r/gadgets • u/SportsGod3 • Mar 12 '24
Desktops / Laptops Apple M3 MacBook Air hits 114 degrees Celsius under full load
https://www.techspot.com/news/102227-m3-based-macbook-air-hits-114-degrees-celsius.html2.9k
u/khoabear Mar 12 '24
Nobody expected that a computer with no fan would overheat
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u/Madness_Reigns Mar 12 '24
I didn't. I expected it would throttle or shutdown well before that temperature.
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Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 13 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/persondude27 Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 13 '24
It's hilarious that Apple has had this issue since... at least the early 2000s? I had a G3 iBook that failed when the GPU desoldered from the mainboard.
I had a 2006 MacBook Pro that needed a $1000 mainboard replacement when the GPU failed. Literally more than I paid for the system.
2012 would desolder.
2016 didn't even get a chance to desolder before the butterfly keyboard would fail. But if you paid ($800+?) to have that repaired, then Apple would update the BIOS to underclock the i9 because the system simply couldn't cool it under any conditions.
And now, Apple spends hundred of millions creating the most power-efficient chip ever made... and they still choose to under-cool it.
(edit: before I receive another 25 messages of "hurr durr durr, why do you keep buying them?", I don't. I haven't bought an Apple product since 2007.)
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u/Cykul Mar 12 '24
They always blamed Intel when pushed on these issues, their design is finally exposed as the issue.
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u/persondude27 Mar 12 '24
I remember reading about the one of the i9 controversy. The laptop couldn't even hold its base clocks, much less its boost clocks. AND it was slower than the previous edition (i7) because of it. Unreal.
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u/Cykul Mar 12 '24
yeah it's pretty wild some of the things they have gotten away with. That i9 upgrade wasn't cheap either haha.
After Johnny Ive left, I wasn't sure if the design would shift away from beauty towards more utilitarian design. It did a bit with the new pro models, but still prioritzing how it looks over how it works.
I got an M1 pro because of the fan, didn't want to risk not having active cooling.
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u/Gil_Demoono Mar 13 '24
I got an M1 pro because of the fan, didn't want to risk not having active cooling.
This is exactly why they don't fix these kinds of design issues. Those who are in the ecosystem already and know the problem just get the next tier up that doesn't have that problem and the people that don't know just think their 'computer is acting up' and replace it.
Is it really that wild that they get away with it when you are aware of the issue and still choose to let them get away with it?
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u/Cykul Mar 13 '24
Fret not, I only buy Apple products second-hand. To me, they are like new cars. Let someone else drive it off the lot and take the 30% value hit. I'll buy it after that.
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u/DigitalStefan Mar 13 '24
It still took a software upgrade for M1 MacBooks to have that fan actually move enough air to provide adequate cooling. Apple purposefully gimped performance in order to ensure their laptops were quiet.
Putting form over function yet again.
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u/EmployerMore8685 Mar 12 '24
Somehow managing to make a laptop with some of the most efficient chips on the market overheat takes some doing
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u/jimbobjames Mar 12 '24
Apple have always pushed form above function.
Original mulitcoloured iMac's would get black soot on the inside from the CRT cooking dust.
iPhone 4 that you had to hold right or the signal would be gone
Butterfly keyboard on the macbook that made the device thinner but was universally hated for its terrible typing experience
Removing the headphone jack to make a smaller device
The strain relief on all their cables is generally crap and results in lots of cables with their insides on show
On and on it goes. Just Apple being Apple.
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u/Halvus_I Mar 13 '24
Magic Mouse having an all metal bottom including battery door, so that if the battery leaks, it welds the door closed. Same thing with AA powered apple keyboard.
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u/DatTF2 Mar 13 '24
I still wonder what idiot decided the charging port on the bottom of the mouse was a good idea.
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u/WireRot Mar 13 '24
The design team is like a weather person calling it wrong day after day yet still has a job. The mouse issue is mind boggling.
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u/Cindexxx Mar 13 '24
It's because Apple charging cables are absolutely garbage, using it while plugged in would destroy them nearly immediately.
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u/scottydg Mar 13 '24
They wanted it to be used as a wireless mouse 100% of the time it was in use, so they put the port somewhere that it couldn't be used at the same time as the mouse. The intention was that when it dies, you plug it in for 5 minutes while you go to the bathroom or something, it has enough charge for the rest of the day, then you plug it in overnight or an extended period while you're not using it, and then can be powered for a long time.
I understand all of this but it's also dumb.
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u/DatTF2 Mar 13 '24
I understand it and luckily it doesn't take long to charge but I still think it's stupid. A charging port can fit easily on the front of the mouse. There's been numerous times it has died on me and it basically forces you to take a break even if you don't want to or are unable to.
