Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Regarding the M2 overheating issue. When this came up last week, I was waiting for Rene’s rebuttal, and it was exactly as I expected - in fact, the way they made it overheat seemed really petty.
You can do exactly the same thing with most Windows laptops as well, by the way. That was one of the key findings for the new 12th gen Intel Core i7/i9 U series processors, their performance can vary greatly, depending on the manufacturer and whether they have decent airflow in their design, heise were seeing up to 30% performance differences from the same chips in different laptops. The early Lenovo Yoga (I think 2nd generation, with the intricate hinge, were also notorious for heavy throttling, because the design was too compromised for thinness to allow it to dissipate the heat effectively.
As Rene said, you can overheat nearly any device, if you try hard enough.
Likewise, the SSD overheating problem. That is a problem every SSD has, when it is used for prolonged writes. In Germany, heise, again, always includes information about how quickly SSDs (especially M.2 sticks) throttle when being used for extended periods of writes and those that throttle down quickly get a bad overall score, even if they can write fast, when cool.
But I thought the USP of the M2 Pro was the cooling? Agreed every device will be a compromise, design vs. performance, but the M2 Pro isn’t a 360 laptop that gets hot and throttles when you use it on your lap.
It does seem that Apple are hitting the same issues with their own chips that every other manufacturer runs into.
Yes and no. An Intel chip in that case would have hit its thermal limits much earlier than the M2, because it generates way more heat (and uses much more power in the process).
You have to remember what they were doing to cause it to overheat, they were running multiple benchmarks, including a Rosetta based benchmark, at the same. That isn’t something anyone will be doing on a daily basis.
The designs are always a compromise. Do you want thin, or do you want something that can run at full power all day long? The MacBook designs will allow prolonged use of all CPU cores, but run up all GPU cores and Neural cores at the same time and keep them pinned, it will generate more heat than the thin design allows.
It is like a car, if you drive aggressively, it will get warmer than cruising. But even driving aggressively, you aren’t pinning the throttle at 100% for prolonged periods of time. Do that and it will overheat (and eventually throw a piston). Race cars have uprated cooling systems, because they spend more time at high revs.
This was, as Rene said, a test specifically skewed to make a click-bait headline. If it was overheating during normal (even high end) workloads, then, yes, we’d be looking at a serious problem, but we are looking at a test specifically designed to overload the system. Again, as Rene said, if you want to find an overheating problem, you can do that with any laptop out there today, but the question is, whether that is a realistic test or not.
I’m not actually sure which article the panel were referring to TBH. One I saw on Twitter was an 8k video export, comparing an M1, M1 Pro and the M2. On the M2 he was observing much higher temps and more throttling as a result, which he says the M1 and M1 Pros did less of.
I think @Leo has been musked by @Lisa 
He said that he wouldn’t announce who was replacing Rene this week, he would keep it as a surprise for next week, then Lisa announced it a day later on Twitter! Does she need to get her tweets approved by the FCC, or Leo, in the future?
I’ll not mention the replacement here, to keep up the suspense for those not on Twitter, but it will certainly be interesting.
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I haven’t seen that one, but the M2 has a dedicated video encrypting/decrypting unit, which the M1 doesn’t have, and the M1 Pro has that unit and a bigger case with professional cooling system, so that might explain why the M2 MBP 13" runs hotter.
Makes sense. The results of the test I saw was M1, M2 then M1 Pro, although they were surprised how close the M1 and M2 were (same chassis).
It will be interesting to see how the M2 MBA performs.
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Well, Lisa is the boss, so…
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I’m sure there are 6 colourful reasons why it won’t really be any surprise, I don’t think.
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I have only today finished the episode.
Thank you Rene for being a great voice on this show. I am not a Mac or Apple person, but your perspective and personality and demeanor helped bring me in. I learned a lot about Apple the company from you and, as I got to know you at a distance, came to really enjoy the point of view you shared with us each week. Jason Snell has some big shoes to fill.
Be well, sir, and thank you for sharing yourself with us for 10 years.
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