alt Hacker NewsI had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling.
My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery.
I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorching hot as they failed to shut down. But that happened to my Mac all the time, too.
The M series though is incredible. I can’t imagine buying a Windows laptop now.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about the graphics.
I had (and still have) a 4k external monitor. Naturally I wanted the MBP to drive the monitor with a resolution that took advantage of all the pixels. Unfortunately with most monitor settings the GPU power consumption would produce enough heat to run the fans even if the rest of the system was completely idle! If I set the output to full HD the GPU would cool down and the fans would turn off. But full HD on a 4k monitor is a waste.
It was very strange. I could drive the monitor at 4k but with the image upside down, and the power consumption would be low. But flip the image right side up and it would run hot and turn on the fans.
It took a couple weeks of fiddling, but I finally found a combination of refresh rate, resolution, image orientation (right side up!), and cabling that let me drive the monitor at high resolution without running the fans. What a pain.
(I used iStat menus to monitor GPU power consumption. At “good” settings it consumed about 5w. At “bad” settings it would consume 17w. At a bad setting you could immediately see the various temperatures go up and the fans spinning up to compensate.)
It was a truly ridiculous idea to put an i9 in any laptop. That generation of i9 is difficult to cool even with liquid cooler systems in big ATX cases.
Apple hardware quality on the laptops was bottom tier during the 2016-2019 "butterfly" era. There's no denying.
The i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC.
Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.