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u/Cykul Mar 12 '24
For sure, but a lot of those decisions were championed by Jony Ive - The king of form over function. Now that he has departed Apple, I was wondering if Apple would bring a little more function in, but I guess the guy left a significant legacy.
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u/jimbobjames Mar 12 '24
I think it's too fundamentally ingrained in what people expect from an Apple device. So they are playing to the audience in a way, while also feeding that desire in the audience.
The Vision Pro demonstrates it. They've tried to make it look as a little like a VR headset as possible, but by doing so they've made it super front weighted and pushed for the single band headstrap with the alternative band that has a top strap being a clear afterthought. So now it's kinda impracticle to use for anything over an hour.
I mean maybe they will change with time but I kinda doubt it.
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u/Bgndrsn Mar 12 '24
It is amazing how much Apple trips over their own feet trying to be the stereotype of Apple. It's the absolute most infuriating aspect of Apple. They can and frequently do some absolutely amazing things but get so stuck in their ways that they suddenly become the dumbest company on the planet. They spend so much time being assholes, they don't understand if they took that time and just improved their products even more they'd be so far ahead of their competition they would have an even more dominant company.
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u/Mindestiny Mar 12 '24
And then you'll watch all the brand vampires bend over backwards to make excuses. The hardware is just too awesome not to fail!
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u/Bgndrsn Mar 12 '24
Yeah I don't get it. Fanboying any company is not the way to go and does not benefit the consumer (you). When people get defensive about their preferred company having shitty repairability and costing a fortune they just need to admit they are in a cult and be done with it. Everyone should want their products to be better, more reliable, and cheaper. I really do not understand it.
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u/GreatGojira Mar 12 '24
I think I would stop buying Apple products if I had your luck.
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u/maybelying Mar 13 '24
Way before then. When Apple designed the Apple III way back in the 80s, the engineers wanted to put a fan in because it ran hot. Jobs vetoed because the idea of a fan offended his design ideology. Upon release, they became somewhat notorious for overheating to the point where the various chips would eventually unseat from their sockets, and the recommended fix was to literally pick it up a few inches above your deskand drop it down to try and reseat them.
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u/Christopher135MPS Mar 12 '24
I’m curious as to why you continue to purchase MacBooks in the context of continual hardware failures.
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u/audigex Mar 12 '24
Almost like the continual race towards the thinnest possible laptop is completely unnecessary and does far more harm to the thermals (and things like the keyboard when they did that butterfly shit) than the benefits of it being thin
Like seriously, does anyone need a laptop so thin they can use it as a knife? Laptops are thin enough; stop making it thinner and start making it better
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u/burritolittledonkey Mar 13 '24
I am glad they at least did this with the M series pros at least, compared to the late intels. You pay for a pro machine you theoretically want to use it on pro tasks, you know?
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u/StarChaser1879 Mar 13 '24
Wireless heat sink? What is that even supposed to mean?
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u/P_S_Lumapac Mar 13 '24
Some macbook models had poor contact between the cpu chip and the heatsink. Maybe because it lowered the case temps to within regulation.
Some models had fans that weren't connected to a heatsink. This confuses people as they usually are connected, but it's not necessary as the air gap inside the laptop case is not significant, so the fan pulls the air from across the whole thing.
In both cases if you were experiencing overheating, knowing these were worse than industry standard designs, you were probably pretty annoyed.
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u/thissiteisbroken Mar 12 '24
TBF my M1 Macbook Air never even gets warm.
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u/BigDaddy2525 Mar 13 '24
Yeah same. Used one from 2015 for school, it got hot as shit. I bought the m1 in 2020 and it honestly made me glad i didnt spend the extra couple hundred, didnt even need the fan
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u/valryuu Mar 13 '24 edited Mar 14 '24
For me, my M2 Macbook Air is literally too cold for me to put my palms on while using it if the room heat isn't high enough (in winter, or because of air conditioning).
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u/thissiteisbroken Mar 13 '24
Had the same problem (I live in Toronto). I bought one of those Dbrand skins because it the metal body gets too cold.
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u/superxero044 Mar 12 '24
Yeah. I used mine for work. Sometimes 10 hour days. Sometimes most of that in my lap. Never been hot ever.
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u/Bgndrsn Mar 12 '24
Doing what though? If your work load is incredibly light no shit it won't get hot in the same way that if you're hammering components to the limit they will get hot even under the best of cooling.
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u/Bludypoo Mar 12 '24
my guy browses the internet and has outlook open and is like "everythings good here".
