M1Pro Macbook Pro is so amazing

[chenbaozhen]

wow.
I just got my M1Pro Macbook Pro for two weeks.
I initially dislike it as it is thicker and heavier than my MBP15 2019.
Weight: 4.75 lbs compared to 4lbs.

But I then really got amazed by how awesome it is.
I have two 4k external monitors which are drawing a lot of power for my 8core i9 MBP15 2019 (mid of 2019, not 16inch one at end of 2019).
The keyboard became very hot that I could bare use.
When I do zoom meetings, the CPU will stall to protect from overheating.
I bought two external fans(at home and at work) from amazon to cool the laptop down so I can still use it.

But with this new M1Pro MBP 16, I never got the chance to use the external fans.
Even the internal fans almost never kicked in for all zoom meetings, my two 4k monitors.
I was able to put away those external fans.
And I have a cool keyboard that I can comfortably use.

Wow it is so amazing.
Hope apple can make it thiner and lighter though.

 

[Darkseth]

Hope apple can make it thiner and lighter though.

They can, that's what they did in 2016.
What happened? Too much heat, too weak cooling.

It's either this silent and cool, or thinner.

So: I hope, they don't make it thinner and lighter, because what Apple did here, was the right direction. This is the (one of the main) reason it's this much cooler and more silent than any of the competition.
If you want thin and light --> Macbook Air M1, or Macbook Pro M1. Or wait for the M2 entry level devices.

 

[spiderman0616]

They can, that's what they did in 2016.
What happened? Too much heat, too weak cooling.

It's either this silent and cool, or thinner.

So: I hope, they don't make it thinner and lighter, because what Apple did here, was the right direction. This is the (one of the main) reason it's this much cooler and more silent than any of the competition.
If you want thin and light --> Macbook Air M1, or Macbook Pro M1. Or wait for the M2 entry level devices.

I tend to agree here. The MBP’s are finally deserving of the “P” again, and if they go thinner and lighter eventually, it should never sacrifice any of the benefits of Apple Silicon. And it should never include those butterfly switches. Burn those with fire and never speak of them again.

All that being said: OP—M1 has been such a great revival of the Mac. I just have the Air for now, but am similarly impressed by the performance even in the base model. Always happy to see people loving the transition as much as I am.

 

[UBS28]

Indeed, let the MBP be THICC. It stays cool and silent like this.

If you want thinness, there is the M1 MBA. And the M1 MBA actually thermal throttles despite having a weaker M1 chip.

 

[iPadified]

I tend to agree here. The MBP’s are finally deserving of the “P” again, and if they go thinner and lighter eventually, it should never sacrifice any of the benefits of Apple Silicon. And it should never include those butterfly switches. Burn those with fire and never speak of them again.

All that being said: OP—M1 has been such a great revival of the Mac. I just have the Air for now, but am similarly impressed by the performance even in the base model. Always happy to see people loving the transition as much as I am.

The keyboard does not feel robust despite the new mechanism. The new keyboard does not feel as good as the external keyboard of the iMac 2020.

I love the silence of the new MBP when starting some heavy jobs. M1 Pro/Max would likely have stayed quite cool in the 2016 case as well.

 

[exoticSpice]

M1 Pro/Max would likely have stayed quite cool in the 2016 case as well.

The M1 Max use 100watts plus when under full load. The 2016 case could barely handle a quad core intel. Thats why Apple made the 2019 16" MBP thicker and more beefier cooling.

Wow it is so amazing.
Hope apple can make it thiner and lighter though.

The reason its cool and quiet is because of the thicker design.

 

[nquinn]

The M1 Max use 100watts plus when under full load. The 2016 case could barely handle a quad core intel. Thats why Apple made the 2019 16" MBP thicker and more beefier cooling.

The reason its cool and quiet is because of the thicker design.

It's one part of the reason. Just moving down to 5nm helped a lot too. These machines run under light/moderate loads at like 10-15w all day.

