have a machine pleasant to use, and one that would fire the fans full speed at boot to keep up maximum performance without thermal throttling.

[bigyabai]

Kinda? Apple was known to tune their ACPI tables pretty hard, it wasn't impossible for them to put a hard-limit of 70c like the other Wintel machines at the time. Instead they seemed to push the Turbo mode until you approached junction temp, which didn't seem like a smart idea for a mobile device. Especially those embarrassingly thin i9 workstations Apple tried shipping.

The behavior persists on Apple Silicon, it just gets there slower. Someone internally at Apple must have a vendetta against CPU throttling, I guess.

[simulator5g]

Heat transfer rates are higher when the difference in temperature is higher. So if the CPU temperature is below the maximum you're leaving some theoretical performance on the table. Someone at Apple has a hard on for performance data that's making them ignore real world consequences.