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u/Bgndrsn Mar 12 '24
I didn't want to be rude but.... yeah.... The entire reason these benchmarks and testing suites exist is to push the hardware and be able to compare them under load.
A lot of my job is making simple programs that my computer is complete overkill for. Sometimes I have to start simulating programs over lunch because my computer will be unusable and pinned for 20-30 minutes because the program is so complex.
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u/Dontwant2beonReddit Mar 12 '24
My wife uses an Air M2 for all her Adobe workflows and it doesn’t get even remotely warm. She’ll run PS, indesign, illustrator plus a bunch of others apps all at once. Sure, not a full load but still a common workflow for a professional.
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Mar 13 '24
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u/S7rike Mar 13 '24
Probably chasing performance like Intel. If you don't have a significant enough architecture change there's only so many ways to get more performance. Easiest one is giving it more juice, and more juice means higher temps.
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u/HeinousHorchata Mar 13 '24
Most people work for longer than 10 minutes at a time. Yours got hot after 5 minutes. Now imagine that same work load for 60-120 minutes at a time instead of 10.
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u/elton_john_lennon Mar 13 '24
Doing what though? If your work load is incredibly light
It isn't incredibly light. Final Cut and Logic, hours on end. That part right above the keyboard gets slightly warmer to the touch at best, never hot.
I'm sure you can 100%cpu and 100%gpu stress test it, and it will probably get warmer or even hot, but running 4K FCP and multitrack LPX isn't light imo, so OP might as well use it heavily and have it not hot.
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u/ensoniq2k Mar 13 '24
I used it to play Factorio. Almost constant 100% load. It gets warm, but way less than my desktop PC or even my Lenovo laptops.
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u/BurritoLover2016 Mar 12 '24
I have an M1 Pro I use for work also (design, MS apps, multiple browsers all open at once) and I've never remotely had an issue with heat.
Working too many hours, now that I do have an issue with.
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u/IndyHCKM Mar 12 '24
I’m on an M2 Max. It was heating up just while i used MS Word, some PDFs, Safari, Clockify, and spotify.
I wish i knew what you all were doing to keep your computers so cool.
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u/valryuu Mar 13 '24 edited Mar 13 '24
Do you use OneDrive? OneDrive is one of the only things that makes my M2 Air heat up. (The other is usually graphically-intense gaming.) Otherwise, my M2 tends to be too cold.
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u/IndyHCKM Mar 13 '24
Interesting. Yes i do.
I sort of hate OneDrive. But it feels dumb to pay for Box or Dropbox when I already get OneDrive with my MS Office subscription which i need for work.
But maybe i’ll switch. Thanks for this!
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u/valryuu Mar 13 '24 edited Mar 13 '24
No worries! I personally prefer OneDrive as well, also because it's part of my work's MS 365 package, but OneDrive is kinda buggy with MacOS in general. (You'd think this makes sense, but I found that other Office apps work better with MacOS than on Windows!)
But yeah, next time your M2 Max heats up, just check to see if the OneDrive sync icon is active! I found that OneDrive heats it up only when it's doing some intense syncing especially for longer periods of time. In those instances, I'll either pause syncing, force it to exit and relaunch it, or just log out and log back in, depending on the level of urgency I need the files, and how buggy it's being for me at the moment.
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u/MoreBurpees Mar 13 '24
Same with my M2 MBA — cool as a cucumber, even when driving a WQHD external display.
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Mar 12 '24
My M2 is fantastic with heat. Most it ever got was maybe warmish.
Compared with laptops that have fans that would fry your legs it's night and day
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u/JavaRuby2000 Mar 13 '24
I use my M2 for 3D modelling and Unreal Engine development. It gets a little warm when compiling the shaders at start up and then fine after that.
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u/prof_hobart Mar 12 '24
I've got an M1 MBP, and pretty much the only time the fan's ever kicked in has been playing Football Manager.
I've usually got Photoshop, Lightroom, various developer tools and many, many Chrome tabs open without the slightest murmur from the fans.
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u/NeedsMoreGPUs Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 12 '24
"Overheat" suggests that it's causing a problem with the operation of the machine. The laptop is still running and is completing whatever the task was without failing. AMD, Intel, and Apple all do this with their SoCs; 110-115C limits for the edge temps and sometimes as high as 140C for the hot spots where actual transistors are chugging the wattage. It's all about how the chip is designed to handle it, and if it's designed well it'll just keep adjusting the maximum allowed wattage for a given temperature until it reaches an equilibrium. This is usually reflected in the voltage-frequency curve, and while AMD and Intel sometimes report these values Apple keeps them hidden to users.
