Warm up your MacBook (2019)

Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.

After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.

The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.

For those without spacebar heating?

"This will start 6 threads that each peg your CPU... "

they're doing what to my CPU????

How big is the risk of condensation when you bring a cold laptop inside?

All their spec sheets say they support up to x% _non-condensing_ humidity, which I’m guessing is about the dew point?

I still use a 2019 MacBook Pro, in 2026 I found the best way to warm it up was to use it daily and not blow the dust out of it for 7 years. After I opened it up and did that it's running a lot cooler.

Modern Macbooks have this issue, the other day I realised I had never heard the fans of it run, so I was wondering if they actually worked.

Found a web based benchmark tool that will run your CPU and GPU at 100% each. While temperatures went up to 90 degrees science... still no fans. Ended up installing a different utility to manually set the fan speed to confirm they worked.

I don't know what they did but it's good.

Looking forward to the follow up: How to Quickly Cool Down Your MacBook

For years at work I've been just using Cinebench as a hand warmer on various Macbooks.

Speaking of cold weather and warming up computers... I've had my fair share of long bicycle commutes during cold winters and I always wondered whether booting up the laptop right after arriving has any effect on the long-term reliability? Like, are there any components which suffer from being activated when they're really cold?

Multithreaded:

  seq 1 20 | xargs -Iqq -n1 -P0 yes >/dev/null

Slightly quicker way to do this is opening Microsoft Teams.

I just need to build our monorepo

Does this work with M series ? M series is much colder and my fingers hurt <sob>

I'm from California... What is this "cold" you speak of?

I think my last Macbook was Wisconsin-locale instead of California. Closing the lid and putting it to sleep actually caused it to heat up (until the battery died).

Alternatively, you could try compiling an Xcode project. That should do the trick as well.

Or you could get a laptop that doesn't have an metal shell, like a thinkpad.

> openssl speed

npm install

  while true; do openssl speed ecdsap384 -multi 2; done

yes only writes y, not the whole word yes

Won't work on M processors, (un)fortunately.

In homeoffice I always work in the nude and the cold metal of my macbook pro hurts my thighs…

Or something useful, save space, compressing some talk or edu video, just 6 fps is usually enough for slides or code, opus audio can go as low as 32k and still be decent compared to source quality, expect 10-15x size reduction

  ffmpeg -hide_banner -y -i in.mp4 \
    -vf "fps=6,format=yuv420p,scale=960:-2:flags=lanczos" \
    -c:v libx265 -tag:v hvc1 -crf 32 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset fast \
    -c:a libopus -b:a 82K -application 2048 \
    -c:s mov_text \
    out.mp4

  -x265-params "keyint=800:min-keyint=24:scenecut=20:ref=8:bframes=16:b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=80:rd=4:subme=5:deblock=1,1:aq-mode=3:aq-strength=0.4:psy-rd=0.4:psy-rdoq=1.0:qcomp=0.7:qg-size=64:rect=1:amp=1:strong-intra-smoothing=1:limit-modes=1:limit-tu=4:rdpenalty=2:tu-intra-depth=4:tu-inter-depth=4:me=star:no-allow-non-conformance=1" \

Now do the opposite for the summer! Show me a command line that cools down the machine! ;)

Needs 2019 in title, this is Intel MacBooks not Apple Silicon.

Another (more useful) option is to render an animation in Blender, or run a local LLM.

Honestly i prefer my macbook frosty

This is now running Cyberpunk or an LLM locally

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To be fair, the fundamental problem here is the author's resting of wrists to type.

This applies to any computer, Apple, Windows or Linux. Desktop or laptop.

If your typing on any computer is dependent on you resting your wrists whilst typing then it is indicative of poor typing technique and/or posture.

And ironically the very thing you think you're trying to prevent by resting your wrists (carpel tunnel and/or strain) is likely to be aggravated by over-reliance on wrist wrests due to the added pressure on the wrist.