 

[iPadified]

The M1 Max use 100watts plus when under full load. The 2016 case could barely handle a quad core intel. Thats why Apple made the 2019 16" MBP thicker and more beefier cooling.

The reason its cool and quiet is because of the thicker design.

The new MBP is not amazingly thicker than the old one so I doubt that is the reason. Under full load like Metal rendering in Blender, the M1 Pro does not noticeably heat up and it is silent. Not compatible with 100W power draw in the M1 Pro chip.

 

[UBS28]

It's one part of the reason. Just moving down to 5nm helped a lot too. These machines run under light/moderate loads at like 10-15w all day.

The old MBP were so bad, you had companies like Razer who can fit an AMD cpu + RTX 3080 in the same size as the 13" MBP.

The cooling systems of the old MBP's cannot be compared to the new MBP's, which has been completely redesigned.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

It's such a huge upgrade coming from the 16" 2019" not just in terms of fans sound connected to external monitor due to the AMD dGPU issues but also the way we can navigate through the UI and everything when using the Intel UHD Graphics...

It's a night and day difference! Definitely know what you mean, I initially upgraded from the i9 16" to the M1 MacBook Air base model just for the sake of Teams and it was already a huge difference.

Love the amount of power I'm packing on the 14"

 

[darngooddesign]

I'm thrilled with my new 16" M1-Pro.

I'm coming from a 2014 13" and the new one doesn't feel much heavier; I much prefer the flat top design because the old tapered design, which has the illusion of thinness, makes them look fatter to me. Most importantly, I love the quiet. When doing Lego renderings the fans spin around 2000 rpm, but they are still quiet enough to just be background noise. I forgot how loud and obnoxious my old MBP was until I forced the new fans to max speed.

 

[MajorFubar]

Hope apple can make it thiner and lighter though.

I hope they leave it as it is so it continues to put function over form. Took them five years to come to their senses.

 

[darngooddesign]

I hope they leave it as it is so it continues to put function over form. Took them five years to come to their senses.

I'll take a thinner and lighter design if it doesn't compromise performance or cooling. Otherwise, the upcoming redesigned MBA satisfies the thin and light requirement.

 

[chenbaozhen]

From what I understood, the low power come from the following:
1. Silicon Scaling: moving to 5nm.
2. Two low power cores & 8 high performance core: In majority of time, the two low power core did almost all the job in my use case. The high performance core only kicked in occasionally.
I can echo that the power consumption is ~10W to 15W all day, as pointed out by @nquinn above.
(I have iStatMenu installed to observe those metrics.)
For the thick design, it might help with the thermal dissipation but given it is only ~10 to 15W, there are not much power to dissipate.
But for sure if your use case is CPU intensive.

 

[darngooddesign]

For the thick design, it might help with the thermal dissipation but given it is only ~10 to 15W, there are not much power to dissipate.
But for sure if your use case is CPU intensive.

The point of the Pros is for CPU intensive tasks. If you aren't doing that then the designed-to-be-thinner MacBooks are for you. I can make my fans spin up to ~2000K when rendering; while the same render the current 13" M1BP, with its tapered design and less internal space for cooling, would double the fan speeds and the Air just throttled quickly.

 

[Mr. Jenkins]

I got a 16" MBP. I have no regrets or complaints. I love it.

 

[mr_roboto]

Indeed, let the MBP be THICC. It stays cool and silent like this.

The M1 Max use 100watts plus when under full load. The 2016 case could barely handle a quad core intel. Thats why Apple made the 2019 16" MBP thicker and more beefier cooling.

The reason its cool and quiet is because of the thicker design.

The old MBP were so bad, you had companies like Razer who can fit an AMD cpu + RTX 3080 in the same size as the 13" MBP.

The cooling systems of the old MBP's cannot be compared to the new MBP's, which has been completely redesigned.