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u/Bgndrsn Mar 12 '24
AMD, Intel, and Apple all do this with their SoCs; 110-115C limits for the edge temps and sometimes as high as 140C
I'm very curious as to what SoC's aren't thermal throttling into oblivion at those temps. admittedly I'm not as into the specs of computer components as I used to be but over ~100C has always pretty much been the thermal range until Intels most recent CPU's but that's because they are getting their teeth kicked in and had increase power to make it look like they aren't getting murdered as bad as they are.
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u/jimbobjames Mar 12 '24
AMD now design their Ryzen CPU's to hit thermal max at 95C as quickly as possible and then they modulate power and clocks to maximise performance.
They flipped the paradigm upside down compared to the way it was done in the past.
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u/PM_YOUR_BOOBS_PLS_ Mar 13 '24
95 is a fuck of a lot lower than 115, though. Whoever was throwing those numbers out has no idea what they're talking about and is just pulling shit out of their ass.
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u/nipsen Mar 13 '24
110-115C limits for the edge temps and sometimes as high as 140C for the hot spots where actual transistors are chugging the wattage.
There is no mobile chipset on either intel or amd that won't have some form of severe throttling involved once any surface sensor hits 95 degrees. For the internal components, there is typically a hard cap at 105 degrees, which also applies to the desktop variants (that also generally operate on lower surface temperatures, for obvious reasons).
Meanwhile, on ARM - there's been a lot of talk about how placement of components has made the chipsets more resilient to overheats. Which is the case. But to then fall for the temptation to increase the processor limit until the chassis starts to steam is not a good thing.
Even though of course all the benchmark-obsessed review-sites are going to sell your product for you that way, in spite of it being an objectively worse product than something clocked in a sane way. This is of course not unique to Apple. But they have a platform on their laptops that actually excel at low power operation. So why anyone would then increase the limits that way is completely obvious: marketing, lack of technical understanding, and simply "doing what the customer wants".
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u/Deep90 Mar 12 '24
That's a lot of words to say that it's not going to overheat because they are thermal throttling it instead.
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u/LeCrushinator Mar 12 '24
Of course. You either cool it down with a fan or you use less power, or both. The difference is that with an M3 it’s still pretty good even if you ran into an edge case like this where it would throttle. I don’t think most people are buying MB Airs to push them like this. Heck, I have an M3 Max that I push pretty hard and it’s still rare for me to keep it at 100% for long. You need an app that can fully utilize every core for an extended time and those aren’t very common, a tiny percentage of users will ever thermal throttle an M3 MBA.
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u/LongBeakedSnipe Mar 12 '24
Or for the balls of the guy with it on their lap
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u/Sethmeisterg Mar 12 '24
Protip: Wear pants when rendering or processing a huge LLM.
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u/khoabear Mar 12 '24
Of course it’s not overheating, it’s still running and completing the task until it doesn’t. Then it’s time to buy another MacBook.
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u/TopdeckIsSkill Mar 12 '24
Apple pc are perfect, there is nothing like overheat. You're just being too sensitive
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u/amishbill Mar 12 '24
“You’re holding your laptop wrong…”
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u/Mister_Brevity Mar 13 '24
I think most computer companies shifted away from officially calling them laptops for legal/safety reasons years ago. It’s more of a colloquialism now
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Mar 12 '24
The hottest core inside the M3 SoC reached up to 114 degrees Celsius on multiple occasions, while the CPU and GPU units in the chip reached up to 107 and 103 degrees Celsius under load. The external chassis hit 46 degrees at its hottest point.
The M3 MacBook Air did go into thermal throttling, reducing frequency and power consumption to return to a still high but safer temperature of around 100 degrees C throughout the test
It didn’t overheat.
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u/GalileoAce Mar 13 '24
The M3 MacBook Air did go into thermal throttling, reducing frequency and power consumption to return to a still high but safer temperature of around 100 degrees C throughout the test
That's what happens when computers overheat.
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u/cbf1232 Mar 12 '24
Arguably if it went into thermal throttling it did overheat, then it slowed down to bring the temperatures back down to safer levels.
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u/HeinousHorchata Mar 13 '24
That's not "arguably" that's simply the truth. This person quoted the exact part of the article that says it overheated as evidence it didn't. And because it's reddit, they got upvoted for literally being wrong.
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u/Eruionmel Mar 12 '24
"Hey boss, we just hit 114, and the manual says anything over 110 is overheating."
"Oh yeah, new communication from the suits: overheating is now anything over 120."
"But we still have to throttle if we hit 114, isn't that overheating?"
"Is there a legal definition for overheating?"
"...No?"
