Comment by AKSF_Ackermann
1 day ago
Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.
The Macs all throttle with heavy workload that raises the temps no matter what you do. The efficiency (and battery life) comes from the hardware being configured to do certain things very efficiently, like video decoding.
Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS
As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.
> but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones
It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.
The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.