To all this, I say: No, not really. Take a look at some iFixit teardown photos instead of blindly trusting what you read on the internet.

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095007/comparison_15inch2019-1.jpg

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095014/comparison_16inch2021-1.jpg

These are images of the 2019 Intel 16" and 2021 M1 16" (yes I know the URL says 15" 2019, they flubbed that, there was no 15" model in 2019, only 16"). Open both images in two browser tabs so you can flip between them rapidly to compare the sizes and shapes of the internal cooling components. (This is a reasonably valid technique because the edge-to-edge dimensions are basically the same - 2019 Intel was 35.79cm x 24.59cm while the 2021 M1 is 35.57cm x 24.81cm.)

The airflow paths are basically the same. The fan designs are basically the same. The exhaust is basically the same. The heatpipe is basically the same. Everything's been tweaked, of course, and some of the dimensions are slightly different, but this is not a complete redesign on new principles. Nor is any of it massively larger for M1.

The reason M1 is so much cooler and quieter than Intel is the silicon. Apple's chip design is able to handle lots of common loads at a fraction the power of the old Intel CPU + AMD GPU combo, while also being faster.

For example, let's talk about single-threaded loads. On modern Intel chips, if you use 100% of a single CPU core, that core can use 30 watts - or more. That's how Intel gets single-thread performance, they just throw lots of watts at it. Their cores are extremely inefficient at the high end of their clock speed range.

This means Intel MBPs often ramp their fans up to annoying speeds under 1 or 2 core loads. On M1 chips, 100% of a single core is just 5 watts. A 16" M1 often doesn't even bother turning the fans on for a 1-2 core load.

Yes, in theory, if you load all the CPU cores and all the GPU cores to the maximum extent possible, you can make a M1 Max hit over 90 watts, which is a figure comparable to the combined sustained power of the Intel CPU and AMD GPU in the old Intel MBPs. If you do that, the M1 fans will probably be quite loud. But the key difference is that it's so much harder to naturally hit 90+ watts on M1 Max. You have to actually load all CPU and GPU cores to 100% to do it, whereas before, you needed much less than 100%.

 

[darngooddesign]

To all this, I say: No, not really. Take a look at some iFixit teardown photos instead of blindly trusting what you read on the internet.

Well they both have fans so the cooling system, the internal space/volume of air they move, and the vent sizes must be identical

 

[exoticSpice]

To all this, I say: No, not really. Take a look at some iFixit teardown photos instead of blindly trusting what you read on the internet.

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095007/comparison_15inch2019-1.jpg

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095014/comparison_16inch2021-1.jpg

These are images of the 2019 Intel 16" and 2021 M1 16" (yes I know the URL says 15" 2019, they flubbed that, there was no 15" model in 2019, only 16"). Open both images in two browser tabs so you can flip between them rapidly to compare the sizes and shapes of the internal cooling components. (This is a reasonably valid technique because the edge-to-edge dimensions are basically the same - 2019 Intel was 35.79cm x 24.59cm while the 2021 M1 is 35.57cm x 24.81cm.)

The airflow paths are basically the same. The fan designs are basically the same. The exhaust is basically the same. The heatpipe is basically the same. Everything's been tweaked, of course, and some of the dimensions are slightly different, but this is not a complete redesign on new principles. Nor is any of it massively larger for M1.

The reason M1 is so much cooler and quieter than Intel is the silicon. Apple's chip design is able to handle lots of common loads at a fraction the power of the old Intel CPU + AMD GPU combo, while also being faster.

For example, let's talk about single-threaded loads. On modern Intel chips, if you use 100% of a single CPU core, that core can use 30 watts - or more. That's how Intel gets single-thread performance, they just throw lots of watts at it. Their cores are extremely inefficient at the high end of their clock speed range.

This means Intel MBPs often ramp their fans up to annoying speeds under 1 or 2 core loads. On M1 chips, 100% of a single core is just 5 watts. A 16" M1 often doesn't even bother turning the fans on for a 1-2 core load.