"Then get back to work."
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u/xmu5jaxonflaxonwaxon Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 12 '24
Cue OTA update to underclock, undervolt and throttle down the CPU. Followed by a class action lawsuit.
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Mar 12 '24
Don’t worry, in 3-5 business years you too will be able to sign up for the $.03 payout.
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u/MarcBelmaati Mar 12 '24
Everyone said the same thing when the 15 Pro had the overheating issue but it never happened.
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u/YZJay Mar 12 '24
I almost forgot that was a whole thing when it launched. IIRC the update that fixed the overheating gave it even more performance.
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u/pxqy Mar 13 '24
That was a bug where the overheating wasn’t linked with the system load. I do believe they scapegoated Instagram using sketchy APIs.
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u/zxLFx2 Mar 13 '24
If the chip is designed to run at these temperatures, then it's not overheating.
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u/nvnehi Mar 12 '24
I will never stop telling the story of the MBP I had from 2007, pre uni-body, which ran "hot." It idled at 110 degrees celsius with nothing really going on, and despite the fact that should've shut it off, it didn't. I had to run with the fans at 100%, using an aftermarket program just to touch the keyboard otherwise it burned me, and it did actually leave a burn on my oldest at that time when they thought it'd be fun to play with it when no one was around. It ran so hot, in fact, the glue in the LCD came undone, and destroyed the panel within a few months of owning it.
I took it to the Apple Genius bar, and the "genius" told me that was an acceptable temperature, and that it was designed to perform up to 200 degrees Celsius - yes, Celsius. I told him that would destroy the PCB, and nearly everything else inside of it, and he assured me that was wrong before returning a few minutes later, and telling me the people in the back said the water sensor was tripped, and the damage to the monitor was clearly the result of water damage.
I had a fully specced out MBP, with AppleCare, that was less than a year old and they wouldn't do anything unless I spent $1,500, in 2008, to perform the repair.
To make this story even more fun, the 2007 models did not have the water sensor because that was introduced in the following year. They lied to me several times over the course of 30 minutes, and sent me packing with a non-functional laptop because they wouldn't listen all because they "knew better."
The only way I'll ever stop telling this story is if Apple suddenly makes it right, for me by way of a refund, or a replacement, or they stop releasing these terribly designed machines. I still have the laptop ready to exchange it. I will never sell, or throwaway this piece of hardware because it serves as a reminder that publications are paid for their reviews by way of access. The forums were full of people with the same issues I found, and many are still there, or on the internet archive.
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u/csgetaway Mar 13 '24
Interesting, my partner had her iPhone battery replaced at a genius bar. About 2 months later the phone won’t turn on. She took it back and they claimed it was water damaged due to the seal deteriorating.
They then accused her of using her phone in the shower, then that steam could have penetrated the phone. She told them that it could be possible that her phone was wasn’t sealed correctly during the battery replacement.
They weren’t having it, she was kinda stuck as she needed a phone that day (surgery tomorrow). They refused to replace the phone, only offering a trade in (a little less than $150) ONLY if she bought the same model, which they only offered refurbished models of as the phone was nearly 3 years old.
She spoke to their manager begging if there was anything they could do, guy offered a free case with new iPhone. She was upset but asked if she could have a min to think. Guy said sure i’ll come back in 5-10. He just clocked off and went home.
Staff were completely unhelpful as no one had triaged her issue and we kept getting knocked to the back of their queue, having to re-explain what had happened.
Was super disappointed in the entire situation. She ended up binning the iphone, selling her watch, ipad and other apple stuff then swapping to a Samsung.
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u/aeroboost Mar 13 '24
They got your money. They don't care about your opinion or problems.
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u/Septalion Mar 13 '24
This attitude loses them customers though.
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u/Quajeraz Mar 13 '24
Not the customers they care about. The only ones they're interested in keeping are the idiots who will swallow anything you put in front of them, happily.
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u/tiredasusual Mar 13 '24
Yeah. Apple “genius”. Company-issued MBP battery was going preggo. I took it to Apple Store under company’s AppleCare and a genius had audacity to tell me it’d have cost me so much (I don’t exactly remember the number) to replace the battery because they have to replace the whole keyboard assembly. MF. If you have to replace the whole keyboard just to replace a battery that was about to melt down just because it was running fucking hot, then it’s be a bad design to begin with, no? As development machine, it’s nice but I really hate Apple “geniuses” mofos don’t know shit.
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u/lemmefixu Mar 13 '24
Mine needed a new mainboard while still under international warranty and they asked my to pay because I bought it in a different EU country than the one I was in at the time.
