Hacker News Reader

Comment by some_account | Hacker News Reader

Apple can't make good keyboards anymore, are they even failing with their thermal paste now?

I really don't feel these machines are professional level.

It's not just Apple, the thermal paste between the die and the heat spreader on newer Intel CPUs isn't getting good reviews either. Replacing the paste under the heat spreader is a lot more tricky though, and requires special tools.

Why neither Apple nor Intel is opting for better thermal compound is amazing. Tests continue to CPU temperatures drop 10+ degrees (C) just by replacing the thermal compound. Even if they opted to get the very best thermal compound, I can't see it eat into the profit of either companies.

I recently built a new gaming PC, and it was so bad that I couldn't even run stock speeds without thermal throttling, let alone any overclocks. A swift delid and some new TIM and I had shaved 25c off the stock temps while no longer throttling. Woe betide any average user who isn't willing to void their warranty on a £500 part to get the it to run as it should, enjoy that RMA process.

Half the issue is the shit TIM they use, the other half is the way they attach the IHS to the CPU. It's attached with a huge amount of sealant around the edges of the IHS and simply removing it will gain you a good 10c improvement because you're moving the IHS a few mm closer to the dye, combine it with good TIM and you're golden, replace it with some liquid metal TIM and you're off to the OC races.

I could maybe forgive them if this was an isolated incident on one generation of chips but this has been the case for about 4 years now.

It may not hurt their margins much to use more expensive thermal compound, but it definitely won't help them in any meaningful way. These products are optimized for real-world bursty workloads that basically never hit a serious thermal limit that better paste could help with. Even on the desktop chips, delidding and replacing the thermal compound provides no benefit until you're pretty far into overclocking territory.

But the price for this machine is crazy, and it doesn't support a use case where you actually use the i9 cpu for long periods of time... Why do you need it then? To open the browser a few milliseconds faster?

It's not a professional machine if it's throttling heavily under load so you can't use its resources....it boggles my mind that it's even allowed to sell something like this.

It's like selling a supercar which can't go at top speed for more than 20 seconds, then it throttles speed to 60 mph.

Not disagreeing with you, but as it happens the Bugatti Veyron can't do the full top speed for very long (Michelin won't guarantee the tires to run above 250 mph for more than 15 minutes.).

It will run out of gas way before then.

They'd avoid bad press like this story though

The problem is actually that the silicone adhesive they use to attach the IHS is too thick. The act of shaving the adhesive down is what really produces thermal improvements.

Delidding, shaving the adhesive, and replacing with fresh TIM produces nearly as good a result as using LM (without the risks of LM). And using LM without shaving the adhesive only produces a few degrees of improvement.

The first edition MacBook Pro had widespread issues with thermal paste back in 2006 that led to random shutdowns and led to a recall to re-apply new paste (I had one and had to get the paste re-applied).

Future generations of MBPs didn’t have the same problems.

The point is: shit happens with any product, the question is will you be supported well? Apple’s history here has generally been good but occasionally they’ve made major blunders (eg. the iBook motherboards about 17-18 years ago).

Their size leads to amplification of issues beyond reasonable response. The keyboard issues for example are way overblown. We have thousands of MBPs and hundreds of Touchbar MBPs at our company and there hasn’t been a widespread keyboard failures.

>Their size leads to amplification of issues beyond reasonable response.

This is a ridiculous sentiment IMO.

> Their size leads to amplification of issues beyond reasonable response. The keyboard issues for example are way overblown.

I have a MacBook pro next to me that is on its fourth keyboard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com