Yes, in theory, if you load all the CPU cores and all the GPU cores to the maximum extent possible, you can make a M1 Max hit over 90 watts, which is a figure comparable to the combined sustained power of the Intel CPU and AMD GPU in the old Intel MBPs. If you do that, the M1 fans will probably be quite loud. But the key difference is that it's so much harder to naturally hit 90+ watts on M1 Max. You have to actually load all CPU and GPU cores to 100% to do it, whereas before, you needed much less than 100%.

The airflow is different in the 2021 Macbook Pro's

 

[mr_roboto]

The airflow is different in the 2021 Macbook Pro's

The last time Apple made a major change to airflow path in 15"/16" machines was with the first generation Retina MBP 15" in 2012. Everything since has been refinement.

Because Apple does keep improving, I'm sure the 2021 models have better flow than the 2019 if fan speed is held constant. But what I'm trying to get across is that the cooling system is not the real story. M1 is actually much more efficient, so much so that under many loads which require high airflow on Intel machines, M1 needs zero airflow (fans are completely turned off).

 

[nquinn]

The old MBP were so bad, you had companies like Razer who can fit an AMD cpu + RTX 3080 in the same size as the 13" MBP.

The cooling systems of the old MBP's cannot be compared to the new MBP's, which has been completely redesigned.

One of the reasons I actually went with the M1 Max was because I figured even if I barely use the GPU, I'd have a larger heatsink on it and more cooling to keep the unit super cool/quiet all the time in everyday usage.

 

[MajorFubar]

I'll take a thinner and lighter design if it doesn't compromise performance or cooling. Otherwise, the upcoming redesigned MBA satisfies the thin and light requirement.

It's about jugging the variables:

[1] - Powerful, cool-running laptops are not going to be as thin-and-light as [2] or [3] (MBP 14/16)
[2] - Cool-running, thin-and-light laptops are not going to be as powerful as [1] or [3] (MBA)
[3] - Thin-and-light, powerful laptops are not going to be as cool-running as [1] or [2] (any recent MPB with an Intel in it)

There will always be market sectors which prefer the unique qualities of [1] or [2].
In the Mac world, [3] is in the process of being made obsolete. Thankfully.

 

[chengengaun]

To all this, I say: No, not really. Take a look at some iFixit teardown photos instead of blindly trusting what you read on the internet.

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095007/comparison_15inch2019-1.jpg

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2021/10/29095014/comparison_16inch2021-1.jpg

These are images of the 2019 Intel 16" and 2021 M1 16" (yes I know the URL says 15" 2019, they flubbed that, there was no 15" model in 2019, only 16"). Open both images in two browser tabs so you can flip between them rapidly to compare the sizes and shapes of the internal cooling components. (This is a reasonably valid technique because the edge-to-edge dimensions are basically the same - 2019 Intel was 35.79cm x 24.59cm while the 2021 M1 is 35.57cm x 24.81cm.)

Actually, there is a 2019 15” MBP, which Apple released in July if I remember correctly. The image above was indeed from the 15”; the 16” fans had metal ‘cover’.

https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/yvxkmgnPVDVXNi4A.medium

That said, it doesn’t negate what you have explained - the thermal design between the MacBooks are not that different across the generations.

p/s: That reminds me of Dave2D’s review of the 2019 15”:

 

[exoticSpice]

The last time Apple made a major change to airflow path in 15"/16" machines was with the first generation Retina MBP 15" in 2012. Everything since has been refinement.

Because Apple does keep improving, I'm sure the 2021 models have better flow than the 2019 if fan speed is held constant. But what I'm trying to get across is that the cooling system is not the real story. M1 is actually much more efficient, so much so that under many loads which require high airflow on Intel machines, M1 needs zero airflow (fans are completely turned off).

2016 MBP airfow:

2021 MBP airflow:

Looks like a different airflow structure to me