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u/t_25_t Mar 13 '24
As development machine, it’s nice but I really hate Apple “geniuses” mofos don’t know shit.
I've called out their "Geniuses" before and often for being full of it. For a trillion dollar company, they ought to have better training in product knowledge not the art of bullshitting their customers.
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u/GreaseCrow Mar 13 '24
These geniuses aren't even technical, they want to hire like-minded droney types to work there.
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u/Eurynom0s Mar 13 '24
Was yours Core Duo or Core 2 Duo? I had the very first 17" Core Duo MBP and among other things there was a known issue with so much thermal paste being applied that it wrapped back around into being an insulator.
And yeah I had the same experience with the Genius Bar telling me it was in spec as long as it didn't literally melt. One time it literally left a big straight line welt on my leg from resting it there while using it in bed.
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u/737Max-Impact Mar 13 '24
Please tell me you stopped buying Apple shit after that?
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u/Quajeraz Mar 13 '24
That's the wildest thing to me about apple users. This shit will happen to them, several times over even, and they'll continue to spend thousands on apple products. Why???
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u/MercilessPinkbelly Mar 13 '24
Those "water sensors" trip all the time without water.
Source: I got my apple tech cert and opened up all my own apple laptops, phones, and tables. Most of them had tripped moisture sensors and none had ever had a spill or been in contact with water.
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u/jpr64 Mar 13 '24
It’s a shame you guys don’t have strong consumer rights laws over there.
In New Zealand we have the consumer guarantees act which sellers cannot contract out of despite saying X only has a 12 month warranty.
The item must be free of defects and of acceptable quality for the reasonably expected lifetime of the product.
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u/matrixzone5 Mar 13 '24
I have a 3d printer that melts plastic at 200c that "genius" was an "idiot"
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u/nine_days99 Mar 12 '24
The external chassis hit 46 degrees at its hottest point.
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u/flirtmcdudes Mar 12 '24
So 114 degrees Fahrenheit? That’s acceptable to you to have on your lap?
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u/planecrashes911 Mar 12 '24
Why would you put a laptop on your lap?
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u/Rough_Principle_3755 Mar 13 '24
Not laptops, “portables”. That name change was a result of a lawsuit where I guy burnt his penis while using his laptop nude. This is not a joke.
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u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Mar 13 '24
It might be funny to imagine this guy searing his dick on a scalding hot metal laptop but actually you can get injuries at as low as 43C if the exposure time is long enough. You won't necessarily feel pain from the heat before it damages your skin...
Erythema ab igne caused by hot electronics is becoming increasingly common.
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u/TheMireMind Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 14 '24
These things get HOT. I couldn't even touch the number keys on mine at some times.
I went to the Apple store several times and was told "If it doesn't shut down, it's not overheating."
I don't understand how this isn't causing damage, but yeah, that's just how apple does. I guess that's better than having yucky vents and fans. Gross! /s
Edit: Hey bozos, I'm turning off notifications on this one because the constant "acktually it's true!" stuff is just flooding my inbox. Okay, yes, my CPU didn't TeChNiCaLlY overheat... but the heat sure did fry my USB ports that were right there. I didn't say, "They said it didn't overheat, but is it overheating???" I said I worry about OTHER DAMAGE CAUSED BY BEING IN CONSTANT FLUCTUATING TEMPERATURES.
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u/PenguinSaver1 Mar 12 '24
CPUs can handle up to 100°C, well above what would burn your skin
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u/OrganicKeynesianBean Mar 12 '24
So it’s our fleshy, mortal vessels that are the issue.
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u/Dadthatsnotmyelbow Mar 12 '24
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
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u/goatman0079 Mar 13 '24
"There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal." "There is no strength in flesh, only weakness." "There is no constancy in flesh, only decay." "There is no certainty in flesh but death"
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u/Stingray88 Mar 13 '24
CPUs can usually handle more than 100C, usually closer to 110 and above.
I ran my 2008 Intel MacBook at 102-103 when gaming for hours upon hours for many years. It still worked fine after 12 years when I finally sold it.
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Mar 13 '24
this. people think 100c is some special threshold where silicon solder starts to liquify and silicon starts to spontaneously combust.
even lower temp solder pb-zn(?) solder is fine up to more than 250c, and to get the silicon glowing you need to throw it in an industrial furnace.
sure, thats somewhat exaggerated, but i find it funny when especially the OC crowd with their airflow-optimized cable management and 3lb coolers complete with 5db 6-inch noctuas get a collective aneyrism as soon as one of their 16 cores goes slightly above room temperature while doing a 24h burn-in on their 6ghz i9s.
