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M2 MacBook Air throttling is being vastly over-exaggerated
- Thread starter mattyjoe
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No it is not. Chips shouldn’t be thermal throttling in the first place.
A fan or better passive cooling in the MBA would be a much better computer.
Apple increased the price of the M2 MBA that much, that these type of limitations don’t make sense anymore and rather spend a bit more for a proper computer like the 14” MBP.
If it was a $999 M2 MBA (with fast SSD), I would have no problem with this. But not for $1500+.
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If we call it Turbo Boost is it OK then?
It really can't. At least not under heavy load.
At what load? M1 Max can consume up to 30W CPU + 60W GPU so highly doubtful any passive cooling can dissipate 90W of heat.
The 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro is basically a fanless laptop most of the time. The fans stays off even under heavy loads. That is a good passive cooling implemented by Apple.
There is no thermal throttling happening as it should be.
Yes it can. The fans are still off when doing 4K video editing.
Only when you play games like World of Warcraft at full maxed out settings is when you hear the fans finally spin up.
It is just as ridiculous to claim that a MBA can only be used for light tasks as it is to claim that it useless because it throttles. Both are extreme takes that ignore the broad abilities of the MBA.
You can use the MBA to do pretty much any task. For most tasks, it will run cool and fast. If you need to do video editing, 3D modeling, or games, it will do those too. It may not be as fast as a MBP for those tasks. After a while, it may reach its thermal limits and slow down. It will continue to do those tasks, it just won’t be as fast as a MBP while doing them. If you need to do those kinds of tasks every day, you would probably be better off getting a MBP. If you only do those tasks occasionally then the minor slowing probably won’t matter and the MBA would still work for you.
this is not a failure of the MBA. There is always a trade off between portability and power. The MBA was designed to be more portable at the cost of a sacrifice a small amount of power in extreme cases. That is a trade off that many people are happy to make.
If you want Apple to add a fan so you can get that extra power in those specialized tasks, they already did that in the M2 13” MBP. For nearly the same price you get a laptop in a similar size and same guts but with a fan. The downside is that it is not as portable as the MBA. It is on the other side of that portability vs power trade off. If that is what you want, it is right there. If not, you can choose the Air. Trying to insist on both maximum portability and maximum power is just ignoring the physics. Adding a fan to The MBA would make it less portable and more like the MBP would be redundant.
What nonsense. Stop offering thoughts.
Something most windows users have owned for years lol. My wifes blade 15 lives on oneIf you really need to do heavy work on a MBA,
problem solved
Must say I use air m2 a lot and no real issues. Surprised after reading all these post 😂
You definitely want them to throttle. This is something all chips do as a safety measure. In the old days the chips just melted.
Not expecting any throttling isn't realistic.
Same! I've written many times before all the stuff I did on mine since getting it. It's a mini-powerhouse. I ran sims in Houdini on it for hours, I edited and rendered 4k video in Final Cut, worked with music in Logic (20 tracks just fine! I didn't even bother doing more because I got bored adding them), Animating and rendering in Blender, tons of work in Xcode, and playing video games.
This thing handled it all like a champ.
No you don’t want it to happen. You want a chassis that is appropriately designed for the chip. But I know that Apple customers find it normal as Apple has a long history of designing computers that are not appropriate for the chip inside.
And not all chips are thermal throttling. Apple Silicon computers (except for the MBA and the 14 MBP with the 32-core GPU) are not thermal throttling. The fans don’t even turn on some Apple Silicon models.
That is what is attractive about Apple Silicon computers in general, they stay silent and cool while delivering all that power. Laptops with a RTX 3080 sound like jet engines by comparison and are super hot. If you let computers like the 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro thermal throttle (and thus being hot and loud like PC’s), what’s the point then?
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Look. The MBA is obviously not for you. You want max performance at all times and won’t accept anything less even to make the device more portable. That’s fine. Apple makes several computers that should serve your needs.
Could you, in turn, understand that some of us also value portability and are willing to accept a reasonable reduction in performance during some operations as a trade off for that portability. As the MBA remains cool and fast in most operations that we would want to do and only hits its limits during extended sessions of tasks that most of us don’t do frequently, that is an acceptable and minor inconvenience. I would not want the added bulk and noise of a fan. The extra performance is not worth it to me.
If I wanted a MBA with a fan, I could get the 13” MBP. That is essentially what that is but it is not what I want.
Do you understand that some of us value the properties of a computer differently than you do and would make different choices?
Many of us are experts in our field and have been in them for decades, which is why we’re telling you throttling is normal. This has literally nothing to do with apple all processors will throttle.
So are you saying that thin and light laptops shouldn't exist and that all chassis should be desktop or larger form factor and come with exotic or liquid cooling systems to squeeze every last drop of performance from the chip without it ever getting hot enough to throttle?
EDIT: Fans not ever coming on with the 14" and 16" models? I call BS.
You are right to call BS. I have a 16" M1 Max and have heard them plenty. Moderate loads up to about 20 watts don't usually spin the fans, but as power gets up towards 30W they'll turn on. All-core CPU loads and most GPU loads will definitely spin the fans.
They aren't always audible, mind you. The 16" fans are nearly silent at 1500 to 2000 RPM (1500 being the minimum speed if turned on), and you do have to push the machine hard to get them above that range. If you want to know for sure when the fans are on, you need to install a monitoring tool like I did (I'm using https://github.com/exelban/stats).
The goals and and principles of consumer laptop design are very different from the goals and principles of workstation laptop or desktop design.
You seem to stuck in the latter mindset, which makes it hard for you to "get" the MacBook Air.
See, the MacBook Air is not supposed to be professional video editing workstation. It's designed to provide unprecedented power in bursty workloads and top-of-the-class efficiency the rest of the time, while still being able to stay reasonably fast under full load.
Both the M1 and M2 are great machines for me as a software developer, because they compile code blazingly fast, they run DB migrations fast and they stay cool and sip power the rest of the time, when I'm essentially writing text in a glorified text editor.
They're great machines for photographers who want their filters, masks and corrections to apply as fast as possible, but they also spend a lot of time just looking at the photo and thinking.
They're great machines for writers, journalists, accountants, lawyers and many more who all enjoy seeing their progress bars fly from zero to 100 % instead of waiting, but they almost never hit the CPU with many minutes of 100 % load.
If you, for some reason, want your computer to stay at its fastest clock speed all the time, then by all means get one, there are laptops that can do that (not many actually), and stop complaining about a machine that's clearly not meant for you.
AMD demoed their 8c/16t mobile chips at CES 2020 IIRC, way before any M1 product was released & the first products were launched mid 2020 which again is about 2 quarters before the M1. Neither Intel nor AMD were competing with M1 at the time & even now with a slight node disadvantage they're generally good enough for what they offer!
2.7 pounds isn't light. Thinkpad X1 Nano Gen 2 is 2.14 pounds and includes a fan.