In a new revelation that brings back memories of Apple throttling older iPhone models to prolong battery life, the company is now found to have done the same on the top-end 2018 MacBook Pro but for a different reason, to prevent the laptop getting overheated. Also, of course, the speed throttling has a negative impact on the performance as well.
Credit for the above discovery goes to Dave Lee who commands a lot of respect with his no-nonsense reviews on YouTube. As Lee found out with his top-of-the-line MacBook equipped with the 6-core 8th gen Core i9 chip rated at 2.9 GHz processor, the clock speed begins to degrade after even just a few minutes of processor intensive work.
Much to Lee’s surprise, the CPU isn’t able to make the most of the Turbo Boost feature it comes with when subjected to some intense work. Rather, the CPU is found to be degraded when pushed to the limits, to the extent that it isn’t even able to hold on to its base clock speed. Lee said he encountered the issue after doing some video editing job using Adobe Premiere Pro.
Interestingly, Lee also took to some unconventional means to drive home the point, that of the MacBook Pro unable to manage the heat generated by the Core i9 chip. That included putting the laptop in a freezer so that the native thermals get some external support. And much to surprise, the laptop did spring back to life, with performance getting a sharp boost. Lee said the rendering time dropped down to 27 mins from the previous 40 mins when the laptop is in the freezer.
Apple had only recently launched the new 2108 MacBook Pro lineup of a laptop with the top model getting 32 gigs of memory along with the Intel Core i9 chip. The company also wasted no efforts to highlight the device being the ultimate for hard-core professionals who are into some serious development tasks. However, with the laptop struggling to even hold on to the base clock speed, it speaks volumes of Apple engineer’s inefficiency in managing all the power on tap.
Also, with the device having just been released, it remains to be seen how Apple responds to the situation.