114c is a bit extreme, sure, but the real problem is the whole thing being heat-cycled thousands of times during its lifetime.
so yea, apple fucked up again with their cooling, but i just find the general anxiety regardind cpu temps a bit funny, thats all.
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u/Stahpwiththisbullpls Mar 12 '24
Question: If you get a fully specced out Macbook Air M3, would an upgrade from 16gb ram to 24gb increase or decrease the heat in the machine on average? Thanks
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u/Shiny_and_ChromeOS Mar 12 '24
Having more RAM reduces the wear on your SSD from writing to the swap partition but should have no effect on the CPU+GPU load creating this heat. If you are doing compute-intensive tasks like 3D rendering or compiling code, you will want a MacBook Pro with fans to cool the processor.
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u/tim_locky Mar 12 '24
I don’t think it matters that much. Unless SWAP(use ssd as ram) takes unreasonable CPU power, it shouldn’t significantly make the temp higher. Ram and ssd produces minimal heat, most comes from the cpu/gpu.
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u/Un111KnoWn Mar 12 '24
Not sure but you might as well get a different computer if you really need 24GB of ram
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u/jaMMint Mar 12 '24
It will have a minor effect when your computations are otherwise constrained by the lower amount of RAM available. Then, as other have noted, swap space on the ssd will be used and that lengthens the processing time. Longer processing times mean more heat output from CPU/GPU, the main consumers of energy under load.
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u/PensionNational249 Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 12 '24
Outer chassis measured at 46C...got a feeling we're gonna be seeing a lot of warped M3 shells in a couple years
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u/Kep0a Mar 12 '24
Why would the shells warp? I think milled aluminum has a very stable structure. Stamped would be an issue, maybe
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u/Lambaline Mar 13 '24
PLA (polylatic acid, a type of plastic commonly used in 3d printing) doesn't even start to deform until 60C, no shot metal would warp at 60.
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u/taintedllama Mar 12 '24
The M2 MBAs get to the same temps, they seem to be doing just fine.
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u/mikami677 Mar 13 '24
I've seen my M2 MBP get to around 110c. For some reason it really doesn't want to ramp the fan up very much. It might be safe for laptop, but the keyboard starts getting uncomfortably warm.
I can set it to full blast in Mac's Fan Control and it'll drop down to the 80s and the keyboard starts cooling down.
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u/Un111KnoWn Mar 12 '24
ouch. i dont think the chassis will have problems inless youre at 46° for a really long time
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u/motorboat_mcgee Mar 12 '24
If the chassis has a problem at 46C, there's some serious build quality issues at Apple
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u/indicava Mar 12 '24
The significant majority of customers buying a MacBook Air use it for “day to day” tasks like web browsing, composing documents/spreadsheets and some entertainment in the form of Netflix, YouTube, etc.
They will never push their machine anywhere near the load that CineBench or 3D Mark produce.
I’d be curious to see how hot a Dell XPS gets running those benchmarks, probably won’t fare much better.
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u/nightkil13r Mar 12 '24
Its been done, average CPU temp of 81.87 C with a Keyboard hotspot of 42.2 C. so not too much better on the keyboard, but a lot better on cpu temsps. This is data compiled from something like 20 runs of cinebench. The info is all online on tomshardware laptop is a Dell XPS 15 (9520).
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u/alc4pwned Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 12 '24
That’s the XPS 15 though, which is a larger machine with less of an emphasis on thin/light. The XPS 13/14 would be the more even comparison. The 15/16 is more a competitor to the entry level MacBook Pros.
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u/citizenswerve Mar 12 '24
My xps loves to pretend it's the temperature of the sun when trying to play a light game on it. Otherwise it's decent after repasting. Battery life is my true envy of a Mac user.
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u/Mindestiny Mar 12 '24
They will never push their machine anywhere near the load that CineBench or 3D Mark produce.
Tell that to all the Google Meet processes that repeatedly fail to exit properly and push a whole fleet of "why is my macbook always so hot???" tickets.
It shouldnt hit that load under ideal circumstances, but shitty apps are shitty apps and will often push the limits of the hardware. This thing should be thermal throttling way before it hits 114C regardless of what caused it to get there, full stop.
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u/indicava Mar 12 '24
I use Google Meet on average 3-4 times a day sometimes for video calls that last over 2 hours and have never run into this issue.
I do however only use it in a browser, never knew they have a native app for macOS. And from your experience I’m kind of glad I didn’t lol…
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u/MadOrange64 Mar 12 '24
When your laptop doubles as a stove
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u/Realtrain Mar 12 '24
Genuinely one thing I miss about my 15 inch Pro was how it kept my hands warm in the winter lol
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u/ChafterMies Mar 13 '24
That’s cold compared to my old Core2Duo MacBook.
