I have a hard time feeling I was the only one conspiratorial enough to suggest something like that.
No, I don't see how that's more than a conspiracy theory.
I am using an M2 Air right now and it has 2-3x better performance than my older i7 Thinkpad while being completely silent and running 3x longer on battery. Apple didn't have the need to pull any tricks.
I am not saying the m1 wasn't amazing (I have one, I like it). I am saying that apple had subpar cooling solutions for several years before the m1. They had ample time to fix it, yet the last intel MacBook was probably the worst one.
If it was intentional I'd expect Apple to have a more expensive Pro Max Ultra tier with actually good cooling, and then a year later they can pretend they invented a new paradigm of CPU cooling that works even in the cheaper models. There's no upside for them if cooling just sucks in general, and their switch to a more energy efficient architecture is clearly motivated by this problem.
Since they were already on the road to switching to Apple Silicon, it may have not been worthwhile to redesign the cases for the Intel machines to compensate.
It was spectacularly bad by design. This would not have been sufficient even if intel had delivered.
The pro models were better but still awful. It wasn't a matter of fitting things in. It was by design.
I have apple products. I like them. But even being charitable I can't come to any other conclusion that they just didn't care to deliver a good product.
The only reason the thermal solutions were indefensibly bad was because Intel's roadmap had nowhere to go but to add more watts and heat. The 2016 MacBook Pro 15" had a perfectly adequate thermal solution for its hardware. Still, in a few short years, Intel's newer processors pushed the design to its thermal limits when they should have been delivering more performance within the same heat and power constraints. Apple had to relent and make the product thicker and add more wattage for the 16" MacBook Pro (Intel).
It's not like Apple massively upgraded the M1 thermal solution and took a victory lap on an artificially unfair playing field. Apple dropped their chips into the same or worse thermal designs and still outperformed Intel. On some benchmarks, the 2020 M1 MacBook Air with no fan beats the 96W 2019 Intel 16" MacBook Pro. [1] For Intel, it was downright embarrassing.
We can't blame Apple for designing an inadequate thermal solution for the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro 15" when it was Intel's own product line that couldn't deliver improved performance without consuming more watts.
Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster over time, not bigger and hotter.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macbook-air-with-m1-chip-beat...
The conspiracy theory is that that used a thermal solution that was enough for the m1 on the intel chips that throttled while browsing the web.
Here’s an article: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/26/tested-thermal-th...
> Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro chassis was designed at the latest, in early 2016. We got the first glimpse of it in a photograph in May of 2016. It looks like Apple is sticking with a four-year chassis design, so it's entirely possible that this is the last year of this enclosure.
> We aren't expecting a thicker machine.
> We've also said this before — we think Apple got hosed by Intel, when they were gearing up for the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure in 2015. We know that in 2015, Intel was promising delivery of 10nm process Core chips well before now. With any luck, Intel will finally deliver on its promises for a die-shrink that was expected nearly three years ago which will help alleviate the situation further. Or, maybe the next will be ARM-based — we don't know.
Apple’s stop-gap 16” model would prove to be thicker, and the article correctly hinted at a future ARM system.
This quote is important context because Intel had been promising lithography advancements that were delayed.
In 2016 Apple designed a chassis that they wanted to keep around for the next several years, but Intel basically didn’t deliver on their stated roadmap. There was no way to update the system without pushing the thermal solution to its limits or partially redesigning the thing.
As far as thermal performance on 2015 systems (pre-USB-C), those designs are so old that I don’t think replacing Intel was on Apple’s near-term radar.
I believe you.
Everyone else is wrong.