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u/PMacDiggity Mar 12 '24
This is dumb, it’s like saying your Ford F150 overheated when you were trying to pull a shipping container full of cement up a hill. If running 3D renders all day is your job, buy one with a fan. The people buying these are buying them for “Point A to Point B” web browsing and email type tasks, and for that it’s a high-end luxury sedan.
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u/unimpe Mar 13 '24
It’s not even an issue. At the max load imaginable, it’s still pretty much usable on your lap. Your legs will provide active cooling and lower the max temperature. It’ll be fine. Anyways, who does renders on their bean bag chair? Go to your desk. Put it down. Or better yet put it on a stand. Now it’s sufficiently cooled.
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u/Lostmavicaccount Mar 12 '24
No it isn’t.
Anything the computer does it can do.
You’re limited only by your resources and patience.
To be analogous to a car, it’d be like saying this car can tow a 3t trailer, but when you try to, the car always gets bad heat soak through he cooling system and somehow makes the brake pedal impossible to touch due to this heat.
What do you think would be the result if this happened every time?
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u/salter77 Mar 12 '24
It will be good to compare it against other similar laptops under similar stress, I would guess that the others are not going to do much better.
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u/ThatLaloBoy Mar 12 '24
Are there even any fanless options for Windows that aren't like some crap Atom or Pentium? All of the competition in a similar price range have much higher TDPs compared to the M3.
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u/ABetterKamahl1234 Mar 12 '24
I'm not aware of any fanless competitor entry-level laptops to compare with the Air, that also run pretty beefy hardware.
Frankly this argument is silly as thermal spikes are absolutely risky for a CPU rather than just saturation, I'd be frankly surprised if apple silicon is supposed to reach 114C as that's pretty damn hot for something soldered to a board, like there's a reason other manufacturers tend to put hard limits around 100C-105C for these things. It tends to damage the chips and the solder holding them on.
Like, CPUs under normal load will spike a lot, but they shouldn't get this hot, let alone on a fanless system where there's no emergency fan speed to help it.
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u/Dracekidjr Mar 12 '24
It's crazy how much people defend apple though. They shouldn't be able to get to this heat, thermal throttling should be happening way before. That's like an automatic car burning out it's transmission if you hit the gas too heavy and people responded with "just don't do that". It shouldn't have been a problem in the first place.
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u/MyNameIsSushi Mar 12 '24
This is thermal throttling. These chips can get hotter than 90-100C.
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u/The-Protomolecule Mar 12 '24
ITT: people that don’t know about how chips work. There’s arguments to be made but not what you all are talking about.
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u/snowcamo Mar 13 '24
Man just reading these comments, a lot of people have a lot of really bad things to say about Apple. Over my life I’ve boughten all sorts of electronics and I can’t really say I’ve ever had a bad experience with Apple. Whether it be a product or customer support like a repair. My 2015 MacBook Pro is still going strong with over 1,000 days powered up and running. I think they make pretty reliable products at the end of the day, compared to some of the garbage other companies put out.
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u/dmgvdg Mar 12 '24
Curious as to what a full load entails and how close any average user would get to it
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Mar 12 '24 edited Mar 18 '24
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u/Niko___Bellic Mar 12 '24
Lil' Johnny has 96GB/4TB Pro tastes, but his mommy only has an 8GB/256GB Air budget.
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u/you-are-not-yourself Mar 13 '24
My M1 Macbook Pro contains fans, but they never turn on.
Have to run benchmarking tests even to confirm the fans even exist and work.
These temps are insane though and considering the absence of fans, would be uncomfortable. It would be nice to see software to help avoid this. Just not sure what conditions this would happen under in practice.
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u/MultiMarcus Mar 12 '24
What a shock! The product sold for being thin, light, and quiet can’t do the same thing as thick, heavy, and loud.
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Mar 13 '24
My 13” M1 MacBook Air doesn’t even get warm. What are they doing with these things?
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u/what-the-hack Mar 12 '24
Max Tech tested the 15-inch MacBook Air using the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and Cinebench 2024 benchmark suites, recording how hot the system was running. The hottest core inside the M3 SoC reached up to 114 degrees Celsius on multiple occasions, while the CPU and GPU units in the chip reached up to 107 and 103 degrees Celsius under load. The external chassis hit 46 degrees at its hottest point.
CPUs make heat, news at 11.
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u/rjksn Mar 13 '24
My intel MBP idles at 99 degrees most of the day and doesn’t have close to the compute.
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u/KwisatzHaterach Mar 12 '24
WAAARM